Worth watching.
04 September 2008
A Good Hour with Paul Saffo
Paul Saffo, noted Forecaster and Essayist, on embracing uncertainty and forecasting.
20 May 2008
Required Viewing - Sheldon Rampton
Sheldon Rampton from the Center for Media and Democracy.
The Wires that Control the Public Mind.
Watch. Learn. Understand.
The Wires that Control the Public Mind.
Watch. Learn. Understand.
28 April 2008
Dirt For Food
Economic policy is social policy. Treating them separately is a very effective way of giving with one hand and taking with the other, while getting credit for both.
Haiti will never get a break - either from it's original colonial superpower, France, or it's nearest superpower, the United States. Here's why-
30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots
By BILL QUIGLEY
Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.
Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”
The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.
The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.”
Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages -- the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers.
This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?
In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”
“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.
Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.
But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?
Haiti is definitely poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.
Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).
Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.
The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”
In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.
U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.
And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.
Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots.”
After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.
Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.
Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.”
In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.
In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.
Haiti will never get a break - either from it's original colonial superpower, France, or it's nearest superpower, the United States. Here's why-
30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots
By BILL QUIGLEY
Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.
Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”
The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.
The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.”
Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages -- the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers.
This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?
In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”
“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.
Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.
But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?
Haiti is definitely poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.
Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).
Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.
The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”
In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.
U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.
And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.
Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots.”
After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.
Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.
Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.”
In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.
In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.
06 April 2008
Fake News For All
The main staple of every news diet is fast-food, more commonly known as Fake News. Arriving easily, cheaply and frequently, it fills you up without the benefits of real information, facts or context.
For example - here's how Fake News seeps into Local TV broadcasts:
How Local TV Embraced Fake News
Americans' first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.
By Farhad Manjoo
Note: This is an excerpt from my new book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture's grip on what people once called "objective reality." Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news-
Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world's most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she'd once written a magazine column called "Internet Mom"). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.
"There's scores of 'iPorn' everywhere," Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become "a pedophile's playground," she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh's Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the "scariest" gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin's warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called "On Your Side." Justice told viewers, "If you didn't know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn."
Nine stations aired Raskin's warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.
But something here was amiss. In addition to panning the iPod, Raskin used her time on TV to push "safer" holiday tech gifts, including products made by Panasonic, Namco and Techno Source. These weren't unbiased reviews. The local stations that featured Raskin were fully aware that the three companies had hired her to pimp their products during news appearances.
I learned of Raskin's ulterior motives from the Center for Media and Democracy, a group based in Madison, Wis., that monitors the public relations industry. Over several years, CMD has investigated an insidious public relations practice that's neither especially new nor uncommon, but is still relatively unknown beyond the cloistered world of television news production. In the trade, they're called VNRs, or video news releases.
A VNR is a short clip of marketing propaganda produced in the language and style of real news. P.R. firms send news stations thousands of such videos every year, the most sophisticated of which are virtually indistinguishable from honest news, featuring interviews with (paid) experts and voice-overs by (fake) reporters who subtly pitch products during their narratives. Surprisingly often, news channels broadcast these videos as real news; many times, CMD has found, the only edits that a station will make to a paid clip is to cut off the disclosure noting that the video was sponsored by a corporation.
VNRs first gained notoriety early in 2005, when the New York Times reported that many local stations aired prepackaged segments produced by federal agencies under the Bush administration. The VNRs cheered the war in Iraq, the Bush Medicare plan and various small-time programs. But Diane Farsetta, a researcher at CMD, says that private VNRs far outnumber federal videos -- and once you start looking for them, they seem to pop up everywhere.
On CMD's Web site, you can watch dozens of local news segments lifted directly from VNRs. The effect would be comical -- four stations ran a piece on how to incorporate Bisquick into your plans for National Pancake Week, to take one example -- if the lying weren't so determined.
A segment may appear to be an in-depth look at the travails of travelers during cold and flu season, but all its experts refer to Zicam nasal spray as a preferred treatment. A consumer-safety piece warns viewers about scam artists who dress up flood-damaged cars and sell them as if they're perfect -- an announcement drenched in irony, considering that the news segment is actually a dressed-up ad for CarFax.com. A Halloween report delves into the origins of the jack-o'-lantern, but the reporter -- who's not actually a reporter but a P.R. man -- ends the story by suggesting holiday recipes from Betty Crocker. All of these pieces made it to news broadcasts near you.
Marketers began creating VNRs in the 1980s, but the practice had a slow start. Producing attractive video was expensive, and VNRs rarely looked slick enough to fit in with a broadcast program. Distribution was also a problem: P.R. firms sent out VNRs by mail on videotape, a system too clumsy for fast-paced newsrooms to work with.
The digital revolution, of course, has changed all that; marketers can now produce and distribute video that looks just as good as anything a TV station can make, and for almost no money.
At the same time, technology has upended how television stations produce news. In many American newsrooms, now, you'll now find computer terminals belonging to a system called Pathfire, which hooks stations into a cloud of video coming in from all over the world -- clips from syndicates such as the Associated Press, from other local stations and from the large broadcast networks.
For producers, Pathfire is a palette from which to create full stories at extremely low cost. Now images of overseas wars, out-of-state disasters, nearby sports victories, freakish weather events, adorable zoo animals and gripping celebrity goings-on are quickly pulled down and cut up into digestible bits of news, with the producer never having to leave the studio. Stations increasingly lean on this third-party footage to pad their broadcasts. According to one study, more than a quarter of the video you see on a typical local newscast isn't at all local, and was collected, instead, from video coming in on the cloud.
But when a producer logs into a system like Pathfire looking for footage for the 11 o'clock broadcast, she doesn't only see videos from legitimate outfits. Such systems also include a smorgasbord of VNRs, which marketers upload into the database daily. P.R. companies don't pay television channels to run the sponsored segments -- that would run afoul of the Federal Communications Commission's "payola" rules -- but the footage is free. For the stations, the offer is sometimes too attractive to refuse.
Although it's subject to tremendous (and, evidently, often justified) ridicule, local TV news has long been -- and remains -- America's first choice for information. Directors of local news stations are uneasy about disclosures that newscasts have routinely aired VNRs; many refused to comment when I asked them about their broadcasts.
The Radio and Television News Directors Association sharply criticized CMD's study, claiming that the findings did not represent typical practices at stations (the group did not respond to my inquiries). Farsetta points out that in surveys, more than 90 percent of news directors have admitted using VNRs -- or parts of VNRs -- in their broadcasts.
Late last year, the FCC began cracking down on the practice, levying fines against Comcast, which owns CN8, a Philadelphia station that has aired VNRs. But CMD, which continues to monitor stations, found that the practice continues.
Robin Raskin, the iPorn-wary tech journalist, told me that between 2002 and 2006, she appeared in almost three dozen TV marketing opportunities -- roughly eight a year, each of which was sponsored by three to five companies and was built around a holiday or news event. Raskin, who no longer does marketing work, says she regrets her decision to promote products on TV. She did it only to make some extra money during a low period in her life, and she says she didn't fully consider how the job would affect her journalistic credibility.
But Raskin adds another line, partly in defense of her actions: Public life is already so commercialized, so suffused with salesmanship, that it seemed nearly naive to recuse herself on mere ethical grounds. Fakery abounds. What's one more on the pile?
"I actually joked with my own colleagues that, 'Hey, I'm off to go do Whore TV," she says. "I was fully aware that that's what it was. And yet it's such a commonplace thing. I mean, there are people hawking drugs, guns, war. The worst that could happen to someone watching my segment is that you might buy a game you don't like."
For example - here's how Fake News seeps into Local TV broadcasts:
How Local TV Embraced Fake News
Americans' first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.
By Farhad Manjoo
Note: This is an excerpt from my new book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture's grip on what people once called "objective reality." Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news-
Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world's most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she'd once written a magazine column called "Internet Mom"). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.
"There's scores of 'iPorn' everywhere," Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become "a pedophile's playground," she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh's Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the "scariest" gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin's warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called "On Your Side." Justice told viewers, "If you didn't know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn."
Nine stations aired Raskin's warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.
