Subject: Re: The Treason of the Mainstream Media
The majority of Americans, the ones who receive their "eye on the world"
through the network channels, have been so insulated from what is happening
around the globe, that if they were exposed to the facts, they would
instantly go into deep denial, declaring it to be a Commie/Muslim plot to
undermine our Freedom.
It's hard for the average American to imagine having enough money, time and
influence to take over the mass media. But that is what has occurred.
Remember those carefree, fun loving days when we all chipped in to pay for
the Voice of America, cramming Truth through the Iron and Bamboo curtains?
We were shocked that a nation could keep their people from learning the
Truth. That would never happen in our Free Land, no siree!
And so, if you wonder from time to time whether we are getting the "real
news", you will need to ask the next question. If our news is being
controlled, are we really a Free Nation?
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 7:25 PM
Subject: The Treason of the Mainstream Media
Weissman writes: "Without leakers, the prime sources on national security
scoops, the mainstream media will shrivel. But I'm willing to bet that
courageous truth tellers will continue to provide information to Internet
sites willing to risk publishing it."
Glenn Greenwald tweeted: 'Who needs the government to try to criminalize
journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?' (photo: NBC)
The Treason of the Mainstream Media
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
23 July 13
For those who came of age politically with the Supreme Court's election of
George W. Bush, disdain for the mainstream media remains severe. Watching
all but a brave handful of the media fall into line to sell the Patriot Act,
the War on Terror, and Weapons of Mass destruction has left an open wound.
It has also left an entire generation with a keen understanding of how
government honchos like Dick Cheney or Barack Obama use the media to spread
the leaks they want to spread while decrying all others.
Forgive the personal comparison, but my own loss of virginity came in the
early 1960s and was far less dramatic. A former high school journalist with
the cherished nickname "Scoop," I slowly came to see The New York Times, our
national newspaper of record, systematically ignore much of the civil rights
struggle in the South, especially when it involved the more radical Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I saw the liberal San Francisco Chronicle
lead the redbaiting attacks against our Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.
And I discovered that my family icon, the American Civil Liberties Union,
cared more about the freedom of those who owned presses than of those
pressing for social change.
Don't get me wrong. My generation saw the heroic and inspiring as well. We
watched CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite question the Vietnam War, however
belatedly he dared to do it. We read "The Pentagon Papers" and applauded The
New York Times for publishing them. We followed Woodward and Bernstein
reporting on Watergate in The Washington Post. We saw the media challenge
the power of the FBI and the CIA. We saw the good. We saw the bad. We
developed "a balanced view" of the media, and by the time of the War on
Terror , most of us did not expect anything better - or anything worse.
How wrong we were! Never in our lifetime has most of the mainstream media
sunk as low as their concerted attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,
the whistleblowers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, journalist Glenn
Greenwald, and the continuing revelations of our country's imperial
brutality and global surveillance. Shamelessly, the media giants have
further embedded themselves as lickspittles to those in power. Even more
treacherous, they have blatantly betrayed the most basic precepts of our
profession and put our freedom at risk.
Professor Yochai Benkler provided the details in his testimony at the
court-martial of Bradley Manning. The Israeli-born Benkler heads the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is a widely cited
expert on WikiLeaks and its evolving relationship with the mainstream media.
You can read him on our website here and here.
From early 2008, Benkler told the military tribunal, the mainstream media
portrayed WikiLeaks in a favorable light as "a new online journalistic
organization." Leading media groups went to court to defend it against an
injunction from the Swiss investment bank Julius Baer that would have shut
it down. Various newspapers publicly praised WikiLeaks for its
professionalism and its efforts to verify and authenticate the leaked
documents that it published. The highly respected Index on Censorship and
Amnesty International both gave WikiLeaks their "New Media Award."
Benkler traced this positive attitude into 2010, the year WikiLeaks and
mainstream media partners began publishing the revelations that Bradley
Manning admits to leaking. These included the horrifying video of a U.S.
Apache helicopter firing down on a Reuters camera team and nearby children
in the heart of Baghdad, military logs of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and exceedingly frank U.S. diplomatic cables from all over the world.
During this period, relations began to fray as journalists at The New York
Times and The Guardian fell out with Assange, who can be an extremely
difficult person. But the big change came only after the release of the
diplomatic cables, when U.S. government officials turned their big guns on
WikiLeaks.
