 Photo by Yoel Meyers |
Last month, I gave a speech at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh on the role media consolidation has played in narrowing the range of political discourse while putting profits above journalism. I also spoke about the importance of independent media to serve as a dissident voice. (As Ben Bagdikian exhaustively notes in his book,
The New Media Monopoly, in 1983, there were 50 dominant media corporation in the US; today there are 5: Time/Warner, News Corp., Viacom, Bertelsmann, and Disney.) It's a subject I speak on fairly often, and one that serves three main purposes: 1) It gets me out of my office to where I can directly engage readers and students in conversation about what media means in the contemporary moment and listen to their feedback. 2) It offers me an opportunity to inflate the importance of my job as the editorial director of an alternative magazine. 3) It allows me to shamelessly promote
Chronogram as an example of what Justice Hugo Black referred to in the landmark media ownership case Associated Press v. US as a "diverse and antagonistic force" that he viewed as "essential to the welfare of the republic."
I gave the talk the week of September 11, in the midst of the patriotic hoopla and the often tearful remembrances of that that tragic day five years ago. Hoping to relate the commemoration in some way with Chronogram , I looked back to the magazine we published directly following the attacks, our October 2001 issue. I found a remarkable editorial written by one of our editors at the time, Todd Paul. It's not the most elegantly written article, nor is it the most thoughtful political analysis we've ever published. But the editorial is clear, plain-spoken, and one of the pieces I am proudest of having published in this magazine. It's also surprisingly prescient. I read it in its entirety at Mount Saint Mary. The editorial is titled "Unsaid Things: Why I'm Not Angry at Osama bin Laden." It is excerpted below.
This editorial is going to make some people angry.
In the midst of all this fist-pumping and solemn vowing, some things remain unsaid:
This is the best thing that could have happened for George W. Bush. Look, the man wasn't legitimately elected. His political bungling cost Republicans control of the Senate. [James Jeffords switched from Republican to Independent shortly after Bush's election.] He has mishandled every issue that has come along. His political fortunes were sinking with the economy. He didn't even seem to care. But now he has a mandate. The attacks gave him, and the entire country, a purpose.
Our religious fanatics aren't so different from their religious fanatics. Bin Ladin tells his followers that killing Americans will cause them to go to heaven. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the terrorist attacks on gays, pagans, abortions, and the ACLU, all of which have caused God to stop protecting the USA. The next time some Christian terrorist blows up an abortion clinic, will our president declare war on Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?
We feel powerless. For a mighty country about to kick some major butt—just as soon as we decide whose butt needs kicking—we feel mighty powerless, don't we? Why? Three reasons: 1) Deep down inside, we know we'd probably be safer if we refrained from kicking some major butt this time. 2) The major butt-kicking that's about to commence is completely out of our control. 3) We can't trust our government to kick the right butts, for the right reasons, and tell us the truth about it.
Our president is trying to manipulate us. We weren't attacked, as Bush claims, because we are a beacon of freedom and democracy. The Swiss are free, but you don't see anyone blowing up watch factories. Also, evil cannot be eradicated from the face of the earth. That's not an attainable goal, and it wasn't a goal at all one month ago. And it isn't really our goal now. Is it?
In the current issue, Sidney Blumenthal, author of How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime, reviews the record of the current administration, including such lowlights as the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, media bullying, Guantanamo Bay, silencing political opponents via leaks, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib, etc., ad infinitum. (An excerpt from Blumenthal's book can be found on page 22.) We continue to strive to be a "diverse and antagonistic" force.
After my talk, someone in the audience suggested that we should publish the piece every year in our September issue as a reminder. Not a bad idea.
The full text of Todd Paul's editorial from our October 2001 issue is available in the archives at our website.
—Brian K. Mahoney
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
On September 20, the United Nations released a report detailing an increase in the evidence of torture on many of the dead bodies found around Baghdad, including "acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands, and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails." Torture is also widespread at Iraqi government detention centers, according to the UN, where detainees showed signs of beatings from electrical cables and "wounds in different parts of their bodies, including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns." The report also revised upward the number of civilian deaths in the months of July and August in Iraq to 6,599 from an earlier report.
Source: United Nations
In its September issue, the journal of the Academy of Management Learning and Education published a study on cheating by students in the US and Canada; the study defined cheating as copying the work of other students, plagiarizing, or bringing prohibited notes into exams. The study found that business students are more likely to cheat than their counterparts in other academic fields; according to the study, in fact, 56 percent of the 5,300 graduate students who participated in the study admitted to cheating in the past year. Lead author, Prof. Donald McCabe, told Reuters that in their survey comments, business school students described cheating as a necessary measure and the sort of practice they'd likely need to succeed in the professional world. "The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important," McCabe said. "You'll have business students saying, 'All I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.'"
Source: Reuters
On September 20, Reuters donated $100,000 to NewAssignment.net, an experiment in open source journalism started by New York University professor Jay Rosen. Rosen's idea is to draw "smart mobs"—groups of people configured to share intelligence—into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and pursue "stories the regular news media doesn't do, can't do, wouldn't do, or already screwed up." In Rosen's model, a network of volunteer citizen journalists, by combining their intelligence and dividing up the work, can team up to create compelling journalism outside the mainstream news paradigm, though Rosen concedes, "I think that's most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadlines, and to set a consistent standard."
Dean Wright, senior vice president and managing editor for Reuters online, is optimistic about the prospects of open-source journalism: "By having citizen contributors, it's a bit like having an army of stringers and sources at your disposal, generating tips and story ideas, and then taking another step: Gathering information in a volume and across geographies that a traditional news organization would find very difficult, if not impossible."
NewAssignment will launch in early 2007, according to Rosen.
Source: NewAssignment.net
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen on his way home from a Tunisian vacation was seized by US authorities at Kennedy Airport on September 26, 2002. After 10 days of questioning, Arar was flown to Jordan and taken overland to Syria, where he was held for 10 months and tortured by Syrian officials. During his imprisonment, Arar confessed to having trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, a country that he had never visited. Syria released Arar in October 2003 and returned him to Canada after concluding that he had no ties to terrorism.
A Canadian government commission looking into the curious case of Maher Arar issued a report on September 18. (The Bush administration refused to cooperate with the commission.) The commission found that Arar first came to the attention of Canadian authorities on October 12, 2001, when he met with a man under surveillance by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). According to Arar, the men spoke of finding cheap printer cartridges, but the meeting set off an investigation of Arar which resulted at the end of October with Arar and his wife, an economist, on a "terrorist lookout" list, despite the evidence linking Arar or his wife to terrorism. The RCMP then alerted US border officers that Arar and his wife were "Islamic extremists suspected of being linked to the al Qaeda movement" and that Arar had visited Washington around September 11.
Arar's case is not the only instance of a terrorism suspect, abducted by the US government and removed to a willing US ally for interrogation, who was later exonerated. Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was arrested by police in Macedonia in December, 2003 because his name was the same as that of another man suspected of terrorist links, and because Macedonian police believed he was carrying a false passport, according to former and current intelligence officials and US diplomats. He was held for five months in Afghanistan. After determining al-Masri was not a terrorist, he was flown to Albania, where he was dumped on a deserted road without money or identity papers.
Both al-Masri and Arar have filed suit against either the CIA or the US government, though both suits have been dismissed by federal judges, who accepted government claims that the cases had to be dismissed because national security would be imperiled if the court looked into the rendition of the wrongly imprisoned men.
Sources: New York Times, Washington Post