But something here was amiss. In addition to panning the iPod, Raskin used her time on TV to push "safer" holiday tech gifts, including products made by Panasonic, Namco and Techno Source. These weren't unbiased reviews. The local stations that featured Raskin were fully aware that the three companies had hired her to pimp their products during news appearances.
I learned of Raskin's ulterior motives from the Center for Media and Democracy, a group based in Madison, Wis., that monitors the public relations industry. Over several years, CMD has investigated an insidious public relations practice that's neither especially new nor uncommon, but is still relatively unknown beyond the cloistered world of television news production. In the trade, they're called VNRs, or video news releases.
A VNR is a short clip of marketing propaganda produced in the language and style of real news. P.R. firms send news stations thousands of such videos every year, the most sophisticated of which are virtually indistinguishable from honest news, featuring interviews with (paid) experts and voice-overs by (fake) reporters who subtly pitch products during their narratives. Surprisingly often, news channels broadcast these videos as real news; many times, CMD has found, the only edits that a station will make to a paid clip is to cut off the disclosure noting that the video was sponsored by a corporation.
VNRs first gained notoriety early in 2005, when the New York Times reported that many local stations aired prepackaged segments produced by federal agencies under the Bush administration. The VNRs cheered the war in Iraq, the Bush Medicare plan and various small-time programs. But Diane Farsetta, a researcher at CMD, says that private VNRs far outnumber federal videos -- and once you start looking for them, they seem to pop up everywhere.
On CMD's Web site, you can watch dozens of local news segments lifted directly from VNRs. The effect would be comical -- four stations ran a piece on how to incorporate Bisquick into your plans for National Pancake Week, to take one example -- if the lying weren't so determined.
A segment may appear to be an in-depth look at the travails of travelers during cold and flu season, but all its experts refer to Zicam nasal spray as a preferred treatment. A consumer-safety piece warns viewers about scam artists who dress up flood-damaged cars and sell them as if they're perfect -- an announcement drenched in irony, considering that the news segment is actually a dressed-up ad for CarFax.com. A Halloween report delves into the origins of the jack-o'-lantern, but the reporter -- who's not actually a reporter but a P.R. man -- ends the story by suggesting holiday recipes from Betty Crocker. All of these pieces made it to news broadcasts near you.
Marketers began creating VNRs in the 1980s, but the practice had a slow start. Producing attractive video was expensive, and VNRs rarely looked slick enough to fit in with a broadcast program. Distribution was also a problem: P.R. firms sent out VNRs by mail on videotape, a system too clumsy for fast-paced newsrooms to work with.
The digital revolution, of course, has changed all that; marketers can now produce and distribute video that looks just as good as anything a TV station can make, and for almost no money.
At the same time, technology has upended how television stations produce news. In many American newsrooms, now, you'll now find computer terminals belonging to a system called Pathfire, which hooks stations into a cloud of video coming in from all over the world -- clips from syndicates such as the Associated Press, from other local stations and from the large broadcast networks.
For producers, Pathfire is a palette from which to create full stories at extremely low cost. Now images of overseas wars, out-of-state disasters, nearby sports victories, freakish weather events, adorable zoo animals and gripping celebrity goings-on are quickly pulled down and cut up into digestible bits of news, with the producer never having to leave the studio. Stations increasingly lean on this third-party footage to pad their broadcasts. According to one study, more than a quarter of the video you see on a typical local newscast isn't at all local, and was collected, instead, from video coming in on the cloud.
But when a producer logs into a system like Pathfire looking for footage for the 11 o'clock broadcast, she doesn't only see videos from legitimate outfits. Such systems also include a smorgasbord of VNRs, which marketers upload into the database daily. P.R. companies don't pay television channels to run the sponsored segments -- that would run afoul of the Federal Communications Commission's "payola" rules -- but the footage is free. For the stations, the offer is sometimes too attractive to refuse.
Although it's subject to tremendous (and, evidently, often justified) ridicule, local TV news has long been -- and remains -- America's first choice for information. Directors of local news stations are uneasy about disclosures that newscasts have routinely aired VNRs; many refused to comment when I asked them about their broadcasts.
The Radio and Television News Directors Association sharply criticized CMD's study, claiming that the findings did not represent typical practices at stations (the group did not respond to my inquiries). Farsetta points out that in surveys, more than 90 percent of news directors have admitted using VNRs -- or parts of VNRs -- in their broadcasts.
Late last year, the FCC began cracking down on the practice, levying fines against Comcast, which owns CN8, a Philadelphia station that has aired VNRs. But CMD, which continues to monitor stations, found that the practice continues.
Robin Raskin, the iPorn-wary tech journalist, told me that between 2002 and 2006, she appeared in almost three dozen TV marketing opportunities -- roughly eight a year, each of which was sponsored by three to five companies and was built around a holiday or news event. Raskin, who no longer does marketing work, says she regrets her decision to promote products on TV. She did it only to make some extra money during a low period in her life, and she says she didn't fully consider how the job would affect her journalistic credibility.
But Raskin adds another line, partly in defense of her actions: Public life is already so commercialized, so suffused with salesmanship, that it seemed nearly naive to recuse herself on mere ethical grounds. Fakery abounds. What's one more on the pile?
"I actually joked with my own colleagues that, 'Hey, I'm off to go do Whore TV," she says. "I was fully aware that that's what it was. And yet it's such a commonplace thing. I mean, there are people hawking drugs, guns, war. The worst that could happen to someone watching my segment is that you might buy a game you don't like."
18 March 2008
So You Were Right. Who Really Cares.
Being right doesn't mean 'you win'. In fact, when you go through the list of everyone who was wrong or right about the Iraq War, you'll find that the people who were wrong did very well, while those who were right, well....
Perception is everything. Winning is everything. Being right, unfortunately, is just a footnote.
That said, kudos to the Knight Ridder/McClatchy people who got it right.
The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right
Interview conducted, edited and condensed by Max Follmer
As the war in Iraq completes its fifth year this week, The Huffington Post is featuring interviews with and essays by those journalists, elected officials, policymakers and former military officials who spoke out early and boldly against what they saw as an inevitable disaster. They join our Iraq Honor Roll.
In the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reporters in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington D.C. bureau were virtually alone in their questioning of the Bush Administration's allegations of links between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The team of Knight Ridder reporters, led by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway, produced stories that now read like a prescient accounting of how the Bush Administration sought to sell the war to the American people. Walcott and Landay spoke with The Huffington Post about the fifth anniversary of the war. Knight Ridder Newspapers has since merged with McClatchy Newspapers. You can read the entire Knight Ridder and McClatchy archives of their Iraq intelligence reporting by clicking here.
John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau Chief-
The Knight Ridder team, and now the McClatchy team, has frequently been cited as one of the few that got it right in the run-up to the invasion. At the time a lot of people said the rest of the media was ignoring you. Is that how you and the team felt at the time?
Well we certainly didn't see anyone doing the same kinds of stories, with the exception of some stories by Walter Pincus at the Washington Post, and much, much later after the Los Angeles Times got onto Curveball. But during the period when I guess, arguably, it mattered, when it could have and should have been a debate about whether to engage in this war, I think we felt that we were fairly lonely.
What was it about the way the Knight Ridder bureau was approaching the story that made it so you didn't get lost in the same wave of reporting that overtook the rest of the press corps?
There wasn't any reporting in the rest of the press corps, there was stenography. The administration would make an assertion, people would make an assertion, people would write it down as if it were true, and put it in the newspaper or on television.
Did you guys have secret sources that no one else had access to, or was this just a question of editors approaching the job from a more traditional sense of what a reporter should actually be doing?
It's both of those things. You can't do this kind of reporting without sources and you can't develop these kinds of sources overnight. The fact that Jonathan and Warren and I, and to a great extent Joe Galloway who was also a part of this team, had been working in these vineyards for many, many years was helpful. But it begins with the second part of your question. When the administration made an assertion, a lot of people wrote it down and printed it and we looked at it and said "that doesn't make any sense. Is that true?" And we proceeded to call people. And very often, and very quickly, people said "no, that's not true," or "there is no evidence that that's true," or "they left out part of the story."
How easy or difficult was it, in your view, for the average interested citizen back in 2002 to find out what was going on in Iraq?
