McCain's 'Maverick' Myth Is the Media's Creation

The bizarre tale of how the media turned a crooked Republican into the mirage of a principled politician.


By David Brock and Paul Waldman
Anchor Books
March 31, 2008

The following is an excerpt from "Free Ride: The Media and John McCain" (Anchor Books, 2008)


Perhaps no word better defines John McCain in the public imagination than "maverick." It's a word that, more than "straight talk" or "moderate" or "reformer," has come to occupy a seemingly permanent place next to the senator's name in the media. It is also distinct from those other modifiers that have come to identify McCain. As critical as the idea of ideological moderation is to the Myth of McCain, his status as a maverick is not about what he believes but about who he is-something far more important in the personality-driven world of today's politics.

In later years, when asked to name his proudest moment in Congress, John McCain would go all the way back to his first year in the House of Representatives to point to a case in which he stood against a Republican president. In 1983, McCain voted against Ronald Reagan's decision to deploy U.S. troops to Lebanon. "I do not see any obtainable objectives in Lebanon," he said at the time, "and the longer we stay there, the harder it will be to leave."43 McCain sees the act as a defining moment: the neophyte lawmaker breaking ranks with his party and his political hero.

(The actual vote was 270-161 in favor of deployment; McCain was joined by twenty-seven Republicans in opposition.) The dissenters would later be vindicated when a truck bomber slammed into the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and precipitating a U.S. withdrawal. "It demonstrated to me that you really have to do, at the end of the day, what you fundamentally know is right," McCain told the National Journal years later.

At the time, McCain's decision to object was barely noted (a New York Times story on the House vote buried a quote from him at the bottom of its story). McCain evidently sees his 1983 vote as the moment where his political identity as a maverick began to form, but that reputation did not really take hold until much later.

In fact, McCain's early years in Congress did not attract much national attention, nor did they evince much evidence of what would become the Myth of McCain. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the press even began to take notice of his self-proclaimed penchant for breaking with party orthodoxy. Early in his career, McCain was seldom described as someone too principled to be bound by party loyalty or the momentary dictates of partisanship.

The first time anyone referred to him as a "maverick" in the press appears to be a February 1989 States News Service story, which quoted Dan Casey, then-executive director of the American Conservative Union, saying about McCain, "He is a good conservative but somewhat of a maverick."

There was no explanation of what made him a maverick, other than the fact that the group had given him a rating of merely 80 out of 100. Other such descriptions are few and far between.

Another story from 1989, in Newsday, described him as a Republican expected to "break ranks" on Dick Cheney's proposed budget cuts to the F-14D aircraft program. But apart from these faint glimmers, there was little indication of the McCain image that would eventually form in the press.

In 1992, McCain was one of three Republican senators to vote for Democratic campaign finance reform legislation (all the Senate Democrats except two voted in favor). The bill called for the provision of taxpayer funds and other incentives to urge candidates to abide by voluntary spending limits; it was vetoed by then-president George H. W. Bush, a veto that the Senate failed to override.

In 1993, McCain again cast himself in the role of party rebel in the campaign finance debate. In deliberations over an identical measure to the one Bush had vetoed in 1992, McCain proposed amendments that caught the attention of the media. McCain offered one amendment that barred candidates from using campaign money for personal expenses such as vacations, mortgage payments, and clothing purchases, among others. Another amendment pushed for the campaign reforms, if enacted, to go into effect in 1994 instead of 1996, as originally proposed.

Little noted was that McCain's amendment was identical to one that his Arizona colleague, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D), was set to introduce to the Senate, before McCain beat him to the punch by a day-a move that won McCain credit for the amendment.

The early returns to these maneuvers were encouraging. In 1993, the Washington Post noted that McCain was one of five "maverick" Republicans for his work on campaign finance reform legislation.

Another Post reference two months later offered a continuation of the theme, describing McCain as a "conservative with maverick instincts."But if the media had taken a closer look, talk of McCain as a maverick may have been a little premature. As news stories at the time made clear, the 1992 campaign finance bill was preordained to be vetoed by Bush, making it easier for McCain and his fellow Republican rebels to back it.

That motive became starker in 1993 when the Clinton administration, pushing a nearly identical bill, was told by McCain and his fellow "renegades" that they would support a Republican filibuster of the legislation. Predictably, Clinton expressed his dismay at the "rebels" who changed their tune when faced with a bill that might actually become law. "The thing that particularly troubles me about this one is that several Republicans voted for a bill not unlike this last year which contained public financing," Clinton said. The Associated Press reported that Republican moderates admitted to voting for the original bill only because they knew it would be vetoed.

Eventually, McCain and his band of mavericks broke with their GOP colleagues on the filibuster, but only after the bill was gutted to remove most of the public financing features of the measure.

The compromise legislation "left almost no one happy" and was derided by advocacy groups like Public Citizen and US PIRG as watered down. The bill eventually died a quiet death in the House. McCain's maverick gestures, though revealed to be less than substantial under scrutiny, nonetheless left their imprint on the media.

In addition to his campaign finance stance, McCain also made some moves during the period that helped gain the attention of political observers and move the maverick theme forward. In 1993, McCain publicly offered to accompany President Bill Clinton to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Memorial Day, providing cover for the president, who had been warned by veterans' groups angry with his failure to serve in the war to stay away from the monument.

Later that year, McCain, working with Senate Democrat (and fellow Vietnam veteran) John Kerry, urged Clinton to lift U.S. trade sanctions against Vietnam. In 1994, McCain and Kerry sponsored a resolution to lift the embargo, against the opposition of veterans' groups and prominent Republican senators like Bob Dole and Phil Gramm. The two would continue to work with the president to accelerate the normalization of trade relations with the country.

In 1995, the National Journal, the Washington insider's bible, published a profile of McCain simply titled "The Maverick." It was the first of what would be a cascade of glowing profiles to come, many of which would center on McCain's penchant for unpredictability and rebelliousness.

The article, by James Kitfield, led with an anecdote of a McCain outburst in front of the reporter about the way the GOP's conservative wing had spoken out against Colin Powell as a possible presidential candidate. Conservative activists within the GOP deemed Powell insufficiently ideological for the Republican revolution then sweeping Washington. Talking to Kitfield, McCain assailed the hard-liners in the GOP who targeted Powell.

"Politics can be a very cruel business because there are people out there like [conservative activist] Paul Weyrich, who has never stood up for public office and thus has never had to answer to the public, yet who feels free to indulge in character assassination," McCain said. He also expressed doubts about the health of his party: "Certainly for conservatives to attack [Powell's] character in the ad hominem fashion they did makes me believe we do have some problems within our party."

Such a demonstrative display against members of his own party seemed to confirm what a handful of other examples had hinted at: that McCain was that rare thing, a true independent.

The Journal profile fixed on his support for normalizing Vietnam relations, outreach to Bill Clinton over the Vietnam Memorial brouhaha, and opposition to pork in defense budgets as examples of the maverick at work. Kitfield also found a Democratic Senate aide to bolster the impression: "[McCain is] also interesting in that even when you wage battle with him, you usually find some middle ground. In that sense, he's put himself somewhat in the role of an honest broker in the Republican Caucus."

For his part, McCain went to his old standby-his POW experience-to build on the emerging theme. "My refusal of early release [in Vietnam] gave me a confidence in my own judgment," he said, adding, "That event gave me confidence that once I've examined something, I know what's right, and I'm willing to hold that position even when it doesn't receive the approval of my colleagues in the short run."

The mid-'90s saw McCain edging closer to the national spotlight. In 1995, Robert Timberg's A Nightingale's Song, an unabashed valentine to the Arizona senator, was published. The book traced the trajectories of five U.S. Naval Academy graduates -- McCain, Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, and James Webb -- whose experiences summed up the nation's own painful experience in Vietnam.

In 1996, McCain received some attention as a potential vice presidential candidate for Dole, who at the time was the American politician most known for being a military veteran. Aware of the buzz beginning to grow for McCain, the party chose him as the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention.

The performance, in which he discussed his captivity in Vietnam, was a hit. William Safire, writing in the New York Times, called it a "brief gem from a brave man," a speech "delivered with quiet modesty and grace." Other plaudits soon followed. In 1997, Time magazine named McCain one of America's 25 most influential people, citing his campaign finance reform work and willingness to anger party colleagues.