"The response is hard to define as anything but shrill," Benkler testified.
Secretary of State Clinton described the release (in Benkler's words) as an
attack on the international community. Vice President Biden called Assange a
high tech terrorist. Congressman Steve King, the incoming chairman of the
Homeland Security Committee, called for Washington to define WikiLeaks as a
foreign terrorist organization. Senator Diane Feinstein, chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, called for prosecution under the Espionage Act of
1917. And Senator Joseph Lieberman, chair of the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security, called for companies to stop providing services to
WikiLeaks.
How did the mainstream media respond? According to Benkler, they joined the
government's campaign to delegitimize WikiLeaks. Bob Beckel, on Fox News,
called Assange "a traitor" and told the government to illegally shoot the
son of a bitch. William Kristol, editor of the neocon flagship The Weekly
Standard, called for a serious effort to degrade and destroy WikiLeaks. Tom
Friedman, the star columnist of The New York Times, called WikiLeaks a major
threat to the world. Bill Keller, the managing editor of the NYT who had
profitably published the news that WikiLeaks gave him, now wrote an 8,000
word essay in which he described WikiLeaks as a secretive cabal of
anti-secrecy vigilantes and attacked Assange as badly smelling as though he
hadn't bathed.
Could the tonal shift have been colder? The government wanted to make
Assange and WikiLeaks public enemy number one, and our supposedly
independent press freely produced the propaganda that Washington wanted. The
Nazi Party's Der Stürmer or the Soviet Union's Pravda and Izvestiya could
not have been slimier, more disgusting, or less professional as journalists.
We have now seen similar mainstream media sleaze against the NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden and relative silence on the trial of Bradley
Manning. We have also seen personal attacks on journalist Glenn Greenwald,
notably from NBC's David Gregory, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, and
even an aging Carl Bernstein, who appears to have made his peace with the
dark side.
No doubt, the mainstreamers think they can maintain their access to official
newsmakers - and win official protection - by separating themselves from
those who are providing real news about the real world. But, as Benkler
shows, the government has already announced in Manning's court-martial that
they would consider an unauthorized leak to The New York Times exactly the
same as one to WikiLeaks. The Obama administration, and no doubt its
successors, Democratic or Republican, will treat all unauthorized leaks as
providing information to the enemy.
Without leakers, the prime sources on national security scoops, the
mainstream media will shrivel. But I'm willing to bet that courageous truth
tellers will continue to provide information to Internet sites willing to
risk publishing it. That's what journalists do, even if most of the
mainstream media would rather grovel for whatever scraps their masters are
willing to hand them.
________________________________________
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly
Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a
magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France,
where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks,
Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Glenn Greenwald tweeted: 'Who needs the government to try to criminalize
journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?' (photo: NBC)
/opinion2/276-74/18547-focus-the-treason-of-the-mainstream-media/opinion2/27
6-74/18547-focus-the-treason-of-the-mainstream-media
The Treason of the Mainstream Media
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
23 July 13
or those who came of age politically with the Supreme Court's election of
George W. Bush, disdain for the mainstream media remains severe. Watching
all but a brave handful of the media fall into line to sell the Patriot Act,
the War on Terror, and Weapons of Mass destruction has left an open wound.
It has also left an entire generation with a keen understanding of how
government honchos like Dick Cheney or Barack Obama use the media to spread
the leaks they want to spread while decrying all others.
Forgive the personal comparison, but my own loss of virginity came in the
early 1960s and was far less dramatic. A former high school journalist with
the cherished nickname "Scoop," I slowly came to see The New York Times, our
national newspaper of record, systematically ignore much of the civil rights
struggle in the South, especially when it involved the more radical Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I saw the liberal San Francisco Chronicle
lead the redbaiting attacks against our Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.
And I discovered that my family icon, the American Civil Liberties Union,
cared more about the freedom of those who owned presses than of those
pressing for social change.
Don't get me wrong. My generation saw the heroic and inspiring as well. We
watched CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite question the Vietnam War, however
belatedly he dared to do it. We read "The Pentagon Papers" and applauded The
New York Times for publishing them. We followed Woodward and Bernstein
reporting on Watergate in The Washington Post. We saw the media challenge
the power of the FBI and the CIA. We saw the good. We saw the bad. We
developed "a balanced view" of the media, and by the time of the War on
Terror , most of us did not expect anything better - or anything worse.