Very difficult. But not so much to find out what was going on in Iraq. It was very difficult for the average reader, or TV viewer or internet browser to find out the truth about Saddam's connection with Al Qaeda and international terrorism, about the real state of his nuclear weapons program, and to find out about the real honest assessment of his weapons of mass destruction program.
Of all the stories that were produced by Knight-Ridder in the run-up to the war, are there one or two that you feel were the most important?
February 13, 2002 comes to mind: Bush Has Decided To Overthrow Hussein, February 13, 2002. And the other one I would point you to is September 6, 2002, Lack Of Hard Evidence Of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials; September 12, 2002: Iraq Has Been Unable To Get Materials Needed For Nuclear Bomb, Experts Say; October 4, 2002: CIA Report Reveals Analysts' Split Over Extent Of Iraqi Nuclear Threat And October 7, 2002: Some In Bush Administration Have Misgivings About Iraq Policy.
How would you compare the level of media skepticism and the caliber of reporting today on Iraq? Five years later, have you seen a shift?
I think that a lot of the media have been very quick to accept the notion that the surge has succeeded and it amounts to some kind of turning point in Iraq. And I'm not sure there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the improvements in security are long lasting, as opposed to temporary. I think there is somewhat greater skepticism, but I think a lot of people still find it very difficult to question what to most Americans is a patriotic enterprise.
What questions are the press corps still not asking?
They range from the very classic journalism questions like "where did the money go?" All the money we've spent in Iraq to support the Iraq government, where has it gone? I think it has been very hard to play the watchdog role on the U.S. mission in Iraq. We've been fairly lonely on that. I haven't seen other people looking into [delays and mismanagement in the construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Iraq] quite as hard as Warren [Strobel] has. Basic accountability reporting has been lacking. As I said before, I think there was a kind of uncritical acceptance of the success of the surge that may be challenged in the coming weeks or months.
Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers National Security Correspondent-
When you look back at that period in the run-up to the war, was there a send in the Knight Ridder bureau that you were being ignored?
Absolutely. It wasn't that we were being ignored, I don't know that anybody was really just paying attention. I know that our stuff was getting picked up in the Early Bird - a daily compendium of national security stories that I believe are put together by one of the offices of public affairs in the Pentagon and then circulated around the government every morning. And I know that some of our stuff was getting picked up there because I was getting backslaps from other correspondents who saw our articles in the Early Bird. That's about as far as it went. As Warren [Strobel] noted in the [Bill] Moyers documentary, some of our own newspapers didn't even run our pieces.
And what was it about the way that you and the Knight Ridder team were approaching the story from a tradecraft point of view that make it different from what the public was seeing in the Times and the Post and the Wall Street Journal?
I think we approached this by asking the question every time the administration made an allegation "is this true?" "Is this true" is the basic question any journalist must ask any time a government, any government, makes an assertion. Governments do things for their own reasons depending on what the administration is. There could be altruistic reasons. But particularly a government that is politicized as the Bush Administration, one has to ask that question even more intensely. So we were doing that. We were also listening to people who were coming to us and saying "we don't think this is right. We don't believe that the intelligence is as strong as the administration is making it out to be." And indeed you saw that in open source reports. I'm referring to the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which everyone had available to it, including members of congress.
First you had on September 3, 2002 the famous New York Times "aluminum tubes" piece by Judy Miller and Michael Gordon. That same day you had Vice President Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appear conveniently on the Sunday talk shows to talk about what had been extremely classified information that had appeared that day, in the New York Times. And then on September 10 you had the same allegations made to the world by the President of the United States from the podium of the United Nations. And then the following week the President made the same assertion that these aluminum tubes were for a nuclear weapons program that Iraq had hidden from UN weapons inspectors in an address to the nation. Then you had the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, which said there is division within the intelligence community on exactly what these tubes are all about.
I raise this point because this was one data point in what we had seen was a trend by this administration of exaggerating the intelligence it had on Iraq. We began tracing It back to right after 9/11 when Warren [Strobel] did the first story quoting analysts as saying it was unlikely that Iraq was involved in the World Trade Center attack. Then he went on to disclose that the former director of the CIA [James] Woolsey had made official visits to Britain on behalf of the Pentagon to check out a cockamamie tale that Ramzi Yousef, who we have in jail for the first World Trade Center attack, was not actually Ramzi Yousef but an Iraqi agent. And then right after the US went into Afghanistan, he and John [Walcott] did a story on how the administration had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. And we kept asking the question "why do they keep talking about Iraq when the problem is Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Why do they keep talking about Iraq?" And we were already in that thinking mode when we started working on the stories in the lead up to the war. We were just doing the journalism that our journalism was pushing at.
Why is it that the folks in the Knight Ridder bureau in Washington had this level of skepticism when the rest of the DC press corps didn't and the national press corps didn't? What was everyone else so concerned about?
I think that everyone else, and I have to include myself in this category until we really started peeling back into the onion - everyone was absolutely convinced that Saddam Hussein had a secret weapons program. On the Al Qaeda account, I don't think anybody ever believed that. Ever. It just made no sense. But on the weapons front, until we really started peeling into that story, I took it for granted. I think that that was the problem: that everyone took it for granted - including in the intelligence community - that he had weapons of mass destruction and it was only once we really started doing the journalism that we started seeing that it might not be true. There was this groupthink that extended beyond the intelligence community into the policymaking community and the journalistic community.
How easy or difficult was it, in your view, for the average citizen to find out what was going on in Iraq and DC?
Back then? I think the fact that you had this repetition of stories in the leading print and electronic media accounted for what we see today is still 40 percent of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This administration drumbeat perpetuated by the mainstream media, except for us and a couple of other people, swung public opinion behind the invasion. I think Moyers illustrated that devastatingly in his documentary.
Looking at the present, how would you compare the level of media skepticism and the caliber of reporting today? Have you seen a shift?
I think there was a kind of almost an epiphany when two things happened. One: Joe Wilson wrote his expose on the 2003 State of the Union and raised question finally - in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, of the administration's case for going to war. And then secondly, nothing was found in Iraq in the invasion. Then you had people jump on that bandwagon almost, that bandwagon about the 19 or 16 words on Niger and uranium in the State of the Union address. Then you started seeing the White house Press doing what it had not done in the run-up to the war, and that was ask tough questions of the White House.
But there has also been, I think, backsliding. Last summer, when the administration started banging the drum about Iran and its involvement in Iraq, and the threat posed by Iran and how Iran was responsible for these explosively-formed penetrators. That's all well and good, they were, these penetrators were killing troops. But what this drumbeat did was two things: it obscured the fact that the majority of deaths in Iraq were still being caused by Sunni insurgents, and that this was going on in the middle of the so-called surge. And I think they were trying to tamp down expectations that the surge was going to produce some kind of miracle.
So they needed to shift public focus away from the fact that it wasn't producing a miracle, so they harped on and on about Iran's involvement and you most of the mainstream media once again beat that same drum. I did a story when the President delivered a speech at the Naval War College, and he mentioned Iran something like 27 times in a speech about Iraq. And so I did a story about how he was bashing Iran when the majority of the deaths in Iraq were still being caused by Sunni insurgents. And they were appearing to try to divert public attention away from that aspect and they were trying to tamp down public expectations about the surge. And my story was noted first by my old boss, Clark Hoyt, who cited my story the next weekend in his column, and the following weekend Frank Rich picked up that story. And compare my story about that speech at the Naval War College and everyone else's where they picked up and ran with the Administration's line about Iran.
Is this because the DC press corps is lazy?
I can't speak for other correspondents and how they operate. I don't want to do that. I, quite frankly, don't know. And maybe that's something that academics can definitely look into. I think the press needs to be held accountable for its failures on Iraq. And, by the way, I they have done some amazing stuff since that turnaround. There has been some amazing journalism that has come out of Iraq. Good skeptical journalism that got it right. And as a result you had the right wing and the administration beating on the press - not responding to the substance that the press was reporting. So you had all these complaints that they were not reporting all this "good" stuff. In fact, if all that good stuff was happening, why did the administration feel the need to send an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq?
Perception is everything. Winning is everything. Being right, unfortunately, is just a footnote.
That said, kudos to the Knight Ridder/McClatchy people who got it right.