Before running for president, McCain found one more issue on which to make a public break with his party -- if only briefly -- and win praise from the press. In November 1997, McCain introduced a bill to provide the Food and Drug Administration with a number of new regulatory powers over tobacco products, in order to "reform and restructure the processes by which tobacco products are manufactured, marketed, and distributed." Giving the FDA the power to regulate tobacco would have been a significant change in policy-one that his Republican colleagues, who receive millions in contributions from tobacco companies, were none too eager to see enacted. After a long process of amendments to the bill, it was eventually killed by Senate Republicans in June 1998.

Reporters quickly wedded the tobacco bill to the campaign finance issue, often mentioning the two issues as a pair proving McCain's maverick tendencies. Meanwhile, some commentators began to notice. "The Senator is cherished by journalists for his quixotic fights on campaign finance reform and tobacco, his scorn for pols driven by polls or pork, and his loose tongue," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in 1999.

"Many reporters loved his Senate crusade against the tobacco companies and publicly cheered on his campaign finance reform efforts. They are addicted to the McCain phenomenon," wrote Charlie Cook of the National Journal after McCain's campaign ended in 2000. Again and again, even years later, the tobacco legislation is brought up as an example of how McCain goes his own way, whatever the political consequences.

That continues to be the case, despite the fact that in the decade since McCain's bill died in 1998, he has done nothing to press the issue further. He did not reintroduce the bill, nor did he attempt to introduce a modified version. If you believe that tobacco should be regulated by the FDA, McCain's effort in 1997 was ineffectual, and he has been absent from the issue ever since. But it did accomplish something significant-for McCain's image.

The maverick goes national

On December 30, 1998, John McCain filed his candidacy papers for his presidential campaign. Within a matter of months, McCain the maverick would explode out of the Beltway and become a national brand.

The January 14, 1999, edition of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call featured an article laying out the utility of McCain's image to a bid for higher office: "Reputation as Maverick Could Benefit McCain in 2000 Presidential Bid." The Associated Press picked up on the theme four days later, juxtaposing his "Ronald Reagan conservatism" with his "maverick image." The story cited McCain's "largely scandal-free past," as though the Keating Five scandal had never happened.

The "invisible primary" -- the period when few other than political junkies are paying attention to the nascent campaign -- was barely under way before the arbiters of conventional wisdom followed suit.

The "maverick" label appeared in story after story.

Time's Margaret Carlson wrote of the "maverick McCain."

Mary McGrory of the Washington Post hailed him as the "Arizona maverick."

William Safire, in his New York Times column, called McCain a "genuine maverick" with appeal to independent voters.

What's noteworthy about these stories is that they referred to McCain as a maverick without providing a single example or citation to explain exactly what made him so --not even bothering to mention campaign finance reform or tobacco. McCain's maverick standing was simply noted, with the assumption that readers would know what the commentator was talking about.

CNN in particular was an instrumental contributor to building the maverick image.

In 1999, CNN aired more stories describing McCain as a "maverick" than any other broadcast or cable news network.

CNN in all aired thirty-seven stories that featured McCain as a maverick, compared with Fox's nine and MSNBC's three.

CNN also topped CBS, NBC, and ABC, which had eight, three, and one stories respectively that defined McCain as a maverick.

On an April 1999 episode of Inside Politics, political analyst William Schneider said, "McCain's been called a moderate by some for his stands on tobacco and campaign finance reform. Is he a moderate, a curse word for many conservatives? No, he's a maverick."

In a broadcast a few months later, Wolf Blitzer said that McCain had "gained the reputation as a maverick within the Republican Party."

By the second half of 1999, McCain the maverick was an established theme.

In September, CNN's Candy Crowley noted the trend: "The word used most often to describe the politics of John McCain is 'maverick.' "

In November, Bob Garfield stated that McCain was "unafraid" to be "kind of a maverick."

On Crossfire, liberal cohost Bill Press joined in the chorus, claiming that McCain had "a well-deserved reputation as a maverick."

By the time the battle for the New Hampshire primaries heated up in December 1999, McCain's insurgent campaign had become established as the favorite -- not among Republican primary voters, but among the national media. The New York Times, in a December 30, 1999, profile, dubbed McCain an "anti-politician."

On the day of the New Hampshire primary, the Times affixed the subhead "The Maverick" to its story on the McCain campaign.

On this wave of positive coverage, it was unsurprising that national polls showed McCain gaining traction with the public at large. In a June 1999 Washington Post poll of Republicans and Republican leaners nationwide, 49 percent said they would vote for Bush as their nominee, while 20 percent said they would choose Elizabeth Dole. McCain came in a distant third, tied at 5 percent with Pat Buchanan. McCain's status would improve dramatically in the coming months, however.

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll released February 28, 2000, McCain towered over the Republican and Democratic fields with a 60 percent favorability rating (Gore was second with 50 percent). Perhaps reflective of the fawning media coverage, McCain also topped Bush and Gore on another question: "The more I hear about (Gore/Bush/McCain) the more I like him ...." By that likeability measure, McCain got 54 percent, compared with 44 percent and 41 percent for Bush and Gore, respectively.

The responses to another question, which asked respondents whether they believed a candidate "says what he really thinks, even if it's not politically popular," suggested that the maverick image was beginning to stick.

McCain easily won that question too, with 67 percent of respondents saying "yes," compared with Bush and Gore's 53 percent and 41 percent, respectively. That marked a sharp increase for McCain from a December 1999 ABC News/Washington Post poll, when only 52 percent of respondents said "yes" for McCain, while Bush and Gore received 57 percent and 43 percent, respectively.

Despite the Bush campaign's overwhelming financial and organizational strength, McCain went on to win New Hampshire, upsetting the presumptive favorite. It was in the wake of his surprising success in New Hampshire that McCain became the top political story in the country.

Time magazine hailed "The McCain Mutiny" on its cover, portraying McCain as an anti-establishment rebel (two months earlier, their cover featured "The Real McCain," with the subtitle, "His heroic life story and passion for reform could give Bush a run for his money").

One scholarly study examining the effects of media coverage during the 2000 primaries found that the more Republican primary voters paid attention to the news, the more likely they were to support McCain, particularly after New Hampshire: When media favoritism was moderately favorable (before New Hampshire), we see marginal effects.

But after media coverage toward McCain's candidacy became overwhelmingly favorable at the expense of Bush, respondents who paid attention to this coverage were substantially influenced as a result. In other words, these results suggest that media favoritism played an instrumental role in creating the surge of momentum from which the McCain campaign benefited.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, media reception appears to have played no meaningful role in shaping Democratic candidate evaluations, either before or after New Hampshire. In other words, the amount of news voters paid attention to had no impact on their feelings toward Al Gore and Bill Bradley. But the more news they got about the campaign, the more they liked John McCain. While such clear, short-term effects are unusual in media studies, this study seems to show that the positive press coverage McCain received led directly to more votes.

Looking at the surge of McCain stories from 1999 through the first months of 2000, it's not unfair to suggest that the "maverick" label was as much a creation of the peculiar groupthink that grips journalists during campaign season as it was a product of original reporting. For the political press corps, a snowball effect set in. While many stories routinely talked of McCain as a maverick, only a fraction of them offered any context or justification for the characterization, such as a list of votes or other factors to explain what exactly it was that made him a maverick.

Those that did were more likely to drop in a reference to campaign finance reform without exploring it in any detail. Many stories were content simply to refer to McCain as a maverick-and leave it at that.

As E. R. Shipp, who was the Washington Post's ombudsman, wrote at the time, her paper seemed to have assigned each of the major candidates a role and found itself unable or unwilling to look beyond the conclusions it had made: "Gore is the guy in search of an identity; Bradley is the Zen-like intellectual in search of a political strategy; McCain is the war hero who speaks off the cuff and is, thus, a 'maverick'; and Bush is a lightweight with a famous name, and has the blessings of the party establishment and lots of money in his war chest. As a result of this approach, some candidates are whipping boys; others seem to get a free pass." Her description applied not just to the Post but to virtually the entire political press corps.

Although it emerged full-blown during the 2000 campaign, the maverick theme has remained a staple of McCain's coverage. Virtually every day -- sometimes many times a day-a reporter or commentator somewhere in the American media is calling John McCain a maverick. Sometimes a reporter almost forgets to mention that McCain is a maverick, then catches him or herself, as NBC's Norah O'Donnell did when guest-hosting Hardball in June 2006. "All right, Senator John McCain -- the maverick McCain," she said, ending their interview.

Both laughed knowingly.

Free Ride: The Media and John McCain (Anchor Books, 2008) © 2008 by David Brock and Paul Waldman. Reprinted with permission by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

David Brock is the President and CEO of Media Matters for America. Paul Waldman is a Media Matters senior fellow.

