Bill Moyers -- on Democracy and Media Reform

This should be required reading for EVERY American, and really every human who cares about liberty an democracy. Here's the video if you're not big on that readin' thing.


The speech is choc-a-bloc with good quotes but here are some of my favorites:

You represent millions of Americans who see media consolidation as a corrosive social force. It robs them of their voice in public affairs, pollutes the political culture and turns the debate over profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.

Whether employing professional journalists trained at prestigious universities or polemicists whose ignorance, arrogance and malevolence serve partisan agendas, our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders; organizations whose self-styled mandate is not holding public and private power accountable so that there is an equilibrium in society, but aggregating their interlocking interests; organizations whose reward comes not from helping fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but from the manufacturing of news and information as profitable consumer commodities, rather than the means to empower morally responsible citizens

So what will happen to news in the future, as the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package? Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it “communitainment.” “Communitainment.” O, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?

“It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.” What we need to know.

For example, we needed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in the American economy and infrastructure. But as Knight Ridder reporters told us at the time, one of the few organizations that systematically and independently set out to challenge the claims of the administration, as the Knight Ridder reporters told us at the time, as my colleagues and I reported in our documentary on PBS, Buying the War, as Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed just this week, the administration, with the complicity of the dominant media, conducted a political propaganda campaign using erroneous and misleading intelligence to deceive Americans into supporting an unprovoked war on another country, leading to a conflict that, instead of being over quickly and bloodlessly as predicted, continues to this day into its sixth year.

We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find—you couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts, self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign policy, who got it all wrong in the first place.

As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and broadcast outlets, news organizations are folded into entertainment divisions. The “news hole” in the print media shrinks to make room for ads, celebrities, nonsense and propaganda, and the news we need to know slips from sight.

When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people who have neither power nor privilege, you can no longer claim to have a representative government.

Global Food Crisis

This emerging global food crisis is only a shot across our bow of ongoing food and water shortages. If this gets worse it will make peak oil, pollution, and global warming seem like minor issues. Unfortunately, all of these items are interrelated and compounded by unsustainable population growth, over consumption by rich countries, and an unfair distribution of resources -- all of which are not being addressed by global leaders.

Given that 2.5 billion people subsist on less than $3 A DAY, they already spend the majority of their income on food. Many are already so malnourished that it causes health problems and death. Each year, some 3.5 million children lose their lives as a direct result of malnutrition. Around a third of all children in developing countries aged under five have their minds and bodies impaired by hunger. So any increase in food prices causes an immediate and significant increase in suffering and death.

This is not the behavior of an intelligent and moral species. We must make some radical changes. We can't just say that this is "their" problem. Everything is intertwined. This is an issue affecting the entire human race. It's *our* problem and we need to own it -- then we need to do something -- fast.

More here including some good video coverage. Thanks 1gm.

How Much DOUBT Do You Buy?

If you're like a typical American -- way more than you probably realize and certainly more than you should... and it's costing us lives. Here's a great Slate article on how science is being sidelined by a systematic attack of obfuscation and doubt explicitly intended to avoid us finding out the truth and taking steps to mitigate the massive detriment we experience and will experience as a result of such inaction.

This started in 1969 when tobacco companies started a spin campaign of monumental proportions trying to prove that there's no evidence to prove that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Their slogan became "doubt is our product." Now we all know that this is patently false but this was the position of big tobacco executives as recently as 10 years ago when they flatly lied to Congress along these very lines.

Sadly, they were very successful at delaying such action by about 30 years, generating enormous profits while the rest of us "waited for the final proof." Unfortunately, the average person doesn't have a workable definition of proof and this is use to the advantage of all sorts of charlatans. This wouldn't matter so much if they only wasted their own money on superstitions such as Astrology or Palm Reading.

Much to the detriment of the planet however, the same lack of reasoning is applied to important items involving world resources. Now the same tactics are used to sow doubt and keep us from progressing on critical issues such as global warming, stem cell research, pollution standards, genetic engineering and a whole host of technologic improvements that are stalled due to scare tactics by the current industries that are (understably) just myopically protecting their interests at our expense.

Now it's not just Evolution that is under attack for "not enough evidence" but there's a burgeoning cottage industry selling the latest conspiracy theory backed mostly by the notion that somehow we're being manipulated by "the man" -- when in fact (ironically), the manipulation is actually the conspiracy. Once we've been nullified by our own paranoia, we will then be unable to take any action against those at the top ripping off the other 99% of us. And when someone points out that we're being taken, well that's just one more conspiracy theory that gets lost in with thousands of others -- and it barely makes a ripple.

