Remembering ‘News Dissector’ Danny Schechter
Journalist and media critic Danny Schechter (1942-2015)
When I launched FAIR in 1986, we had virtually no allies in the mainstream media. Except for Danny, then a producer at ABC’s 20/20. He was full of encouragement—telling us how important that we launch this group to monitor corporate media misdeeds. He gave us at FAIR crucial advice in those first years.
And we were amazed at the unique segments on economic or racial injustice he was able to get on 20/20—overcoming many obstacles. From inside the belly of the beast in the late 1980s, he told us of his concern that FAIR might be overemphasizing corporate control, because it sometimes sounded as if we were letting mainstream journalists off the hook who he felt should have been fighting harder to get the big stories told.
—FAIR founder Jeff Cohen recalling journalist and media critic Danny Schechter (1942-2015)
People Who Write for State-Financed Papers Shouldn’t Throw Stones
A Washington Post news article (3/11/15) explained that when the Obama administration declared Venezuela to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” that was just “legal formalities” that allowed Obama to invoke emergency powers to impose sanctions on Venezuelan officials in an effort “to send a strong message in defense of human rights and democracy.”
But Venezuelans got upset anyway, as the Post’s Nick Miroff and Karen DeYoung explained, because:
“Such nuances stood little chance in the meat grinder of Venezuela’s rough political culture, where state-financed and pro-government broadcasters dominate the airwaves.”
The Washington Post’s owner is positioned to get more than $1 billion in state financing from the Pentagon–in addition to the $600 million coming from the CIA. (photo: DoD/Ken Hammond)
As it happens, the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, CEO and leading owner of Amazon, which was paid $600 million to store and process information for the CIA, NSA and other US spy agencies (Atlantic, 7/17/14); it’s unlikely any Venezuelan outlet is so well “state-financed.” The Post is too pro-government to suspect that that could ever be a problem, however.
Elite Media Float Calls for Allying With Al-Qaeda, ISIS
Is it time to forgive and forget when it comes to September 11. That’s the implication of “Accepting Al Qaeda,” a Foreign Policy essay (3/9/15) by Barak Mendelsohn that argued:
“The instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward Al-Qaeda…. Destabilizing Al-Qaeda at this time may in fact work against US efforts to defeat ISIS.”
Not only can Al-Qaeda be “an important player in curtailing ISIS’s growth,” but it can help “contain Iran’s hegemonic aspirations, which threaten US allies,” noted Mendelsohn, a political science professor at Haverford College and a veteran of Israeli intelligence.
The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman suggests “arming Isis” as “the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq.”
While we’re at it, maybe we should accept ISIS as well, suggested New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (3/18/15):
“Should we be arming ISIS?… Obviously, I abhor ISIS and don’t want to see it spread or take over Iraq. I simply raise this question rhetorically because no one else is: Why is it in our interest to destroy the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq?”
The fact that ISIS is openly committed to a policy of genocide (Independent, 3/20/14) doesn’t seem to give Friedman pause.
Time Explains the World Via National Caricature
Time magazine depicts a meeting between US officials and what it would have you think of as Iranian carpet merchants. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AP)
Time (4/3/15) published a piece, by former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren, that likened negotiating with Iran to dealing with a Middle Eastern “carpet merchant”: “Seasoned buyers…understand that the merchant’s smiles, the many cups of tea he serves, his invitations to stroll along the riverbank, are all part of his selling tactic.” The ethnic stereotyping turns nasty, with Oren asserting, “The Iranians, we know, cheat.” It’s hard to see how this piece differs from an antisemitic screed that compares Israeli politicians to unscrupulous diamond dealers.
Clear Channel Calls Covert Commercials ‘User-Friendly, Satisfying’
Clear Channel Radio—the nation’s largest radio station owner, which changed its name last year to “iHeart Media“—and a number of smaller radio fiefdoms, calling themselves the Radio Broadcasters Coalition, have filed a petition with the FCC asking that they be excused from the requirement that they tell their listeners when they play a song because a record company paid them to do so (New York Times, 3/16/15).
Instead, they’d like to make such disclosures on their websites, “because it would result in listeners’ having access to more information in a more user-friendly and satisfying way.”
Of course, it would also have the side benefit that the vast majority of listeners would be totally unaware that the music that they’re listening to is actually a paid commercial disguised as programming.
NYT Saw ‘Spirit of Adventure’ in Ethnic Incarceration
The World War II–era internment of Japanese-Americans is recalled by most as a shameful chapter in US history, but at the time the New York Times put a remarkably positive spin on it. Under the headline “Japanese Begin Evacuation Trek” (although 62 percent were US citizens) and the subhead “good humor prevails,” a March 24, 1942 article described the first internees as “weary but gripped with the spirit of adventure over a new pioneering chapter in American history.”
The accompanying photo, showing smiling internees headed to the prison camp boarding a train under military guard, bore the caption: “Concentration Camp Special.”