© 2008 Anchor Books All rights reserved

View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/80724/
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NPR News

National Pentagon Radio?


By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t Perspective
March 27, 2008


While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter's voice from Iraq was unequivocal on the morning of March 27: "There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen."

Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the US media establishment. In the "War Made Easy" documentary film, I put it this way: "If you're pro-war, you're objective. But if you're antiwar, you're biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn't dream of making a statement that's against a war."

So it goes at NPR News, where - on "Morning Edition" as well as the evening program "All Things Considered" - the sense and sensibilities tend to be neatly aligned with the outlooks of official Washington. The critical aspects of reporting largely amount to complaints about policy shortcomings that are tactical; the underlying and shared assumptions are imperial.

Washington's prerogatives are evident when the media window on the world is tinted red, white and blue.

Earlier in the week - a few days into the sixth year of the Iraq war - "All Things Considered" aired a discussion with a familiar guest.

"To talk about the state of the war and how the US military changes tactics to deal with it," said longtime anchor Robert Siegel, "we turn now to retired Gen. Robert Scales, who's talked with us many times over the course of the conflict."

This is the sort of introduction that elevates a guest to truly expert status - conveying to the listeners that expertise and wisdom, not just opinions, are being sought.

Siegel asked about the progression of assaults on US troops over the years: "How have the attacks and the countermeasures to them evolved?"

Naturally, General Scales responded with the language of a military man. "The enemy has built ever-larger explosives," he said. "They've found clever ways to hide their IEDs, their roadside bombs and even more diabolical means for detonating these devices."

We'd expect a retired American general to speak in such categorical terms - referring to "the enemy" and declaring in a matter-of-fact tone that attacks on US troops became even more "diabolical."

But what about an American journalist?

Well, if the American journalist is careful to function with independence instead of deference to the Pentagon, then the journalist's assumptions will sound different than the outlooks of a high-ranking US military officer.

In this case, an independent reporter might even be willing to ask a pointed question along these lines: You just used the word "diabolical" to describe attacks on the US military by Iraqis, but would that ever be an appropriate adjective to use to describe attacks on Iraqis by the US military?

In sharp contrast, what happened during the "All Things Considered" discussion on March 24 was a conversation of shared sensibilities. The retired US Army general discussed the war effort in terms notably similar to those of the ostensibly independent journalist - who, along the way, made the phrase "the enemy" his own in a follow-up question.

It wouldn't be fair to judge an entire news program on the basis of a couple of segments. But I'm a frequent listener to "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition." Such cozy proximity of worldviews, blanketing the war maker and the war reporter, is symptomatic of what ails NPR's war coverage - especially from Washington.

Of course, there are exceptions. Occasional news reports stray from the narrow baseline. But the essence of the propaganda function is repetition, and the exceptional does not undermine that function.

To add insult to injury, NPR calls itself public radio.

It's supposed to be willing to go where commercial networks fear to tread.

But overall, when it comes to politics and war, the range of perspectives on National Public Radio isn't any wider than what we encounter on the avowedly commercial networks.

The documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same name, went into home-video release this week and is now available on DVD from Netflix, Amazon and similar outlets. For more information, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

Source:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032708A.shtml
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Journalist-Bites-Reality!

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that it's utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil.


Skeptic
by Steve Salerno
Fwb. 13, 2008


It is the measure of the media’s obsession with its “pedophiles run amok!” story line that so many of us are on a first-name basis with the victims: Polly, Amber, JonBenet, Danielle, Elizabeth, Samantha. And now there is Madeleine.

Clearly these crimes were and are horrific, and nothing here is intended to diminish the parents’ loss. But something else has been lost in the bargain as journalists tirelessly stoke fear of strangers, segueing from nightly-news segments about cyber-stalkers and “the rapist in your neighborhood” to prime-time reality series like Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” That “something else” is reality.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time — and just 3 percent of the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.)

Overall, the odds that one of America’s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.”

That’s a diplomatic way of phrasing the uncomfortable but factually supported truth: that if your child is not molested in your own home — by you, your significant other, or someone else you invited in — chances are your child will never be molested anywhere.

Media coverage has precisely inverted both the reality and the risk of child sexual assault.

Along the way, it has also inverted the gender of the most tragic victims: Despite the unending parade of young female faces on TV, boys are more likely than girls to be killed in the course of such abuse.

We think we know Big Journalism’s faults by its much ballyhooed lapses — its scandals, gaffes, and breakdowns — as well as by a recent spate of insider tell-alls. When Dan Rather goes public with a sensational expose based on bogus documents; when the Atlanta Journal Constitution wrongly labels Richard Jewell the Olympic Park bomber; when Dateline resorts to rigging explosive charges to the gas tanks of “unsafe” trucks that, in Dateline’s prior tests, stubbornly refused to explode on their own; when the New York Times’ Jayson Blair scoops other reporters working the same story by quoting sources who don’t exist … We see these incidents as atypical, the exceptions that prove the rule.

Sadly, we’re mistaken.

To argue that a decided sloppiness has crept into journalism or that the media have been “hijacked by [insert least favorite political agenda]” badly misses the real point; it suggests that all we need to do to fix things is filter out the gratuitous political spin or rig the ship to run a bit tighter. In truth, today’s system of news delivery is an enterprise whose procedures, protocols, and underlying assumptions all but guarantee that it cannot succeed at its self described mission.

Broadcast journalism in particular is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for illuminating life, let alone interpreting it, is almost nil.

“You give us 22 minutes, and we’ll give you … what, exactly?”

We watch the news to “see what’s going on in the world.” But there’s a hitch right off the bat. In its classic conception, newsworthiness is built on a foundation of anomaly: man-bites-dog, to use the hackneyed j school example. The significance of this cannot be overstated. It means that, by definition, journalism in its most basic form deals with what life is not.

Today’s star journalist, however, goes to great lengths to distance himself from his trade’s man bites dog heritage. To admit that what he’s presenting is largely marginalia (or at best “background music”) deflates the journalist’s relevance in an environment where members of Major Media have come to regard themselves as latter day shamans and oracles. In a memorable 2002 piece, “The Weight of the Anchor,” columnist Frank Rich put it this way, regarding the then-Big 3 of Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather: “Not quite movie stars, not quite officialdom, they are more famous than most movie stars and more powerful than most politicians.”

Thus, journalism as currently practiced delivers two contradictory messages: that what it puts before you (a) is newsworthy (under the old man bites dog standard), but also (b) captures the zeitgeist. (“You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world,” gloat all news radio stations across the country.)

The news media cannot simultaneously deliver both. In practice, they fail at both. By painting life in terms of its oddities, journalism yields not a snapshot of your world, but something closer to a photographic negative.

Even when journalism isn’t plainly capsizing reality, it’s furnishing information that varies between immaterial and misleading. For all its cinema-verité panache, embedded reporting, as exemplified in Iraq and in Nightline’s recent series on “the forgotten war” in Afghanistan, shows only what’s going on in the immediate vicinity of the embedded journalist. It’s not all that useful for yielding an overarching sense of the progress of a war, and might easily be counterproductive: To interpret such field reporting as a valid microcosm is the equivalent of standing in a spot where it’s raining and assuming it’s raining everywhere.

Journalism’s paradoxes and problems come to a head in the concept of newsmagazination, pioneered on 60 Minutes and later the staple tactic of such popular clones as Dateline, 48 Hours, and 20/20. One of the more intellectually dishonest phenomena of recent vintage, newsmagazination presents the viewer with a circumstantial stew whipped up from:
a handful of compelling sound-bites culled from anecdotal sources, public-opinion polls (which tell us nothing except what people think is true), statistics that have no real evidentiary weight and/or scant relevance to the point they’re being used to “prove,” crushing logical flaws such as post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, faulty or, at best, unproven “expert” assumptions, or other “conventional wisdom” that has never been seriously examined, a proprietary knowledge of people’s inner thoughts or motives (as when a White House correspondent discounts a president’s actual statements in order to reveal to us that president’s “true agenda”), etc.

Case in point: On Nov. 5, 2004, NBC’s Dateline built a show around the dangers of gastric bypass surgery. The topic was a natural for Dateline, inasmuch as The Today Show’s own Al Roker, who did much of the reporting, had undergone the surgery and achieved a stunning weight loss. In setting the scene, anchor Storm Phillips noted that the expected mortality rate for gastric bypass is 1 in 200. (Translation: The survival rate is 199 in 200, or 99.5 percent.)

