Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Press

TV Or Not TV: Election Coverage

By

Regardless of the results, watching election returns on TV can be detrimental to good mental health. Last night saw us bouncing between MSNBC, NECN (New England Cable News), CNN, and Comedy Central. One “serious” national channel – MSNBC – included a cast of thousands led by Chris Mathews and Keith Olbermann. I mostly avoid cable news stations and I was reminded why last night. Mathews is a self-centered, egomaniacal, know-it-all screamer who turned the elections into a melodrama all about him. Trying unsuccessfully to bully Howard Dean into taking responsibility for ending the Iraq War was not the least of his rants, but one of the more telling ones.  He actually believes that Dean must demand that all U.S., troops pull out of Iraq tomorrow or he has lost his credibility.  This was a theme last night – “all right, mister know-it-all, you won so what will you do to get out of Iraq”.  Hmmm – I thought the president was in charge of foreign policy. Thought he got us in on a whim and a lie, so silly me thought it was his responsibility to find a way out.

The inaptly named Wolf Blitzer led CNN’s efforts  – no more need be said. Simply awful.  Expounding the obvious made into another kind of melodrama.

NECN actually did a better job – quieter, more thoughtful, less self-serving, and no posturing by R.D. Sahl and his colleagues.

As for Comedy Central – Stewart and Colbert were fun for about 15 minutes and then committed the cardinal sin of comedy – they became boring.

Our friend Mackenzie Brothers comments regularly on the fatuousness of American politics and the American press.  He lives in Canada and is in Europe this fall and I am happy for him. But he would have had something to say about the way we report on what would be the most important decisions made in a democracy if they were made and reported on seriously.

Canada Leaves Green for Brown

By

Canada is making it into the German papers more than it used to, but it’s not always for flattering reasons. It used to be that the only Canadian stories worth carrying had to do with grizzly bear attacks, Quebec separatism (almost always misportrayed) and sports; Steve Nash is Dirk Nowitzky’s best friend or Canadian thugs won another match against European skilled squads. The latter has however disappeared of late as Sweden showed it could beat anybody in any number of ways, including thuggery.
Bur now Prime Minister Harper actually gets his photo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, just like the fantastic twins now ruling Poland. And that’s a bad sign, because the twins never get in unless they’ve done something extremely silly. So there was Harper making a speech in which he attempted to announce that Canada was getting out of its Kyoto commitments. This did not go over well, to put it mildly, and now this decision will have to be reconsidered. A Canadian prime minister should know he’s in big trouble when the foreign press begins to compare him very unfavourably to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Whither democracy?

By

The German media is obsessed with two items these days. One involves the metaphysical dimensions of “Borat”, the film in which a British Jewish comic has the nerve to make fun of almost everything, insulting almost everyone on his journey across the US in the role of a Kazakh reporter out to discover the wonders of “the greatest country in the world”. But nothing comes off worse than US society itself. The other topic involves the dirty tricks that are slashing through the supposedly civilized veneer of the electoral process in the the US in its final days. The chaotic absurdity of the two scenarios are related, and to the Germans add up to a serious questioing of the democratic process itself in the US. Is this the process for which German soldiers should go to war? Never mind Iraq, considered an illegal lost cause from the start, what about all those other places where help is requested to set up democracies? Suppose they don’t work any better than this miserable election? Democracy isn’t doing very well as a concept of a political concept in Europe these days. Germany struggles along with a coalition government that has little leadership. but it works fine compared to its neighbours. Austria has had no government at all in the month since its election and seems unable to make any progress in finding one. Sweden couldn’t get through one week of a newly-elected government without firing several new cabinet ministers because they had failed to fulfill the fundamental duties of a democratic society. Several hadn’t paid obligatory broadcasting fees for ten years, including the new minister of culture, others avoided taxes by hamstering money in off-shore accounts, several employed illegal cheap workers. Worst of all, none of the East European states under Soviet control has come up with a stable working democracy after fifteen years iof trying, and several, like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, are getting worse. Only Slovenia from the former Yugoslavia really seems to have joined the west. Could it be that German ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder got it right when he recently wrote that Vladimir Putin, a loyal friend of Germany, and a “pure democrat”, was the only kind of leader that could bring order to Eastern Europe. Maybe Borat knows.

America’s Investigative Cartoonist

By

Garry Trudeau is an American original. He draws a comic strip that has, over the past 26 years, taken on the major political issues, pissed off political figures on both sides of the aisle and entertained end instructed millions of readers.
For both faithful and new readers, his recent episodic series on BD’s recovery from serious wounds in Iraq has been a lesson in compassion, adding to our understanding of what it is to be recovering from serious war wounds, and all of this done with wry humor.

The Washington Post Magazine of October 22 carried a lengthy profile of Trudeau, Doonesbury’s War,  that is a moving description of Trudeau’s and BD’s journey.  Well worth a read.

The British Press, Darfur and the Bush Prism

By

Much of the British press gave up on the United States when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, with Tony Blair’s support and blessing. Given the deception used to justify the invasion and the incomprehensible incompetence of the Iraq adventure this made some certain sense. The problem for journalism is that when reporters see everything through the prism of Bush’s obvious inadequacies, they can become blinded to other realities.

A case in point is Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor of the Guardian who actually wrote in the fall of 2004 a piece claiming that problems in Darfur were being hyped by the Bush administration and that there was no real evidence of a coming genocide.

Beaumont used the classic journalistic ploy of assigning what was surely his own opinion to unnamed “international aid workers”. Bush, USAID head Andrew Natsios, and Secretary of State Powell were all blamed in Beaumont’s article for exaggerating the seriousness of the situation to suit their political agenda for Sudan.