The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right
Interview conducted, edited and condensed by Max Follmer
As the war in Iraq completes its fifth year this week, The Huffington Post is featuring interviews with and essays by those journalists, elected officials, policymakers and former military officials who spoke out early and boldly against what they saw as an inevitable disaster. They join our Iraq Honor Roll.
In the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reporters in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington D.C. bureau were virtually alone in their questioning of the Bush Administration's allegations of links between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The team of Knight Ridder reporters, led by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway, produced stories that now read like a prescient accounting of how the Bush Administration sought to sell the war to the American people. Walcott and Landay spoke with The Huffington Post about the fifth anniversary of the war. Knight Ridder Newspapers has since merged with McClatchy Newspapers. You can read the entire Knight Ridder and McClatchy archives of their Iraq intelligence reporting by clicking here.
John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau Chief-
The Knight Ridder team, and now the McClatchy team, has frequently been cited as one of the few that got it right in the run-up to the invasion. At the time a lot of people said the rest of the media was ignoring you. Is that how you and the team felt at the time?
Well we certainly didn't see anyone doing the same kinds of stories, with the exception of some stories by Walter Pincus at the Washington Post, and much, much later after the Los Angeles Times got onto Curveball. But during the period when I guess, arguably, it mattered, when it could have and should have been a debate about whether to engage in this war, I think we felt that we were fairly lonely.
What was it about the way the Knight Ridder bureau was approaching the story that made it so you didn't get lost in the same wave of reporting that overtook the rest of the press corps?
There wasn't any reporting in the rest of the press corps, there was stenography. The administration would make an assertion, people would make an assertion, people would write it down as if it were true, and put it in the newspaper or on television.
Did you guys have secret sources that no one else had access to, or was this just a question of editors approaching the job from a more traditional sense of what a reporter should actually be doing?
It's both of those things. You can't do this kind of reporting without sources and you can't develop these kinds of sources overnight. The fact that Jonathan and Warren and I, and to a great extent Joe Galloway who was also a part of this team, had been working in these vineyards for many, many years was helpful. But it begins with the second part of your question. When the administration made an assertion, a lot of people wrote it down and printed it and we looked at it and said "that doesn't make any sense. Is that true?" And we proceeded to call people. And very often, and very quickly, people said "no, that's not true," or "there is no evidence that that's true," or "they left out part of the story."
How easy or difficult was it, in your view, for the average interested citizen back in 2002 to find out what was going on in Iraq?
Very difficult. But not so much to find out what was going on in Iraq. It was very difficult for the average reader, or TV viewer or internet browser to find out the truth about Saddam's connection with Al Qaeda and international terrorism, about the real state of his nuclear weapons program, and to find out about the real honest assessment of his weapons of mass destruction program.
Of all the stories that were produced by Knight-Ridder in the run-up to the war, are there one or two that you feel were the most important?
February 13, 2002 comes to mind: Bush Has Decided To Overthrow Hussein, February 13, 2002. And the other one I would point you to is September 6, 2002, Lack Of Hard Evidence Of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials; September 12, 2002: Iraq Has Been Unable To Get Materials Needed For Nuclear Bomb, Experts Say; October 4, 2002: CIA Report Reveals Analysts' Split Over Extent Of Iraqi Nuclear Threat And October 7, 2002: Some In Bush Administration Have Misgivings About Iraq Policy.
How would you compare the level of media skepticism and the caliber of reporting today on Iraq? Five years later, have you seen a shift?
I think that a lot of the media have been very quick to accept the notion that the surge has succeeded and it amounts to some kind of turning point in Iraq. And I'm not sure there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the improvements in security are long lasting, as opposed to temporary. I think there is somewhat greater skepticism, but I think a lot of people still find it very difficult to question what to most Americans is a patriotic enterprise.
What questions are the press corps still not asking?
They range from the very classic journalism questions like "where did the money go?" All the money we've spent in Iraq to support the Iraq government, where has it gone? I think it has been very hard to play the watchdog role on the U.S. mission in Iraq. We've been fairly lonely on that. I haven't seen other people looking into [delays and mismanagement in the construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Iraq] quite as hard as Warren [Strobel] has. Basic accountability reporting has been lacking. As I said before, I think there was a kind of uncritical acceptance of the success of the surge that may be challenged in the coming weeks or months.
Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers National Security Correspondent-
When you look back at that period in the run-up to the war, was there a send in the Knight Ridder bureau that you were being ignored?
Absolutely. It wasn't that we were being ignored, I don't know that anybody was really just paying attention. I know that our stuff was getting picked up in the Early Bird - a daily compendium of national security stories that I believe are put together by one of the offices of public affairs in the Pentagon and then circulated around the government every morning. And I know that some of our stuff was getting picked up there because I was getting backslaps from other correspondents who saw our articles in the Early Bird. That's about as far as it went. As Warren [Strobel] noted in the [Bill] Moyers documentary, some of our own newspapers didn't even run our pieces.
And what was it about the way that you and the Knight Ridder team were approaching the story from a tradecraft point of view that make it different from what the public was seeing in the Times and the Post and the Wall Street Journal?
I think we approached this by asking the question every time the administration made an allegation "is this true?" "Is this true" is the basic question any journalist must ask any time a government, any government, makes an assertion. Governments do things for their own reasons depending on what the administration is. There could be altruistic reasons. But particularly a government that is politicized as the Bush Administration, one has to ask that question even more intensely. So we were doing that. We were also listening to people who were coming to us and saying "we don't think this is right. We don't believe that the intelligence is as strong as the administration is making it out to be." And indeed you saw that in open source reports. I'm referring to the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which everyone had available to it, including members of congress.
First you had on September 3, 2002 the famous New York Times "aluminum tubes" piece by Judy Miller and Michael Gordon. That same day you had Vice President Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appear conveniently on the Sunday talk shows to talk about what had been extremely classified information that had appeared that day, in the New York Times. And then on September 10 you had the same allegations made to the world by the President of the United States from the podium of the United Nations. And then the following week the President made the same assertion that these aluminum tubes were for a nuclear weapons program that Iraq had hidden from UN weapons inspectors in an address to the nation. Then you had the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, which said there is division within the intelligence community on exactly what these tubes are all about.
I raise this point because this was one data point in what we had seen was a trend by this administration of exaggerating the intelligence it had on Iraq. We began tracing It back to right after 9/11 when Warren [Strobel] did the first story quoting analysts as saying it was unlikely that Iraq was involved in the World Trade Center attack. Then he went on to disclose that the former director of the CIA [James] Woolsey had made official visits to Britain on behalf of the Pentagon to check out a cockamamie tale that Ramzi Yousef, who we have in jail for the first World Trade Center attack, was not actually Ramzi Yousef but an Iraqi agent. And then right after the US went into Afghanistan, he and John [Walcott] did a story on how the administration had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. And we kept asking the question "why do they keep talking about Iraq when the problem is Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Why do they keep talking about Iraq?" And we were already in that thinking mode when we started working on the stories in the lead up to the war. We were just doing the journalism that our journalism was pushing at.
Why is it that the folks in the Knight Ridder bureau in Washington had this level of skepticism when the rest of the DC press corps didn't and the national press corps didn't? What was everyone else so concerned about?
I think that everyone else, and I have to include myself in this category until we really started peeling back into the onion - everyone was absolutely convinced that Saddam Hussein had a secret weapons program. On the Al Qaeda account, I don't think anybody ever believed that. Ever. It just made no sense. But on the weapons front, until we really started peeling into that story, I took it for granted. I think that that was the problem: that everyone took it for granted - including in the intelligence community - that he had weapons of mass destruction and it was only once we really started doing the journalism that we started seeing that it might not be true. There was this groupthink that extended beyond the intelligence community into the policymaking community and the journalistic community.
How easy or difficult was it, in your view, for the average citizen to find out what was going on in Iraq and DC?
Back then? I think the fact that you had this repetition of stories in the leading print and electronic media accounted for what we see today is still 40 percent of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This administration drumbeat perpetuated by the mainstream media, except for us and a couple of other people, swung public opinion behind the invasion. I think Moyers illustrated that devastatingly in his documentary.