Phillips then handed off to Roker; the affable weatherman spent a few cheery moments on his own success, then found his somber face in segueing to the tragic saga of Mike Butler, who died following surgery. The Butler story consumed the next 30 minutes of the hour long broadcast, punctuated by the obligatory wistful soliloquy from Butler’s young widow. So, in covering a procedure that helps (or at least doesn’t kill) roughly 99.5 percent of patients, Dateline elects to tell the story in terms of the .5 percent with tragic outcomes.

Had NBC sought to equitably represent the upside and downside of gastric bypass, it would’ve devoted 1/200th of the show — a mere 18 seconds — to Butler. Further, wouldn’t it have been journalistically responsible for Dateline to devote a good portion of the broadcast to the risks of morbid obesity itself, which far outweigh the risks of surgical bypass?

Do the math … please

One underlying factor here is that journalists either don’t understand the difference between random data and genuine statistical proof, or they find that distinction inconvenient for their larger purpose: to make news dramatic and accessible. The media need a story line — a coherent narrative, ideally with an identifiable hero and villain.

As Tom Brokaw once put it, perhaps revealing more than he intended, “It’s all storytelling, you know. That’s what journalism is about.”

The mainstream news business is so unaccustomed to dealing with issues at any level of complexity and nuance that they’re wont to oversimplify their story to the point of caricature.

The best contemporary example is the Red State/Blue State dichotomy, invoked as an easy metaphor to express the philosophical schism that supposedly divides “the two Americas.”

Watching CNN’s Bill Schneider hover over his maps on Election Night 2004, drawing stark lines between colors, one would’ve thought there were no Republicans in California, or that a Democrat arriving at the Texas border would be turned back at gunpoint. Well, guess what: The dichotomy doesn’t exist — certainly not in the way journalists use the term.

It’s just a handy, sexy media fiction.

Although California did wind up in the Kerry column in 2004, some 5.5 million Californians voted for George W. Bush. They represented about 45 percent of the state’s total electorate and a much larger constituency in raw numbers than Bush enjoyed in any state he won, including Texas. Speaking of Texas: That unreconstituted Yankee, John Kerry, collected 2.8 million votes there. Two-point-eight million. Yet to hear the media tell it, California is deep, cool Blue, while Texas is a glaring, monolithic Red. Such fabrications aren’t just silly. They become institutionalized in the culture, and they color — in this case literally — the way Americans view the nation in which they live.

The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events does not a “disturbing new trend!” make — but that doesn’t stop journalists from finding patterns in happenstance. Take lightning. It kills with an eerie predictability: about 66 Americans every year. Now, lightning could kill those 66 people more or less evenly all spring and summer, or it could, in theory, kill the lot of them on one really scary Sunday in May. But the scary Sunday in May wouldn’t necessarily mean we’re going to have a year in which lightning kills 79,000 people.

(No more than if it killed a half-dozen people named Johanssen on that Sunday would it mean that lightning is suddenly targeting Swedes.) Yet you can bet that if any half-dozen people are killed by lightning one Sunday, you’ll soon see a special report along the lines of, LIGHTNING: IS IT OUT TO GET US?

We’ve seen this propensity on display with shark attacks, meningitis, last year’s rash of amusement-park fatalities, and any number of other “random event clusters” that occur for no reason anyone can explain.

Journalists overreact to events that fall well within the laws of probability. They treat the fact that something happened as if we never before had any reason to think it could happen — as if it were a brand-new risk with previously unforeseen causation.

Did America become more vulnerable on 9/11? Or had it been vulnerable all along?

Indeed, it could be argued that America today is far less vulnerable, precisely because of the added vigilance inspired by 9/11. Is that how the media play it? Similarly, a bridge collapse is no reason for journalists to assume in knee-jerk fashion that bridges overall are any less safe than they’ve been for decades. Certainly it’s no reason to jump to the conclusion that the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, which is how several major news outlets framed the collapse of the Interstate 35W Bridge this past summer.

As Freud might put it, sometimes a bridge collapse is just a bridge collapse. Alas, journalism needs its story line.

For a textbook example of the intellectual barrenness of so much of what’s presented even as “headline” news, consider the Consumer Confidence Index and media coverage of same. For decades, such indices have been telling America how it feels about its economic prospects. The best known index has been compiled each month since 1967 by the Conference Board, a nonprofit organization dating to 1916.

The Board’s index is an arbitrary composite of indicators rooted in five equally arbitrary questions mailed to 5000 households. (“Do you see jobs as being easier or harder to get next year?”) On Tuesday, October 30, 2007, the Board reported that its latest CCI had dipped to a two-year low. The media jumped on the story, as is ever the case when the CCI dips. (CCI upticks are seldom reported with the same fervor.) Like many of its counterparts nationally, no doubt, a Philadelphia network affiliate sent its consumer affairs reporter trudging out to find consumers who lacked confidence. She succeeded.

Few reporters bother to mention that, customarily, there has been only a tenuous connection between CCI numbers and actual consumer spending or the overall health of the economy as objectively measured. In fact, just days after the release of the downbeat CCI, the Labor Department reported that the economy had generated 166,000 new jobs in October — twice the forecast. That statistic, which measures reality, got nowhere near the same play as the CCI, which measures perception.

So let’s recap.

We have a fanciful metric that’s just a compilation of opinion, which is layered with further opinion from passersby, and then subjected to in-studio analysis (still more opinion). All of which is presented to viewers as … news. The problem for society is that giving headline prominence to meaningless or marginal events exalts those events to the status of conventional wisdom.

“Reporting confers legitimacy and relevance,” writes Russell Frank, Professor of Journalism Ethics at Penn State University. “When a newspaper puts a certain story on page one or a newscast puts it at or near the top of a 22 minute program, it is saying to its audience, in no uncertain terms, that ‘this story is important.’”

The self-fulfilling nature of all this should be clear: News organizations decide what’s important, spin it to their liking, cover it ad nauseam, then describe it — without irony — as “the 800-pound gorilla” or “the issue that just won’t go away.” This is not unlike network commercials promoting sit-coms and dramas that “everyone is talking about” in the hopes of getting people to watch shows that apparently no one is talking about.

Tonight at 11 … the Apocalypse!

Far worse than hyping a story that represents just .5 percent reality, is covering “news” that’s zero percent reality: There literally is no story. Even so, if the non-story satisfies other requirements, it will be reported anyway. This truism was not lost on the late David Brinkley, who, towards the end of his life, observed, “The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

On June 9, 2005, as part of its ongoing series of “Security Updates,” CNN airs a special report titled “Keeping Milk Safe.” Over shots of adorable first-graders sipping from their pint cartons, CNN tells viewers that the farm-to-shelf supply chain is vulnerable at every point, beginning with the cow; with great drama, the report emphasizes the terrifying consequences such tampering could have. Nowhere does CNN mention that in the history of the milk industry, no incident of supply-chain tampering has ever been confirmed, due to terrorism or anything else.

Similarly, after the Asian tsunamis struck over Christmas 2004, Dateline wasted no time casting about for an alarmist who could bring the tragedy closer to home: the familiar Could It Happen Here? motif. The show’s producers found Stephen Ward, Ph.D., of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In January, Dateline’s East Coast viewers heard Ward foretell a geological anomaly in their very own ocean that could generate the equivalent of “all the bombs on earth” detonating at once.

The event Ward prophesied would unleash on New York City a wave containing “15 or 20 times the energy” of the Asian tsunamis. As a helpful backdrop, Dateline treated its viewers to spectacular visuals from The Day After Tomorrow, showing Manhattan’s heralded landmarks disappearing beneath an onrushing, foamy sea.

But for sheer overwrought absurdity, it’s hard to beat what took place in mid-September 1999.

For six full days, journalists behaved as if there was one story and one story only: Hurricane Floyd. The TV tempest commenced as the actual tempest still lolled hundreds of miles offshore, with no one certain how much of a threat Floyd posed, or whether it might fizzle before it hit land (as so often happens — Katrina has changed the way we think about hurricanes, but Katrina was a once-in-a-generation event). This was Saturday. By Tuesday the hurricane-in-absentia had engulfed the nightly news. While residents of areas in Floyd’s projected path evacuated, the other side of the highway was clotted with news crews on their way in. By Wednesday all of the networks had their parka clad correspondents standing on some coastal beach, each correspondent bent on looking wetter and more windblown than the next. Sprinkled among all this were the requisite interviews with men (and women) on the street — as well as in insurance companies, emergency-services offices, local restaurants, and the like.