Journalists make mistakes and of course it is not possible to always see into the future – but in the fall of 2004 there was ample evidence of the coming catastrophe and Beaumont was guilty of ignoring those realities and hyping his own theory that Darfur was a product of George Bush’s imagination.

Last month, the Guardian reported the estimated death toll in Darfur – some two years later – to be between 200 and 300 thousand. When does a “hype” become genocide?

The Press and Darfur

By

The west is very slowly gaining awareness of what can certainly be characterized as genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. It will be another terrible reminder of the ability of the international community to watch while hundreds of thousands – even millions – are butchered as innocent victims of fights for political power. There is enough blame to go around on this one –many, if not most, of the member states of the UN – and therefore the UN itself – can share in it, as they did in Rwanda.

Warnings of what was to come in Rwanda began to surface in 1993 and included requests for assistance and permission to take preventive action from Major General Roméo Dallaire, U.N. force commander in Rwanda. Kofi Annan, then head of UN Peacekeeping Forces, refused those requests. Six months later 800,000 Rwandans were dead. But the list of responsible leaders is long enough to include virtually every Western leader, including President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright. The western response to the genocide in Bosnia was similarly late – although it eventually arrived, at least partly because it was occurring in Europe and easier to place in terms of the national interest of the Atlantic alliance.

The genocide in Darfur is approaching the dimension and dementia of Rwanda and we will in a few years be wringing our hands again and saying “never again” — again. But the warnings are there now and the opportunities to do something are there now and China’s oil is there now and the U.S. ability to act is hobbled now and as you read this people in Darfur are being slaughtered now.

Genocide in Darfur is also a reminder of how difficult it has become for mainstream Western press to pay substantial, ongoing attention to crimes of this dimension when they occur in remote countries with non-Western populations. A quick search of keywords and titles in LexisNexis for “Darfur” AND “genocide” for the past month gives 52 hits – 20 of them from non-U.S. sources. A similar search for “Foley” and “page” gives 568 hits. Recognizing this is a soft statistic, a disgraced Congressman’s dirty emails got roughly ten times the media attention received by a genocide responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead Sudanese – with more on the way. The press could do more if they chose to put resources into the story but when Congressman Foley is playing with pages, well…

“National Character Counts Week”: Russian Version

By

In head to head competition with President Bush’s bizarre comments in support of Congressman Sherwood (see “Bush and the Philanderer”, below) Russia’s President Putin, referred to press reports that Israel’s President Katsav may face criminal charges for rape and sexual harassment of several women.

According to both Russian and Western press reports Putin finished a meeting with Israeli Prime minister Olmert, the press was ushered out, and Putin thought the microphones had been turned off.  He told Olmert: “Say hi to your president. He turned out to be quite a powerful guy. Raped 10 women. We’re all surprised. We all envy him.”

According to a report on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s website Putin’s “spokesman said that ‘these remarks are not to be commented on’ because they were ‘personal remarks for his counterpart and not for journalists’ ears.’

The RFE/RL report concludes with a reminder that “After Putin called earlier in 2006 for increasing the birthrate, critical journalist Vladimir Rakhmankov dubbed the president ‘Russia’s phallic symbol.’ Rakhmankov is now on trial for ‘insulting a representative of the state.’”

Murder, the Press and Putin

By

The Moscow Times comments on the recent death of the Russian investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, in its October 19 issue. The piece places her murder in the context of a country run by former KGB officials with a love of authority and personal presidential power. It describes a country that offers little in the way of hope for a permanent thaw of Cold War realities.
From the Moscow Times:

“The 12 journalists who have been killed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin came to power were probably killed to avenge something already written or to prevent the publication of something else. But an atmosphere in which individuals and free institutions are held in open contempt also facilitated these murders.

This contempt was evident in the remarks Putin made after two days of silence about the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya. ‘I think that journalists should be aware that her influence on political life was extremely insignificant in scale.’ The woman is two days dead and the president of her country pronounces her life’s work “extremely insignificant.” But Putin takes her death almost as an affront, at the very least, a smudge on his regime: ‘This murder inflicts more harm and damage to the governments of Russia and Chechnya than did her publications.’

Secrecy, the Press and the People

By

Francis Kukuyama raised an important issue in an Op Ed piece in the October 8 issue of the NY Times. For some time now the administration has been back backfiring on information by reclassifying previously open information to secret information.  There is of course no good reason for this.  There is much in our history as a country that we would regret later; that is not terribly surprising given everyone’s ability to make mistakes. But this is an administration obsessed with admitting no mistakes – not only by them, but also of any American administration  (well- except perhaps the Clinton administration). Some of this back=fired reclassification is simply ludicrous: it makes secret information that has been widely published here and abroad for years. Fukuyama makes the salient point that the better informed we are the better decision we can make as an informed population.   Maybe that’s the point…

Iraqi Death Count and the Press

By

The editor of Editor and Publisher, Greg Mitchell, considers the recently reported estimate of 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 in the magazine’s current issue.  He is particularly interested in the issue of the press’s failure to adequately look at and do the hard work to adequately account for Iraq’s civilian deaths.

He considers the credibility of the estimate of 600,000 that came from work carried out by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, compares it to the credibility of President Bush’s response, looks at the different ways the press dealt with the report, from the AP’s immediate “can’t be right” response to the Washington Post’s more thoughtful consideration, provides some data speculating on what would be comparable numbers in the U.S. and leaves the reader numbed with the reality of what we have created in Iraq. President Bush’s response in a press conference was:

“I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”

Read the article at the Editor and Publisher website.