Looking at the present, how would you compare the level of media skepticism and the caliber of reporting today? Have you seen a shift?
I think there was a kind of almost an epiphany when two things happened. One: Joe Wilson wrote his expose on the 2003 State of the Union and raised question finally - in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, of the administration's case for going to war. And then secondly, nothing was found in Iraq in the invasion. Then you had people jump on that bandwagon almost, that bandwagon about the 19 or 16 words on Niger and uranium in the State of the Union address. Then you started seeing the White house Press doing what it had not done in the run-up to the war, and that was ask tough questions of the White House.
But there has also been, I think, backsliding. Last summer, when the administration started banging the drum about Iran and its involvement in Iraq, and the threat posed by Iran and how Iran was responsible for these explosively-formed penetrators. That's all well and good, they were, these penetrators were killing troops. But what this drumbeat did was two things: it obscured the fact that the majority of deaths in Iraq were still being caused by Sunni insurgents, and that this was going on in the middle of the so-called surge. And I think they were trying to tamp down expectations that the surge was going to produce some kind of miracle.
So they needed to shift public focus away from the fact that it wasn't producing a miracle, so they harped on and on about Iran's involvement and you most of the mainstream media once again beat that same drum. I did a story when the President delivered a speech at the Naval War College, and he mentioned Iran something like 27 times in a speech about Iraq. And so I did a story about how he was bashing Iran when the majority of the deaths in Iraq were still being caused by Sunni insurgents. And they were appearing to try to divert public attention away from that aspect and they were trying to tamp down public expectations about the surge. And my story was noted first by my old boss, Clark Hoyt, who cited my story the next weekend in his column, and the following weekend Frank Rich picked up that story. And compare my story about that speech at the Naval War College and everyone else's where they picked up and ran with the Administration's line about Iran.
Is this because the DC press corps is lazy?
I can't speak for other correspondents and how they operate. I don't want to do that. I, quite frankly, don't know. And maybe that's something that academics can definitely look into. I think the press needs to be held accountable for its failures on Iraq. And, by the way, I they have done some amazing stuff since that turnaround. There has been some amazing journalism that has come out of Iraq. Good skeptical journalism that got it right. And as a result you had the right wing and the administration beating on the press - not responding to the substance that the press was reporting. So you had all these complaints that they were not reporting all this "good" stuff. In fact, if all that good stuff was happening, why did the administration feel the need to send an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq?
How To Start A War - Step 2: "Demonize the Enemy"
If you can't beat your opponent [by proxy war with Columbia], then use the confrontation to label the opponent. In this case, demonize by labelling Venezuela "a terrorist state".
Yes, it'll work. It always works. Just read Goebbels.
After that, comes "The Big Lie".
U.S. May Add Venezuela to List of Terrorist States
Pablo Bachelet | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has launched a preliminary legal inquiry that could land Venezuela on the U.S. list of nations that support terrorism, following reports of close Venezuelan links with Colombian rebels, a senior government official has confirmed.
The investigation is the first step in a process that could see Venezuela join North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran as countries designated by the State Department as supporters of terrorism.
U.S. laws give some leeway on what economic activity is subject to such sanctions, but experts say adding Venezuela to the list would force U.S. and even foreign firms to sever or curtail links with one of the world's largest oil producers.
The legal review comes after Colombia captured four computers belonging to a guerrilla leader in a March 1 raid into Ecuador. The documents suggest the Venezuelan government was in the process of providing $300 million to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The U.S. and Colombian governments and the European Union have officially designated FARC as a terrorist organization, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said publicly that he considers it a legitimate insurgency.
A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the subject, said government lawyers had been asked to clarify "what goes into effect in terms of prohibitions, or prohibited activities," with the state sponsor designation.
The official was reluctant to predict if the FARC computer discoveries will lead to sanctions, noting U.S. investigators first must corroborate their veracity. The lawyers have not yet returned their opinions, the official added.
But if the captured documents are shown to be true, the official said, "I think it will beg the question of whether or not Venezuela, given Chavez's interactions with the FARC, has ... crossed the threshold of state sponsor of terror."
Aware of the weighty impact of declaring a country a state sponsor of terrorism, officials say a designation occurs only after careful deliberation. Rhonda Shore, a spokeswoman for the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Terrorism, said in an email that a government must have "repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism."
Venezuela already is subject to a U.S. weapons sale ban and other sanctions as a country that refuses to cooperate on terrorism matters.
Chavez has established warm relations with Iran. Bush administration officials also complain that Venezuela refuses to cooperate on drug trafficking issues and has lax standards for controlling identity documents.
But declaring Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism would take the sanctions to a much higher degree.
Such a designation "immediately imposes restrictions on the abilities of U.S. companies to work in Venezuela," said James Lewis, a former State Department arms trafficking expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It would make it very hard for Venezuela to sell oil to the U.S."
The State Department's website cites four categories of sanctions for countries on the terror list, including restrictions on U.S. aid, a ban on weapons sales, tightened controls over items that have dual military and civilian purposes and "miscellaneous financial and other restrictions."
Lewis said the last category is "the killer." Those sanctions, often implemented by the Treasury Department's Office of Asset Control, prohibit U.S. companies and banks from dealing with countries on the list. Even non-U.S. companies are reluctant to do business with Iranian companies for fear of running afoul of U.S. sanctions, he added.
The designation could reach far beyond the oilfields. Boeing, for instance, would need to be careful in its dealings with Venezuelan airlines, Lewis added. Assets belonging to specially designated entities linked to the country could see their financial assets in U.S. banks frozen.
But Lewis and other U.S. officials cautioned that the harsh sanctions against Iran, which was declared a state sponsor in 1984, would not necessarily be replicated on Venezuela.
"There's not a standard template" for sanctions, said John Rankin, a spokesman for the Office of Asset Control.
But even a more gentle menu of sanctions would have strong economic and foreign policy implications, given Venezuela's position as the hemisphere's third largest exporter to the United States, after Canada and Mexico. In 2007, it was the fourth largest supplier of petroleum to the United States, after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. The government-owned PDVSA oil company also owns CITGO Petroleum, which has several refineries in the United States and is the country's third-largest supplier of gasoline.
Chavez, who often rails against President Bush and U.S. policies, has repeatedly threatened to cut off oil shipments to the United States in response to what he views as a possible U.S. attack against his government.
But few believe he can carry out his threat, given that he needs U.S. refineries to process his heavy crude. Chavez recently has been looking to expand his sales to places like China.
Yes, it'll work. It always works. Just read Goebbels.
After that, comes "The Big Lie".
U.S. May Add Venezuela to List of Terrorist States
Pablo Bachelet | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has launched a preliminary legal inquiry that could land Venezuela on the U.S. list of nations that support terrorism, following reports of close Venezuelan links with Colombian rebels, a senior government official has confirmed.
The investigation is the first step in a process that could see Venezuela join North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran as countries designated by the State Department as supporters of terrorism.
U.S. laws give some leeway on what economic activity is subject to such sanctions, but experts say adding Venezuela to the list would force U.S. and even foreign firms to sever or curtail links with one of the world's largest oil producers.
The legal review comes after Colombia captured four computers belonging to a guerrilla leader in a March 1 raid into Ecuador. The documents suggest the Venezuelan government was in the process of providing $300 million to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The U.S. and Colombian governments and the European Union have officially designated FARC as a terrorist organization, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said publicly that he considers it a legitimate insurgency.
A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the subject, said government lawyers had been asked to clarify "what goes into effect in terms of prohibitions, or prohibited activities," with the state sponsor designation.
The official was reluctant to predict if the FARC computer discoveries will lead to sanctions, noting U.S. investigators first must corroborate their veracity. The lawyers have not yet returned their opinions, the official added.
But if the captured documents are shown to be true, the official said, "I think it will beg the question of whether or not Venezuela, given Chavez's interactions with the FARC, has ... crossed the threshold of state sponsor of terror."
Aware of the weighty impact of declaring a country a state sponsor of terrorism, officials say a designation occurs only after careful deliberation. Rhonda Shore, a spokeswoman for the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Terrorism, said in an email that a government must have "repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism."
Venezuela already is subject to a U.S. weapons sale ban and other sanctions as a country that refuses to cooperate on terrorism matters.