Bereft of an actual hurricane to show during this feverish build-up, The Today Show aired old footage of Hurricane Hugo’s plunder of Charleston, in sledgehammer foreshadowing of the disaster to come.

Floyd caused a fair amount of damage when it finally hit on Thursday: 57 deaths and an estimated $6 billion in property loss. But here’s where things get curious. By the time Floyd blew in, media interest clearly had ebbed. On television at least, coverage of the aftermath was dispatched in a day or so, with occasional backward glances occupying a few moments of air time in subsequent newscasts. Bottom line, the coverage of Floyd before it was a real story dwarfed the coverage given the storm once it became a story.

Evidently the conjured image of tidal waves crashing on shore was more titillating to news producers than film of real life homeowners swabbing brownish muck out of their basements.

Today’s newspeople have substantially improved on one of the timeless axioms of their craft: “If it bleeds, it leads.” They prefer the mere prospect of bad news to most other kinds of news that did occur.

The result is journalism as Stephen King might do it: the dogged selling of the cataclysm ’round the corner, complete with stage lighting and scenes fictionalized for dramatic purposes. Sure, the camera loves suspense. But … is suspense news? Is it really news that someone thinks a hurricane might kill thousands? It might kill no one, either, which is historically closer to the truth. Honest journalism would wait to see what the storm does, then report it.

Granted, Floyd blew in during a slow week. Following, though, is a sampling of the events that were largely ignored while the assembled media were waiting for Floyd: The House of Representatives took a hard stand on soft money, approving limits on campaign spending.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an investigation of corporate America’s fondness for cash balance pension plans, an issue that affected millions of workers, and stood to affect millions more.

The 17 member Joint Security Commission released a chilling report on America’s handling of security clearance applications. This, let us remember, was two years before the terror attacks of 9/11.

Also covered with the media equivalent of a yawn that week were the terrorist bombings in the Soviet Union and the gruesome, continuing holocaust in East Timor.

The advance billing given to Floyd bespeaks a gloomy trend in broadcast news’ continuing slide toward theater. We witnessed this same phenomenon during the run-up to Desert Storm, Y2K, and the Clinton impeachment, among others.

The Crusades — postmodern style

Nowhere are these foibles more noticeable — or more of a threat to journalistic integrity — than when they coalesce into a cause: so-called “advocacy” or “social” journalism.

To begin with, there are legitimate questions about whether journalism should even have causes. Does the journalist alone know what’s objectively, abstractly good or evil? What deserves supporting or reforming? The moment journalists claim license to cover events sympathetically or cynically, we confront the problem of what to cover sympathetically or cynically, where to draw such lines and — above all — who gets to draw them. There are very few issues that unite the whole of mankind.

Regardless, as Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism told USA Today, “News outlets have found they can create more … identity by creating franchise brands around issues or around a point of view.”

Worse, for our purposes, the data on which journalists premise their crusades are drawn from the same marginalia discussed above. When Francisco Serrano was discovered to be living in the Minnesota high school he once attended, the media covered the 2005 story as if every American high school had a half-dozen homeless people living in it. The actual episode, though exceedingly rare if not one-of-a-kind, became a window to the nation’s social failings.

In his thinking and methodology, today’s journalist resembles the homicide cop who, having settled on a suspect, begins collecting evidence specifically against that suspect, dismissing information that counters his newfound theory of the crime. Too many journalists think in terms of buttressing a preconceived argument or fleshing out a sense of narrative gained very early in their research. This mindset is formalized in journalism’s highest award: the Pulitzer Prize.

Traditionally, stories deemed worthy of Pulitzer consideration have revealed the dark (and, often as not, statistically insignificant) underbelly of American life.

In 2007 the Pulitzer for “public-service journalism” went to The Wall Street Journal, for its “creative and comprehensive probe into backdated stock options for business executives…”

The Journal reported on “possible” violations then under investigation at 120 companies. There are 2764 listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange; NASDAQ adds another 3200. Not to dismiss the sincerity and diligence of the Journal’s work, but what’s the final takeaway here?

That 120 companies (0.02 percent) “possibly” cheated? Or that — so far as anyone knows — at least 5844 others didn’t?

Food for thought: Every time I fly, I’m amazed that these huge, winged machines get off the ground, stay off the ground, and don’t return to ground until they’re supposed to.

Think about the failure rate of commonplace products: Light bulbs burn out. Fan belts snap.

Refrigerators stop refrigerating. But planes don’t crash. Actuarially speaking, they simply don’t.

The entire process of commercial flight and the systems that support it is remarkable. Do you fully understand it? I don’t. I’m sure lots of people don’t. Still, you won’t win a Pulitzer for a piece that sheds light on the myriad “little miracles” that conspire to produce aviation’s normalcy, stability and success. You’d be laughed out of today’s newsrooms for even proposing such a piece (unless you were doing it as the kind of feel-good feature that editors like to give audiences as gifts for the holidays). Have a flight go down, however — one flight, one time — and have a reporter find some overworked ATC operator or other aberration that may have caused the disaster, and voila! You’re in Pulitzer territory for writing about something that — essentially — never happens.

Just as journalists who run out of news may create it, journalists who run out of real causes may invent them. It’s not hard to do. All you need is a fact or two, which you then “contextualize” with more so-called expert opinion.

December 10, 2004 was a banner night for exposing those well-known dens of iniquity that masquerade as Amish settlements. Stories about rape and incest among the Amish appeared on both Dateline and 20/20. The Dateline story even made reference to the principal character in the story that aired an hour later on 20/20 — which gives you some idea how common the abuse may be, if seasoned journalists must choreograph their exposés around the same incident. That brings us to Elizabeth Vargas and her question for 20/20’s expert on Amish affairs: Just how widespread is this abuse? Amid stock footage of adorable children strolling down a dusky road in suspenders and bonnets, the expert tells America that it’s “not a gross exception.”

What kind of reporting is that? Does it indicate that 1 percent of Amish children are abused? Ten percent? Forty percent? Who knows?

This is what passes for investigative journalism nowadays.

Their world … and they’re welcome to it

The world we’re “given” has an indisputable impact on how Americans see and live their lives. (How many other events are set in motion by the “truths” people infer from the news?) Here we enter the realm of iatrogenic reporting: provable harms that didn’t exist until journalism itself got involved.

In science journalism in particular, the use of anecdotal information can have results that would be comical, were it not for the public alarm that often results in response. Pop quiz: How many Americans have died of Mad Cow Disease? Before you answer, let’s look to Britain, where the scare began in earnest around 1995 after a few herd of cattle were found to be infected. First of all, in the cows themselves, what we call “Mad Cow” is technically bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. When BSE species-jumps to humans, it manifests itself as something called variant Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease, or vCJD. (“Non-variant” CJD occurs independently of cows and can even be inherited.) A link between BSE and vCJD was established in 1996. British reporters went scurrying to find epidemiologists who were alarmed by the discovery, some of whom obligingly put the death toll in the coming years above 500,000.

By late 2006, the end of Mad Cow’s first documented decade, the U.K. had confirmed a total of 162 human deaths — nothing to be glib about. But that’s a long way from 500,000. (Undaunted, enterprising British reporters have begun talking about “mad sheep.” No joke.) And here in the U.S.? The CDC describes two confirmed deaths, both involving people born and raised abroad. A third case involves a man from Saudi Arabia who remains alive at this writing.

Not what you might’ve expected, eh?

Nevertheless, when a New Jersey woman, Janet Skarbek, became convinced that an outbreak had killed off her neighbors, she found a warm welcome in newsrooms. Her dire pronouncements touched off a mini hysteria. Even after the CDC eliminated vCJD as a factor, the media kept fanning the fires of public concern, typically by quoting Dr. Michael Greger, a part time chef and full-time alarmist who labels Mad Cow “the plague of the 21st Century.” When journalists want a fatalistic sound bite on the disease, they dial Greger’s number.

However history may remember Mad Cow as an actual pathology, this much is sure: The media inflamed scare has been fatal to jobs — most directly in the meat packing industry, but in related enterprises as well. It has soured consumers on beef. It has caused volatile swings in livestock prices. It has mandated new protocols that add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the average cattle rancher’s cost of doing business. It has caused us to cut ourselves off from key beef suppliers, fomenting minor crises in diplomacy and commerce. A 2005 survey reckoned the total cost of Mad Cow to U.S. agricultural interests at between $3.2 billion and $4.7 billion. This, for something that has killed far fewer Americans in 10 years than the 200 who die each month from choking on food or food substances each week.