We need to bring back critical thinking and public dialog where experts can weigh-in and we can all participate. Remember, the balanced, well-reasoned and fair position is not necessarily equidistant from the extremes. Sometimes, one side is wrong, crazy or just plain stupid. Can you spot the difference? Not if you only listen to one side of the dialog. We all need to listen to rational opposing opinions and then make up our minds. First making up your mind and only then looking for substantiation of your preconceived notions doesn't create a reasoned opinion -- it creates an ideology!

Read the article.

Scott McClellan - this seems important

The inside scoop on how we were all deceived...

On the run-up to the Iraq War


Responds to critics


On Bush and the media

George W. Guilty of Murder?

The Great Journalism Meltdown

Sure we've all seen the lustre lost from professions once respected and now disdained: lawyer, politician, businessman and sometimes even policeman (given the many scandals). Those still (mostly) holding their head up high include school teachers, doctors and firefighters. But what about the fourth estate, probably the most important part of our democracy right after the Judicial branch? It was thought that laws are the backbone of our society and while the Supreme Court keeps the lawmakers honest from the top, it has traditionally been the journalists that keep them honest from the bottom, as it were -- in the daily fight to find the truth and then deliver it to the people.

"An informed citizenry is the bulwark of democracy" Thomas Jefferson

So let's take a look a recent study that shows how bad it's become for the press (near the bottom of the page). Not only has the esteem of the press dropped to the lowest of nearly all institutions, but the widely used excuse that "they are merely providing what the people want" is also shown to be without merit as most people (at least claim that they) don't like the way new is delivered.

Also of note in this same article is that the National Political Editor of The Washington Post , wrote a column acknowledging the extremely obvious truths about his "profession" -- that because they are obsessed with attracting traffic-generating links, they focus on empty trivialities at the expense of substantive news. As we've long noticed, everyone appears to be in a race to the bottom, landing somewhere between People magazine and the National Enquirer. How pathetic!

For an insider's opinion from a real journalist, everyone should read this scathing expose by David Halberstam on today's American press -- in stark contrast with his 2005 speech to Columbia School of Journalism grads on what a real journalist should be.

But now that Big Media is focused solely on the bottom line, they can be easily manipulated by anything that threatens their profit. So they fall back on cheap reporting methods, little fact checking, fewer investigative reports, appeasing big advertisers, and avoiding offending anyone by staying away from hard hitting stories -- because that has to offend someone -- too risky! Now they've neutered the news making it so bland that no one will complain, not the viewers, not the big companies ripping us who may stop advertising with them, and in the latest case they avoid asking difficult questions of our government fearing that they'll have their access removed. So instead, they have been indicted with the most flagrant abdication of their journalistic responsibilities -- and what does the news media say about it? Nothing; of course. That would make themselves look bad.

Even Bush's own Press Secretary mocks them for being weak, complicit little mouthpieces for government propaganda. Not only do they not even try to deny it, they don't even mention it! So to keep from losing even more viewers to the Internet, they can't even talk about what amounts to one of the biggest news stories of our time. And they call themselves newsmen? I hope that Walter Cronkite isn't watching this debacle as it will surely cause enough despair to send him to his grave.

I'm guessing that the big brass is pressuring them to sweep this under the rug and hope that it will go away. Sadly, it probably will get insufficient notice because we have been barraged with too many other scandals and we're all numb. But this one in particular is one of the worst. To know that we no longer have thousands of journalists throughout the globe looking out for the public good -- holding people accountable. Now who will do it?

Maybe other countries haven't turned their news people into craven pigs slurping at the trough of virtually all other businesses -- that of trading any integrity for a quick buck. The Internet is the last place where you can find news that isn't about the latest celebrity meltdown or some such other empty distraction.

So here's a chance for our "best and brightest" TV news anchors to tell it like it is. Unfortunately, it's obfuscated by some giggly reparte and then quickly gets pushed aside for some self-gratulatory pat on the backs about their fundraising efforts. Sad. This Salon article does a great job shredding this encounter and clearly demonstrates the difference between vapid TV news and substantive Internet news.

So Katie Couric gets it right arguing that the media did fail to do its job -- pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war. But the two bobble-heads next to her, especially the painfully empty-headed Charlie Gibson insists that the media did a perfectly fine job and that he would do nothing different.

I suspect that we'll look back at this time and realize that these last few years were the beginning of the end of REAL journalism -- at least in the mainstream. Since now Big Media only cares about following the money, the only journalists with any integrity will be working for small shops or blogging on the Internet.

For now, I'll see if BBC news still offers any hope. But what will the American people do?