How wrong we were! Never in our lifetime has most of the mainstream media
sunk as low as their concerted attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,
the whistleblowers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, journalist Glenn
Greenwald, and the continuing revelations of our country's imperial
brutality and global surveillance. Shamelessly, the media giants have
further embedded themselves as lickspittles to those in power. Even more
treacherous, they have blatantly betrayed the most basic precepts of our
profession and put our freedom at risk.
Professor Yochai Benkler provided the details in his testimony at the
court-martial of Bradley Manning. The Israeli-born Benkler heads the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is a widely cited
expert on WikiLeaks and its evolving relationship with the mainstream media.
You can read him on our website here and here.
From early 2008, Benkler told the military tribunal, the mainstream media
portrayed WikiLeaks in a favorable light as "a new online journalistic
organization." Leading media groups went to court to defend it against an
injunction from the Swiss investment bank Julius Baer that would have shut
it down. Various newspapers publicly praised WikiLeaks for its
professionalism and its efforts to verify and authenticate the leaked
documents that it published. The highly respected Index on Censorship and
Amnesty International both gave WikiLeaks their "New Media Award."
Benkler traced this positive attitude into 2010, the year WikiLeaks and
mainstream media partners began publishing the revelations that Bradley
Manning admits to leaking. These included the horrifying video of a U.S.
Apache helicopter firing down on a Reuters camera team and nearby children
in the heart of Baghdad, military logs of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and exceedingly frank U.S. diplomatic cables from all over the world.
During this period, relations began to fray as journalists at The New York
Times and The Guardian fell out with Assange, who can be an extremely
difficult person. But the big change came only after the release of the
diplomatic cables, when U.S. government officials turned their big guns on
WikiLeaks.
"The response is hard to define as anything but shrill," Benkler testified.
Secretary of State Clinton described the release (in Benkler's words) as an
attack on the international community. Vice President Biden called Assange a
high tech terrorist. Congressman Steve King, the incoming chairman of the
Homeland Security Committee, called for Washington to define WikiLeaks as a
foreign terrorist organization. Senator Diane Feinstein, chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, called for prosecution under the Espionage Act of
1917. And Senator Joseph Lieberman, chair of the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security, called for companies to stop providing services to
WikiLeaks.
How did the mainstream media respond? According to Benkler, they joined the
government's campaign to delegitimize WikiLeaks. Bob Beckel, on Fox News,
called Assange "a traitor" and told the government to illegally shoot the
son of a bitch. William Kristol, editor of the neocon flagship The Weekly
Standard, called for a serious effort to degrade and destroy WikiLeaks. Tom
Friedman, the star columnist of The New York Times, called WikiLeaks a major
threat to the world. Bill Keller, the managing editor of the NYT who had
profitably published the news that WikiLeaks gave him, now wrote an 8,000
word essay in which he described WikiLeaks as a secretive cabal of
anti-secrecy vigilantes and attacked Assange as badly smelling as though he
hadn't bathed.
Could the tonal shift have been colder? The government wanted to make
Assange and WikiLeaks public enemy number one, and our supposedly
independent press freely produced the propaganda that Washington wanted. The
Nazi Party's Der Stürmer or the Soviet Union's Pravda and Izvestiya could
not have been slimier, more disgusting, or less professional as journalists.
We have now seen similar mainstream media sleaze against the NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden and relative silence on the trial of Bradley
Manning. We have also seen personal attacks on journalist Glenn Greenwald,
notably from NBC's David Gregory, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, and
even an aging Carl Bernstein, who appears to have made his peace with the
dark side.
No doubt, the mainstreamers think they can maintain their access to official
newsmakers - and win official protection - by separating themselves from
those who are providing real news about the real world. But, as Benkler
shows, the government has already announced in Manning's court-martial that
they would consider an unauthorized leak to The New York Times exactly the
same as one to WikiLeaks. The Obama administration, and no doubt its
successors, Democratic or Republican, will treat all unauthorized leaks as
providing information to the enemy.
Without leakers, the prime sources on national security scoops, the
mainstream media will shrivel. But I'm willing to bet that courageous truth
tellers will continue to provide information to Internet sites willing to
risk publishing it. That's what journalists do, even if most of the
mainstream media would rather grovel for whatever scraps their masters are
willing to hand them.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly
Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a
magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France,
where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks,
Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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