To hear the media tell it, we’re under perpetual siege from some Terrifying New Disease That Threatens to End Life as We Know It. It’s too soon to render verdicts on the ultimate impact of avian flu, but that pathogen would have to wipe out many millions in order to justify the hype. Lyme Disease? The Cleveland Clinic has this to say: “Although rarely fatal and seldom a serious illness, Lyme Disease has been widely publicized, frequently overdramatized, and sometimes linked to unproven conditions.”

Is it coincidence that visits to national parks began tracking downward in 1999, amid media coverage that made it sound as if deer ticks and the rest of Mother Nature’s foot-soldiers had declared war on humankind? Maybe. Maybe not.

In science reporting and everywhere else, there’s no minimizing the psychic effects of regularly consuming a world-view rooted in peculiarity, much of which is pessimistic. In a 2003 Gallup poll, just 11 percent of respondents rated crime in their own neighborhoods as “very serious” or “extremely serious,” yet 54 percent of those same respondents deemed crime in America as a whole “very serious” or “extremely serious.” The catch-22 should be apparent: If crime were that pervasive, it would have to be occurring in a lot more than 11 percent of the respondents’ “own neighborhoods.” Such an enigmatic skew can only be explained in terms of the difference between what people personally experience — what they know firsthand — and the wider impressions they get from the news.

Figuratively speaking, we end up drowning in the tides of a hurricane that never makes shore.

I give you, herewith, a capsule summary your world, and in far less than 22 minutes:

• The current employment rate is 95.3 percent.
• Out of 300 million Americans, roughly 299.999954 million were not murdered today.
• Day after day, some 35,000 commercial flights traverse our skies without incident.
• The vast majority of college students who got drunk last weekend did not rape anyone, or kill themselves or anyone else in a DUI or hazing incident. On Monday, they got up and went to class, bleary-eyed but otherwise okay.

It is not being a Pollyanna to state such facts, because they are facts. Next time you watch the news, keep in mind that what you’re most often seeing is trivia framed as Truth. Or as British humorist/philosopher G.K. Chesteron whimsically put it some decades ago, “Journalism consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

Source:
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-02-13.html
________________

Dalai Lama: ‘I am prepared to

face China. I will go to

Beijing’

As crisis over Tibet deepens, Dalai Lama makes extraordinary offer to negotiate directly with President Hu Jintao



by Andrew Buncombe in Dharamsala
The Independent/UK
March 21, 2008


Almost half a century after he fled to India, the Dalai Lama has raised the extraordinary prospect of travelling to Beijing and holding face-to-talks with the Chinese regime in an effort to resolve Tibet’s most serious crisis for two decades.

Having watched helplessly from exile as his Tibetan homeland has suffered under Chinese rule, the man regarded as a living god by millions of his followers said yesterday that he was ready to negotiate personally with the Chinese leadership. The Dalai Lama, 73, acknowledged the difficulty associated with a face-to-face summit, but said he was even ready to meet President Hu Jintao, notorious in Tibet for his hardline approach when he served as Tibet’s local Communist leader.

“I am always ready to meet the Chinese leaders, and particularly Hu Jintao. I am very happy to meet,” he told a small group of journalists at his office in Dharamsala. “But as I mentioned earlier, to go to Beijing and meet leaders… that would be big news. Many Tibetans would think… may develop some unrealistic expectations. I have to think very carefully.”

While a visit to Beijing would leave him open to criticism of appeasing the Chinese, the undertaking the Dalai Lama gave yesterday underlines his desperate wish to avoid further bloodshed in the country of his birth.

Seeking to put pressure on China, he said he was willing to travel to Beijing in a matter of weeks if there was a “concrete indication” that the Chinese authorities were prepared to negotiate and if the protests in Tibet had concluded. His spokesman later confirmed that while he did not wish to simply provide the Chinese with a photo-opportunity that could be used against him, he was ready to discuss a “mutually agreeable solution” to the issue of Tibet.

The remarkable prospect of a summit between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese leadership - either in Beijing or elsewhere - came as China said police had opened fire and wounded four Tibetan protesters in Sichuan province and arrested dozens of others who had ignored a deadline to end the most serious demonstrations to rock Tibet for more than two decades.
Earlier this week, the Chinese leadership indicated it would be prepared to talk to the Dalai Lama if he stopped “separatist activities” and recognised Tibet and Taiwan as parts of China.

Gordon Brown told the Commons on Wednesday that the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, had told him he was ready to meet the Dalai Lama if he renounced violence. But assessing the genuine intentions of the Chinese leadership remains at best a guessing game. Beijing is concerned about sullying its reputation ahead of the upcoming Olympic Games, but while giving an undertaking to meet the Dalai Lama, various Chinese officials have continued to demonise him and accuse him and his “clique” of orchestrating the demonstrations in Tibet.

“For the Dalai Lama, we not only listen to what he says, but more importantly, we focus on what he does,” said the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang. “He has said he is not a separatist. But all of his propositions and actions prove that he has never stopped his splittist words and deeds.”

The Dalai Lama knows his only real leverage as head of a Tibetan government in exile is in winning over international opinion to his cause. Today he is due to meet Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, while tomorrow he is scheduled to have lunch with the actor Richard Gere in Delhi. Both have supported him for many years.

Winning the backing of camera-friendly celebrities and power-wielding politicians has long been the strength of the smiling and avuncular 1989 Nobel laureate. Laughing, joking and yet utterly serious all in the space of a sentence, this is a role he continues to play to perfection as the cause to which he has devoted his life receives unprecedented world attention. Never more than now has he needed to stress the importance of non-violent protest and the limited nature of the movement’s demands.

“The Chinese constitution already mentions autonomy [for Tibet]. So that should not be just a word on paper but implemented on the spot,” he said, sitting in front of a statue of the Buddha.

“The whole world knows Dalai Lama is not seeking independence, one hundred times, a thousand times I have repeated this. It is my mantra - we are not seeking independence.”

In Beijing, the authorities admitted for the first time that the often violent protests that swept through Lhasa 10 days ago in protest against Chinese rule had spread to other Tibetan communities in additional provinces. Subsequently, the government has dispatched more troops and paramilitaries across the region as it seeks to reassert its control in those areas. It has banned the media and foreign tourists from travelling to the region.

Precisely how many people have been killed or injured as a result of the protests and the subsequent crackdown is unclear. The Chinese government says 16 people have died while the Tibetan exiles say the number stands at 80. On walls and buildings throughout Dharamsala, exiles have posted graphic and disturbing photographs of Tibetans apparently killed by Chinese police or soldiers.

“It’s horrible. There are many bodies. The Chinese are holding the bodies,” claimed Tenzin Thangh, who was participating in a candlelit vigil through the main street of the town - a procession that has become a nightly occurrence. “The soldiers are going into all parts of Tibet.”

From Dharamsala, a former British hill station established on the peaceful fringe of the Himalayas, Chinese accusations regarding the Dalai Lama’s ability to direct events in Tibet and the description of him as “a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast”, appear little short of preposterous. Indeed, his cautious “middle way” approach has been criticised by some Tibetans, including the Tibetan Youth Congress which seeks full independence from China. While many younger Tibetans have been outspoken in their criticism of the Dalai Lama’s tactics, in recent days they have halted such comments in an apparent effort not to appear divided at a crucial juncture.

What certainly does not seem in doubt is the reverence with which he is held as the community’s religious leader. Before meeting reporters yesterday, the Dalai Lama spent time in the flower-filled gardens of the compound receiving and blessing various visitors, including a family who had travelled secretly from Shanghai.

Asked later how he felt about the personal insults that Chinese officials had directed towards him, he said such comments mattered little to him. He also said he did not believe that the international community was taken in by what the Chinese said.

“As a Buddhist monk, it does not matter what they call me,” he said with a chuckle. “The outside world doesn’t believe that I am [a] devil.”

Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/dalai-lama-i-am-prepared-to-face-china-i-will-go-to-beijing-798998.html
_____________________

Alaska House speaker warns tanker owners


March 19, 2008
Anchorage Daily News


The Alaska House speaker is threatening to hold hearings on whether owners of the shipping company that hauls North Slope crude oil for BP are skimping on tanker maintenance.

He recently sent letters to top executives of three firms that jointly own Alaska Tanker Co. (ATC), the operator of BP’s troubled tanker fleet.