Chavez has established warm relations with Iran. Bush administration officials also complain that Venezuela refuses to cooperate on drug trafficking issues and has lax standards for controlling identity documents.
But declaring Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism would take the sanctions to a much higher degree.
Such a designation "immediately imposes restrictions on the abilities of U.S. companies to work in Venezuela," said James Lewis, a former State Department arms trafficking expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It would make it very hard for Venezuela to sell oil to the U.S."
The State Department's website cites four categories of sanctions for countries on the terror list, including restrictions on U.S. aid, a ban on weapons sales, tightened controls over items that have dual military and civilian purposes and "miscellaneous financial and other restrictions."
Lewis said the last category is "the killer." Those sanctions, often implemented by the Treasury Department's Office of Asset Control, prohibit U.S. companies and banks from dealing with countries on the list. Even non-U.S. companies are reluctant to do business with Iranian companies for fear of running afoul of U.S. sanctions, he added.
The designation could reach far beyond the oilfields. Boeing, for instance, would need to be careful in its dealings with Venezuelan airlines, Lewis added. Assets belonging to specially designated entities linked to the country could see their financial assets in U.S. banks frozen.
But Lewis and other U.S. officials cautioned that the harsh sanctions against Iran, which was declared a state sponsor in 1984, would not necessarily be replicated on Venezuela.
"There's not a standard template" for sanctions, said John Rankin, a spokesman for the Office of Asset Control.
But even a more gentle menu of sanctions would have strong economic and foreign policy implications, given Venezuela's position as the hemisphere's third largest exporter to the United States, after Canada and Mexico. In 2007, it was the fourth largest supplier of petroleum to the United States, after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. The government-owned PDVSA oil company also owns CITGO Petroleum, which has several refineries in the United States and is the country's third-largest supplier of gasoline.
Chavez, who often rails against President Bush and U.S. policies, has repeatedly threatened to cut off oil shipments to the United States in response to what he views as a possible U.S. attack against his government.
But few believe he can carry out his threat, given that he needs U.S. refineries to process his heavy crude. Chavez recently has been looking to expand his sales to places like China.
12 February 2008
"90 Day June" - A Suicide Blog
Pithy title. Clear concept. Effective execution. Simply brilliant.
Check her out in 83 days to see if its real.
Check her out in 83 days to see if its real.
29 January 2008
26 January 2008
02 January 2008
Fathering a New Country
While the rest of the world has been bogged down by Bush-league wars, Russia has quietly [and not so quietly] been re-inventing itself better than Madonna.
Natural resources, strategic location and Duma-loads of money - the pride is back, baby! And to solidify his place in history, Putin will give birth to a New Russia - now with more superpower.
Russia: Putin's Plan To Become 'Father Of A New Country'
By RFE/RL analyst Victor Yasmann
Many observers of Russia are puzzled as to why President Vladimir Putin went to such bizarre lengths to turn the country's recent legislative elections into a "national referendum" on his own rule.
After all, Putin completely dominates the political stage, and he could have easily initiated and passed any changes to the constitution needed for him to run for another term as president. His oft-repeated assertions that he respects the letter and the spirit of the current constitution ring hollow, given Kremlin policies like the restriction of opposition political parties, strictures on civil society, suppression of nonstate media, subordination of the judicial system, and abolition of the direct election of regional administration heads.
Even most foreign observers -- while noting the unfair nature of the Duma elections and the myriad ways the Kremlin misused its power against weak political opponents -- have never really doubted the outright victory of the pro-Putin forces.
That victory was never in doubt because Putin is genuinely popular, for a mixture of objective and subjective reasons. Because of the vast revenues Russia accrues due to high global energy prices, the standard of living for many Russians is improving markedly -- and most of them attribute that prosperity to Putin personally. Putin has also hijacked populist policies from both the right and left ends of the spectrum. Borrowing from the left, he has increased pensions and state aid programs. From the right, Putin adopted the policy of a sharp reduction of business taxes and a low, flat-rate income tax for individuals. Finally, Putin's efforts to restore Russia's standing as a power in the international arena is enormously popular among Russians, many of whom remain bitter about the economic hardships and foreign-policy weakness of the 1990s. The yearning for a restoration of Russia's prestige is expressed throughout society, in areas as diverse as sports and the arts. This feeling has saturated the atmosphere because of the Kremlin's skillful manipulation.
A career intelligence officer, Putin has taken considerable pains to conceal his plans. It has become commonplace to say that Russian policy under Putin has become a series of "special operations." This secrecy is simply a part of the mindset of Putin and the siloviki -- people associated with the security organs and the military -- who surround him.
Questions Raised
Until mid-December, there was evidence that Putin was having trouble choosing a successor for when his current term expires in March 2008. His anointing of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev does not necessarily make things simpler. Many believed the successor should come from among the siloviki who form Putin's inner circle, or at least be acceptable to them. It is unclear how Medvedev, who does not come from the ranks of the siloviki, will hold up. Moreover, because these siloviki are divided among themselves, it's unclear there is even such a thing as a candidate acceptable to all factions -- one who will be recognized as the supreme commander by the entire military and security community. Putin must also keep in mind that Russia is the world's second most powerful nuclear power and Medvedev, if he remains the successor of choice, must be an acceptable and predictable partner for the international community, particularly the United States.
Some clues about Putin's intentions can be found in an 800-page manifesto issued last summer by a group of about 70 pro-Putin, national-patriotic academics under the title "Russian Doctrine." The book is presented as a set of "guidelines" for the next administration and a kind of national, supra-party platform. It contains detailed foreign- and domestic-policy proposals, including autocratic reforms to the military, national-security system, the economy, the mass media, education, and culture.
Moreover, it was approved at the September World Congress of Russian People, an annual event sponsored by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Kirill, who handles foreign relations for the Moscow Patriarchate and is one of the leading ideologues of the Putin regime, took pains to praise it.
The "Russian Doctrine" presumes that the Russian Federation is doomed to extinction because it will be unable to cope with the looming challenges of international competition. Within the next decade, the authors claim, Russia will increasingly begin to lag behind China, India, the United States, and some Southeast Asian countries. In response, the authors propose a new state structure based on the traditions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Interestingly, they propose doing so without dissolving the Russian Federation: that is, they urge the creation of a "parallel state" initially operating unseen behind the facade of the current one. It would consist of a system of political and economic institutions accessible only to Putin and the siloviki that the authors call "the invisible, networked Russia."
However, on closer inspection, the model described in "Russian Doctrine" resembles neither tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union so much as it does the sociopolitical structures of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s.
Parallel Institutions
It isn't hard to find examples of the sort of parallel institutions the authors describe in the policies enacted during Putin's two terms as president. In 2005, he created the Public Chamber, a pseudo-public, estate-based organ similar to ones that existed in parallel to the legislatures of the countries mentioned above. More importantly, the Kremlin has been actively creating state megacorporations in key sectors of the economy, including energy, nuclear power, aviation, shipbuilding, and nanotechnology. The number of these new entities has mushroomed in the last few years, most of them being headed by siloviki from Putin's inner circle.
In December, the finishing touches were put on Rostekhnologia, a conglomerate based on the arms-export monopoly Rosoboroneksport and including virtually all weapons producers and traders, as well as machine-building firms and the giant carmaker AvtoVAZ. Rostekhnologia is headed by Sergei Chemezov, a KGB colleague from Putin's days in Dresden, East Germany. The doctrine of a corporate state also has its roots in the political climate of 1930s Europe.
In addition, during the Duma campaign, Kremlin-inspired activists energetically promoted the idea of Putin as "national leader" after he leaves the presidency. Analysts have speculated that Putin could play a role in Russia similar to that played by former South African President Nelson Mandela or former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping after their retirement. But in combination with the emerging corporate state, a national leader would seem more like Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, or Spain's Caudillo, Francisco Franco. Russian ideologists have been compelled to adopt the English-based word "lider" since the Russian "vozhd" is strongly associated with Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.