While BP paid for the tankers, it owns only 25 percent of ATC. The other owners, at 37.5 percent apiece, are Keystone Shipping and Overseas Shipholding Group Inc.

The speaker said he wrote the letters after ATC’s president came to him and said he was having difficulties with the company owners and has not been given the resources and support necessary to maintain operations integrity.

Since 2004, BP has upgraded its fleet with four new double-hull ships at a cost of $250 million each.

The new BP tankers, however, have been plagued with problems since they were launched into service, including cracked rudders, anchors that have fallen off during rough crossings of the North Pacific, a mooring post snapping off the deck of one ship while docking, and two known cases in which engine power or control was lost.

The speaker made reference to these “mechanical integrity issues” in his letters, and said he has confidence in the ATC president’s efforts to fix the problems.

Source:
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/349443.html
_________________


Florida Power & Light pulls plan for Wind Turbines at Blind Creek


March 19, 2008
Palm Beach Post


Florida Power & Light Co. officials announced Tuesday they would give up their idea of building three turbines at Blind Creek, public land just north of their St. Lucie Nuclear Plant.

But they still plan to build six turbines on their Hutchinson Island land. None of the wind turbines would be closer than 2,510 feet to the nuclear plant or the closest residential development, the Sands condominiums.

St. Lucie County commissioners still must decide whether they will approve height variances and other permits to allow wind turbines to be built anywhere on the island.

FPL officials say the St. Lucie site is ideal because of its higher wind speeds and because existing transmission lines from the nuclear plant could be used to transmit power.

FPL’s vice president of development said he hopes to get the go-ahead by fall.

Source:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/tcoast/epaper/2008/03/19/m1a_slwindmill_0319.html
_________________



Group ready to fight Bellefonte plant site


March 19, 2008
Huntsville Times


A group opposing a proposed nuclear plant at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Bellefonte site has launched a campaign informing the public of the potential dangers of nuclear power.

NuStart, a consortium of nuclear utilities that includes TVA, is seeking to build a twin Westinghouse-designed reactor-plant at Bellefonte.

The plant would be located next to one TVA did not finish after investing about $4.2 billion. In a news release Tuesday, Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team (BEST) said the potential for radioactive leaks and wastes and issues of security, high construction costs, and a reduced water supply are its main concerns.

“Nuclear reactors are very expensive to build and operate safely,” said a BEST founder.

“The real threat of terrorism means that every nuclear reactor has the equivalent of a terrorist bull’s eye painted on it.”

A TVA spokesman said the utility’s nuclear plants “are very controlled and regulated.”

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold public meetings on the proposed plant on April 3.

Source:
http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/news/1205918159262841.xml&coll=1
_________________


Nuclear watchdog group raises alarm over Seabrook plant


March 19, 2008
Gloucester Daily Times (NH)


A local watchdog group is raising new concerns about the safety of Seabrook Station after the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) found cracked weld alloys on water pressurizers similar to those at the New Hampshire nuclear plant.

The latest discoveries come after the NRC last week noted the flaw and said eight plants – including Seabrook – may need to shut down in order to repair the problem.

“We were looking at certain welds in the reactors. When the plants were built, they had to attach two different kinds of steel and used a certain alloy, which over time has shown under some conditions it can crack, and of course we don’t want those cracks to affect safety,” an NRC spokesman said.

The C-10 group, which monitors radiological emissions from the plant, is asking why the NRC did not shut Seabrook down immediately, noting the problem is something well documented throughout the power industry.

The NRC spokesman said, “The NRC has looked at the issue at a significant level of detail, and our staff is satisfied Seabrook is safe and can safely continue until the scheduled outage in a few weeks.”

NRC officials decided Thursday the welds of the pressurized water reactors could wait until Seabrook’s spring shutdown before any modifications need to be made.

Source:
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/punews/local_story_079065724.html
__________________

Ohio seizes voting machines in Criminal Investigation

Great news for democracy! It looks like some voter fraud went down in Ohio, with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation seizing voting machines for forensic analysis and a criminal investigation underway.

[Apparently, a candidate's name was marked as withdrawn on a number of voting machines and the internal audit capability on the machines had been manually disabled by election board programmers, which is pretty shady. And Ohio doesn't exactly have a great record when it comes to voting.]


By Ryan Paul
ArsTechnica
March 18, 2008
Comment Gizmodo


At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.

The investigation was launched after Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's Secretary of State and chief election official, found that a candidate's name was marked as withdrawn on the electronic voting machine that she used during the recent primaries, an irregularity that was also reported by voters in other precincts. The state attorney general is now working with a team of computer forensic consultants to determine if there was any tampering.

Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates that the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines had been manually disabled by county election board programmers last year, making it almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been made to the systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had failed to adhere to routine machine testing standards and had tested only one machine in each precinct rather than all of the machines.

Ohio has seen one electronic voting disaster after another ever since counties in the state began adopting the technology. Two Cuyahoga election officials were convicted of rigging a recount in May 2004 because they literally admitted to doing precounts and displayed the evidence while being recorded on videotape. A different Cuyahoga county recount, for a November 2007 local election, was equally marred when Brunner turned the state's voter-verifiable paper audit trail law into a mockery by conducting the recount with paper ballots reprinted after the election from voting machine memory cards.

After all of these incidents, Brunner launched a $1.9 million security review which determined that the voting machines used in the state are all egregiously insecure and susceptible to manipulation and outright fraud in numerous ways. The review produced over 1,000 pages of documentation describing the profound flaws that impact the systems.

According to WHIOTV, which conducted a television interview with Brunner, the state will consider dumping the faulty touch-screen voting machines and switching to more reliable optical scanners that read votes from conventional paper ballots. Rep. Kevin DeWine, a state legislator and deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, vehemently opposes returning to paper ballots because doing so would likely cost the state an estimated $64 million. His arguments seem dubious in the face of the growing costs associated with cleaning up the messes created by the defective touch-screen voting systems.

Security evaluations conducted in several states demonstrate clearly that electronic voting machines commercially available from virtually all of the mainstream vendors utterly fail to meet even the most basic security standards. With the important 2008 elections approaching quickly, states need to reevaluate the implications of their election policies and seriously consider going back to paper if more advanced technology can't get the job done.

[Boy, this all really makes you trust into our system of government, doesn't it? In the end, Ohio might end up scrapping the touchscreen machines entirely and going back to paper ballots, a move that would cost the state about $64 million but would keep elections a touch more trustworthy.]

Sources:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080318-ohio-seizes-voting-machines-in-criminal-investigation.html
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Admiral Fallon For VP?

National Review Online: Military Giant’s Abrupt Resignation Could Be A Calculated Political Move


By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
National Review Online
March 13, 2008


Here’s a radical thought: The abrupt resignation Tuesday of the combatant commander of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William J. “Fox” Fallon, is not the end of a career but a move calculated to catapult the former naval officer into the vice-presidential sweepstakes. After all, a military man who has proven himself utterly unserious about the Iranian threat would be perfect running mate for either Senators Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

The superficial appeal of such a cynical gambit may prove short-lived, however. The more one knows about Admiral Fallon’s conduct as a senior officer in sensitive positions around the world, the more unappealing his candidacy should be. Would any president want on his (or her) team an individual who had engaged in serial acts of insubordination and sabotage of a previous commander-in-chief?

Consider just a few of the more public examples of such behavior:

According to a recent, fatuous profile in Esquire, no sooner had Adm. Fallon assumed his previous post as commander of Pacific Command in 2005, than he began an aggressive campaign to establish closer military-to-military ties with China’s People’s Liberation Army. The history of such efforts was replete with examples of the Chinese using these contacts as opportunities to collect intelligence against our forces, while systematically withholding information about their military’s capabilities, prompting many in the Pentagon and Congress to oppose the resumption of these exchanges.

Fallon’s appeasement of Communist China continued in 2006 when, as the Washington Times’s national-security correspondent, Bill Gertz, reported, he “restricted U.S. intelligence-gathering activities against China, fearing that disclosure of the activities would upset relations with Beijing.” Never mind that the PRC is engaged in even more comprehensive and aggressive espionage against this country than that of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

The admiral’s assignment to Centcom commander came as a shock to those who had observed what some called his “toxic leadership” in the Pacific Command. Having secured this new posting, he inflicted a similar disfunctionality on the headquarters for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He actively worked against the surge in Iraq and, at every turn, sought to impede Gen. David Petreaus’s implementation of a successful counterinsurgency strategy there. He has acknowledged that he did not forcefully deliver a message from Washington aimed at discouraging Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf from imposing martial law on his country.