Using its hegemony over Russian culture and information, the Kremlin has been able to infuse the national consciousness with the idea of a renewed imperial state. Maksim Kalashnikov, one of the authors of the "Russian Doctrine" project and a leading proponent of new-empire thinking, has written that nothing better reflects the aspirations of a national elite than a country's science fiction books. "Today most of our science fiction is revanchist, imperial literature in which Russians are redeeming their shame [from the 1990s] and building up a new superpower," he wrote.
Two Russias
The phenomenon has not escaped the attention of Russia's neighbors. The Ukrainian website glavred.ua wrote recently that there are two Russias -- a proto-imperial Russia inside the country and a regular country from the outside. Igor Panarin, a Russian expert on information wars and a proponent of the new imperialism, told the website: "Inside the country, in the virtual world, such an empire is, indeed, being created. This is very good and it is to the credit of the current president. The next goal is to expand this public relations campaign beyond Russia's borders."
In 2006, neo-imperialist author Mikhail Yuriev published a science fiction utopia called "The Third Empire," in which the action is set in 2053. In Yuriev's vision, the world then will be covered by five super states -- India, China, the American Federation (comprising North and South America), an Islamic caliphate, and the Russian Empire. The latter includes all of Russia and the former Soviet republics and also sweeps all the way across Western Europe and even encompasses Greenland. In the text, Yuriev describes how Russia conquered Europe and Turkey in a series of "expansionist wars."
Although Yuriev's vision is fantastic, it is not completely divorced from reality. In early 2007, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry published a report on Russia's economic development through 2020. The report contained an optimistic, a neutral, and a pessimistic forecast. Under the optimistic forecast, Russia would emerge as one of the world's 10 most-developed countries by the end of the period. However, according to press reports, Putin ordered the neutral and pessimistic scenarios removed and made the optimistic scenario even rosier. Under Putin's vision, by 2020 Russia will be among the world's top five most-developed countries, on a par with the United States, China, India, and Japan. In short, Russia would be the most advanced country in Europe, state television commented recently.
If Putin is indeed following a plan along the lines of the "Russian Doctrine," then perhaps some of his next moves can be anticipated as he leaves office and focuses on the creation of a new political infrastructure and networks. The new president, a handpicked loyalist, might undertake a large-scale purge of the 1990s elite from the state apparatus, the mass media, and other positions of power. The "Russian Doctrine" identifies this as a top priority.
Speaking to RFE/RL on December 1, liberal economist Andrei Illarionov mentioned his concern that the new president might launch mass repressions, including some that touch the security apparatus. The new president might also be called upon to implement other reforms that are expected to meet with resistance at home and abroad, including the possible reform of the territorial-administrative divisions of the Russian Federation. Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak has already drawn up a plan to divide the country up into several "macroeconomic regions." Kozak told reporters last week that the plan covers the period through 2020 and "will be a leap forward in the development of various territories."
Then, after this dirty work has been done, a new draft constitution, based on "conservative values," can be introduced. Under it a new schedule of elections will be laid out and Putin can return to the Kremlin in glory, the father of a new country.
But to implement this plan, Putin needs to be sure that he has more legitimacy than his successor. That's why he turned the Duma elections into a personal referendum. Taken together, Unified Russia and A Just Russia pulled in more than 70 percent of the vote. Since the president elected in March will be unlikely to get much more than 50 percent of the vote, Putin will have an important "legitimacy edge." With Medvedev's call for Putin to step in as a future prime minister, the plan would appear to be well under way.
Natural resources, strategic location and Duma-loads of money - the pride is back, baby! And to solidify his place in history, Putin will give birth to a New Russia - now with more superpower.
Russia: Putin's Plan To Become 'Father Of A New Country'
By RFE/RL analyst Victor Yasmann
Many observers of Russia are puzzled as to why President Vladimir Putin went to such bizarre lengths to turn the country's recent legislative elections into a "national referendum" on his own rule.
After all, Putin completely dominates the political stage, and he could have easily initiated and passed any changes to the constitution needed for him to run for another term as president. His oft-repeated assertions that he respects the letter and the spirit of the current constitution ring hollow, given Kremlin policies like the restriction of opposition political parties, strictures on civil society, suppression of nonstate media, subordination of the judicial system, and abolition of the direct election of regional administration heads.
Even most foreign observers -- while noting the unfair nature of the Duma elections and the myriad ways the Kremlin misused its power against weak political opponents -- have never really doubted the outright victory of the pro-Putin forces.
That victory was never in doubt because Putin is genuinely popular, for a mixture of objective and subjective reasons. Because of the vast revenues Russia accrues due to high global energy prices, the standard of living for many Russians is improving markedly -- and most of them attribute that prosperity to Putin personally. Putin has also hijacked populist policies from both the right and left ends of the spectrum. Borrowing from the left, he has increased pensions and state aid programs. From the right, Putin adopted the policy of a sharp reduction of business taxes and a low, flat-rate income tax for individuals. Finally, Putin's efforts to restore Russia's standing as a power in the international arena is enormously popular among Russians, many of whom remain bitter about the economic hardships and foreign-policy weakness of the 1990s. The yearning for a restoration of Russia's prestige is expressed throughout society, in areas as diverse as sports and the arts. This feeling has saturated the atmosphere because of the Kremlin's skillful manipulation.
A career intelligence officer, Putin has taken considerable pains to conceal his plans. It has become commonplace to say that Russian policy under Putin has become a series of "special operations." This secrecy is simply a part of the mindset of Putin and the siloviki -- people associated with the security organs and the military -- who surround him.
Questions Raised
Until mid-December, there was evidence that Putin was having trouble choosing a successor for when his current term expires in March 2008. His anointing of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev does not necessarily make things simpler. Many believed the successor should come from among the siloviki who form Putin's inner circle, or at least be acceptable to them. It is unclear how Medvedev, who does not come from the ranks of the siloviki, will hold up. Moreover, because these siloviki are divided among themselves, it's unclear there is even such a thing as a candidate acceptable to all factions -- one who will be recognized as the supreme commander by the entire military and security community. Putin must also keep in mind that Russia is the world's second most powerful nuclear power and Medvedev, if he remains the successor of choice, must be an acceptable and predictable partner for the international community, particularly the United States.
Some clues about Putin's intentions can be found in an 800-page manifesto issued last summer by a group of about 70 pro-Putin, national-patriotic academics under the title "Russian Doctrine." The book is presented as a set of "guidelines" for the next administration and a kind of national, supra-party platform. It contains detailed foreign- and domestic-policy proposals, including autocratic reforms to the military, national-security system, the economy, the mass media, education, and culture.
Moreover, it was approved at the September World Congress of Russian People, an annual event sponsored by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Kirill, who handles foreign relations for the Moscow Patriarchate and is one of the leading ideologues of the Putin regime, took pains to praise it.
The "Russian Doctrine" presumes that the Russian Federation is doomed to extinction because it will be unable to cope with the looming challenges of international competition. Within the next decade, the authors claim, Russia will increasingly begin to lag behind China, India, the United States, and some Southeast Asian countries. In response, the authors propose a new state structure based on the traditions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Interestingly, they propose doing so without dissolving the Russian Federation: that is, they urge the creation of a "parallel state" initially operating unseen behind the facade of the current one. It would consist of a system of political and economic institutions accessible only to Putin and the siloviki that the authors call "the invisible, networked Russia."
However, on closer inspection, the model described in "Russian Doctrine" resembles neither tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union so much as it does the sociopolitical structures of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s.
Parallel Institutions
It isn't hard to find examples of the sort of parallel institutions the authors describe in the policies enacted during Putin's two terms as president. In 2005, he created the Public Chamber, a pseudo-public, estate-based organ similar to ones that existed in parallel to the legislatures of the countries mentioned above. More importantly, the Kremlin has been actively creating state megacorporations in key sectors of the economy, including energy, nuclear power, aviation, shipbuilding, and nanotechnology. The number of these new entities has mushroomed in the last few years, most of them being headed by siloviki from Putin's inner circle.
In December, the finishing touches were put on Rostekhnologia, a conglomerate based on the arms-export monopoly Rosoboroneksport and including virtually all weapons producers and traders, as well as machine-building firms and the giant carmaker AvtoVAZ. Rostekhnologia is headed by Sergei Chemezov, a KGB colleague from Putin's days in Dresden, East Germany. The doctrine of a corporate state also has its roots in the political climate of 1930s Europe.