Fallon also takes pride in having “banished the term ‘long war’ from Centcom’s vocabulary.” The Esquire puff-piece details how:

[Fallon] believes real victory in this struggle will be defined in economic terms first, and so the emphasis on war struck him as ‘too narrow.’ But the term also signaled a long haul that Fallon simply finds unacceptable. He wants troop levels in Iraq down now, and he wants the Afghan National Army running the show throughout most of Afghanistan by the end of the year.

Then, there is the matter of Iran.

Fallon was most clearly in breach of the principle of civilian command of the military as he sought to contradict presidential assessments of the threat posed by the mullahocracy there and to promote his own diplomatic initiatives with Tehran. For example, he told Esquire that Iran could eventually participate in a summit of Persian Gulf chiefs of defense, similar to one he convened earlier this year in Tampa. He also asserted that engagement with Iran is crucial to stop the flow of munitions into Iraq, when every indication is that the Iranians perceive such diplomatic openings as signs of American weakness and lack of resolve, to be exploited wherever possible.

Not least, Fallon opined on al-Jazeera last fall that, “This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions.” Asia Times carried a report last year that he would resign if ordered to go to war - a sentiment he never denied.

The question is: Will rank insubordination on a scale arguably not seen in a military commander since MacArthur faded away nearly six decades ago be rewarded by still higher office?

Will Democratic politicians, so anxious to demean George Bush’s presidency and seek partisan advantage by pandering to the American people’s penchant for ignoring, rather than confronting emerging threats, resist the temptation to embrace Fox Fallon? Or will they seek to burnish their own, woefully inadequate national-security credentials by enlisting this arrogant, short-sighted, and insubordinate officer in a new, and probably even more problematic, political career?

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.

Source:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/13/opinion/main3934345.shtml
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United States of Amnesia

What about Cheney's DC Madam Problem?


by Gustav Wynn
OpEd News
March 11, 2008


How soon we forget the blockbuster ABC News scoop that was - and then wasn't - much bigger and more explosive then Governor Spitzer's, because it alleged Dick Cheney was a client.

In fact, when the news broke, Bush's "AIDS Czar" Randall Tobias, a former Eli Lilly top exec, resigned in shame. He should have stalled a bit like Louisiana Senator David Vitter did - the story was going to be killed, according to Wayne Madsen who named the ABC employee that pulled the plug after White House pressure.

Madsen expanded on the story after ABC dropped it, to allege that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was a client, as well as a lawyer in Rudy Giuliani's firm.

Senator Vitter has admitted and apologized for his part in he scandal, but is still in office, likely to be subpoenaed in the Spring 2008 trial of Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Perhaps more sinister then the prostitution allegations are the questions of complicity in a media wash-out by ABC, whose in-house staff was originally given call records directly by Madam Palfrey.

Also according to Madsen, the probe of the DC Madam reveals much more troubling questions, including the unsolved murder of a US attorney and another fired in Bush's DOJ purge, both of whom were investigating the DC Madam case.

This network cover-up mirrors similar allegations made in Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS News/Viacom. Hopeful his $70 million suit will go forward, Rather claims his controversial Texas Air Guard story was killed not because of the infamous disputed memo, but because of a call made from the White House.

Rather too, will likely name who in the Bush Administration made the call, and who at Viacom took it, also claiming CBS News quashed the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal to curry White House favor, until it was reported by Australian news.

Read about the Vice President's prostitution scandal here: Cheney Scandal Widens, reported on OpEd News last May, and be sure to follow the trial this April, because network news may not!

Source:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_gustav_w_080311_united_states_of_amn.htm
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Washington prepares for cyber war games


March 7, 2008
Washington Post


The U.S. government will conduct a series of cyber war games throughout next week to test its ability to recover from and respond to digital attacks.

Code-named ‘Cyber Storm II,’ this is the largest-ever exercise designed to evaluate the mettle of information technology experts and incident response teams from 18 federal agencies, including the CIA, Department of Defense, FBI, and NSA, as well as officials from nine states, including Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In addition, more than 40 companies will be playing, including Cisco Systems, Dow Chemical, McAfee, and Microsoft.

In the inaugural Cyber Storm two years ago, planners simulated attacks against the communications and information technology sector, as well as the energy and airline industries.

This year’s exercise will feature mock attacks by nation states, terrorists and saboteurs against the IT and communications sector and the chemical, pipeline and rail transportation industries.

A former director of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security who helped to plan both exercises said Cyber Storm is designed to be a situational pressure-cooker for players.

Those who adopt the proper stance or response to a given incident are quickly rewarded by having to respond to even more complex and potentially disastrous scenarios.

Players will receive information about the latest threats in part from a simulated news outlet, and at least a portion of the feeds they receive will be intentionally misleading, he said.

At a cost of roughly $6.2 million, Cyber Storm II has been nearly 18 months in the planning, with representatives from across the government and technology industry devising attack scenarios aimed at testing specific areas of weakness in their respective disaster recovery and response plans.

Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030701157.html
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Montana Governor Foments Real ID Rebellion


By Ryan Singel
January 18, 2008

[Comment News2U - Once again the government threatens the states with a mandate to give up more citizen rights or pay the consequences, moving us one more step toward the fascist abyss, all in the name of 'homeland security'. ]

Listen to the NPR interview:
Montana Governor on 'Real ID' Act
Listen Now [4 min 21 sec]

Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) declared independence Friday from federal identification rules and called on governors of 17 other states to join him in forcing a showdown with the federal government which says it will not accept the driver's licenses of rebel states' citizens starting May 11.

If that showdown comes to pass, a resident of a non-complying state could not use a driver's license to enter a federal courthouse or a Social Security Administration building nor could he board a plane without undergoing a pat-down search, possibly creating massive backlogs at the nation's airports and almost certainly leading to a flurry of federal lawsuits.

States have until May 11 to request extensions to the Real ID rules that were released last Friday. They require states to make all current identification holders under the age of 50 to apply again with certified birth and marriage certificates. The rules also standardize license formats, require states to interlink their DMV databases and require DMV employee to undergo background checks.

Extensions push back the 2008 deadline for compliance as far as out 2014 if states apply and promise to start work on making the necessary changes, which will cost cash-strapped states billions with only a pittance in federal funding to offset the costs.

Last year Montana passed a law saying it would not comply, citing privacy, states' rights and fiscal issues.

In his letter (.pdf) to other governors, Schweitzer makes clear he's not going to ask for an extension.

"Today, I am asking you to join with me in resisting the DHS coercion to comply with the provisions of REAL ID, " Schweitzer wrote. "If we stand together either DHS will blink or Congress will have to act to avoid havoc at our nation's airports and federal courthouses."

But Homeland Security spokeswoman Laura Keehner says DHS has no intention of blinking.

"That will mean real consequences for their citizens starting in may if their leadership chooses not to comply," Keehner said. "That includes getting on an airplane or entering a federal building, so they will need to get passports."

Keehner says DHS's policy won't change even if Georgia -- one of the 17 states that has signaled strong opposition to the rules -- declines to apply for an extension.

If that scenario came to pass, every Georgian who flies out through the nation's busiest airport -- Atlanta-Hartsfield International -- would have to be patted down by Homeland Security agents and have his carry-on bag hand-screened, likely resulting in massive delays.

Keehner also suggests that patted-down citizens will turn their wrath not on the feds but on their state government.

For his part, Schweitzer wants Congress to step up and pass alternative legislation that would stop Real ID and re-instate a commission that was working on driver's license rules before the REAL ID Act was slipped into must-pass defense legislation in 2005. That legislation assigned DHS the task of setting the rules single-handedly.

Keehner is adamant that the rules will make the country safer and that the price tag is not too high.

"The ability to get false identification must end, and Real ID is that step," Keehner said.
Privacy groups counter that the rules create a de-facto national identification card and won't stop terrorism or identity theft.

For his part, Schweitzer struck back at DHS statements he obviously considers arrogant.

"I take great offense at this notion we should all simply 'grow up'," Schweitzer wrote, referring to Thursday remarks from DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff about border rules regarding Canada.

Schweitzer says those remarks "reflect DHS (sic) continued disrespect for the serious and legitimate concerns of our citizens."

A DHS policy maker suggested earlier this week that Real IDs could also be required to buy cold medicine and to prove employment eligibility.

Schweitzer's letter went out to the governors of Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington.

Source:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/montana-governo.html
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