In addition, during the Duma campaign, Kremlin-inspired activists energetically promoted the idea of Putin as "national leader" after he leaves the presidency. Analysts have speculated that Putin could play a role in Russia similar to that played by former South African President Nelson Mandela or former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping after their retirement. But in combination with the emerging corporate state, a national leader would seem more like Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, or Spain's Caudillo, Francisco Franco. Russian ideologists have been compelled to adopt the English-based word "lider" since the Russian "vozhd" is strongly associated with Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.
Using its hegemony over Russian culture and information, the Kremlin has been able to infuse the national consciousness with the idea of a renewed imperial state. Maksim Kalashnikov, one of the authors of the "Russian Doctrine" project and a leading proponent of new-empire thinking, has written that nothing better reflects the aspirations of a national elite than a country's science fiction books. "Today most of our science fiction is revanchist, imperial literature in which Russians are redeeming their shame [from the 1990s] and building up a new superpower," he wrote.
Two Russias
The phenomenon has not escaped the attention of Russia's neighbors. The Ukrainian website glavred.ua wrote recently that there are two Russias -- a proto-imperial Russia inside the country and a regular country from the outside. Igor Panarin, a Russian expert on information wars and a proponent of the new imperialism, told the website: "Inside the country, in the virtual world, such an empire is, indeed, being created. This is very good and it is to the credit of the current president. The next goal is to expand this public relations campaign beyond Russia's borders."
In 2006, neo-imperialist author Mikhail Yuriev published a science fiction utopia called "The Third Empire," in which the action is set in 2053. In Yuriev's vision, the world then will be covered by five super states -- India, China, the American Federation (comprising North and South America), an Islamic caliphate, and the Russian Empire. The latter includes all of Russia and the former Soviet republics and also sweeps all the way across Western Europe and even encompasses Greenland. In the text, Yuriev describes how Russia conquered Europe and Turkey in a series of "expansionist wars."
Although Yuriev's vision is fantastic, it is not completely divorced from reality. In early 2007, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry published a report on Russia's economic development through 2020. The report contained an optimistic, a neutral, and a pessimistic forecast. Under the optimistic forecast, Russia would emerge as one of the world's 10 most-developed countries by the end of the period. However, according to press reports, Putin ordered the neutral and pessimistic scenarios removed and made the optimistic scenario even rosier. Under Putin's vision, by 2020 Russia will be among the world's top five most-developed countries, on a par with the United States, China, India, and Japan. In short, Russia would be the most advanced country in Europe, state television commented recently.
If Putin is indeed following a plan along the lines of the "Russian Doctrine," then perhaps some of his next moves can be anticipated as he leaves office and focuses on the creation of a new political infrastructure and networks. The new president, a handpicked loyalist, might undertake a large-scale purge of the 1990s elite from the state apparatus, the mass media, and other positions of power. The "Russian Doctrine" identifies this as a top priority.
Speaking to RFE/RL on December 1, liberal economist Andrei Illarionov mentioned his concern that the new president might launch mass repressions, including some that touch the security apparatus. The new president might also be called upon to implement other reforms that are expected to meet with resistance at home and abroad, including the possible reform of the territorial-administrative divisions of the Russian Federation. Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak has already drawn up a plan to divide the country up into several "macroeconomic regions." Kozak told reporters last week that the plan covers the period through 2020 and "will be a leap forward in the development of various territories."
Then, after this dirty work has been done, a new draft constitution, based on "conservative values," can be introduced. Under it a new schedule of elections will be laid out and Putin can return to the Kremlin in glory, the father of a new country.
But to implement this plan, Putin needs to be sure that he has more legitimacy than his successor. That's why he turned the Duma elections into a personal referendum. Taken together, Unified Russia and A Just Russia pulled in more than 70 percent of the vote. Since the president elected in March will be unlikely to get much more than 50 percent of the vote, Putin will have an important "legitimacy edge." With Medvedev's call for Putin to step in as a future prime minister, the plan would appear to be well under way.
01 January 2008
"When we act, we create our own Reality."
If you're big enough, things happen when you move.
So in spite of the Butterfly Effect [or maybe because of it], countries act and the rest of us react. The USA acts. Russia acts. Venezuela acts. China acts. India acts. Pakistan acts. Israel acts.
A new reality sets in [or perceived reality]. And the rest of the world turns.
Scheherazade in the White House
‘We’re an empire and when we act, we create our own reality’
How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.
By Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ”.
Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase “reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right…’)”.
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the Rescue
The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in 1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at US forces headquarters in Qatar: for a million dollars, a storage hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels. It is not known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003 he stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there. Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and said it was fantastic – like theatre. David Broder of The Washington Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture. Sforza had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about 60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was never as explicit as on 15 August 2002 when Bush solemnly spoke of national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to those of his predecessors.
The Image Becomes the Story
For Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve”, Sforza rented three barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself.
What is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission accomplished”, the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty – over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control”. Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world.
Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement”. This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”
So in spite of the Butterfly Effect [or maybe because of it], countries act and the rest of us react. The USA acts. Russia acts. Venezuela acts. China acts. India acts. Pakistan acts. Israel acts.
A new reality sets in [or perceived reality]. And the rest of the world turns.
Scheherazade in the White House
‘We’re an empire and when we act, we create our own reality’
How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.
By Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ”.
Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase “reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right…’)”.
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the Rescue
The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in 1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at US forces headquarters in Qatar: for a million dollars, a storage hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels. It is not known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003 he stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there. Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and said it was fantastic – like theatre. David Broder of The Washington Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture. Sforza had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about 60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was never as explicit as on 15 August 2002 when Bush solemnly spoke of national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to those of his predecessors.
The Image Becomes the Story
For Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve”, Sforza rented three barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself.
What is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission accomplished”, the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty – over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control”. Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world.
Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement”. This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”
Applied Entertainment
The best form of entertainment is in using it to actually do something worthwhile: stories that show our tremendous potential, games that teach us empathy and compassion, movies that relate our common humanity of struggle.
So now the United Nations announces that they have signed a deal with Marvel to apply comicbook status onto global governance.
Brilliant. I can't wait to see world leaders pounding on the address podium with Hulk hands.
Kapow! A Hero for our Troubled Times
Simon Usborne
The Independent
Spider-Man's challenges have so far been pretty small beer. Since he first spun his web in the 1960s, he has squared up to a gallery of rogues, from the multi-limbed Doctor Octopus to the shape-shifting Sandman. Yet so far he has only been tasked with rescuing the citizens of New York.
Now he is set for the truly big time. In a story out later this year, the Marvel hero will be called upon to rescue the battered image of a very real-world institution – the United Nations.
In a move that will add grist to the mills of critics of the UN, who say the New York-based international organisation is ineffective and is suffering a communications crisis, particularly in the US, the body is joining forces with Marvel Comics, the creative force behind a stable of superheroes that includes Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and theX-Men. The unlikely partnership will create a new comic book that will include UN characters working alongside "Spidey" and other superheroes to settle bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.
Details of the plot have not yet been released but, according to the UN Office for Partnerships, the script is being written and the final storyline is set to be approved next month. Cartoonists and writers are working for free. The comic is expected to be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature heroes including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, as well as workers from UN agencies such as children's charity UNICEF and blue helmets of the peacekeeping forces.
Eventually, the work will be translated into several other languages and widely distributed, but it is American schoolchildren who the UN plans to target first in a bid to rescue its image; the comic will be distributed free to one million US school children later next year. The UN says on its website, "By making the complex UN system accessible to youth, the partners hope to teach children the value of international co-operation, and sensitise them to the problems faced in other parts of the world."
There is, of course, no mention on its website of the UN's troubled image but the initiative can only serve to bolster the organisation's reputation, which has become embroiled in accusations of corruption and ineptitude. Relations between the UN and the US have become particularly tense during the presidency of George Bush. More than 10 years ago, former US ambassador the UN, John Bolton went so far as to say there was "no such thing" as the UN and called the US the world's "only real power". He also declared that if the 38-storey UN building "lost 10 storeys today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference".
Marvel Entertainment, the parent company based in New York that owns Marvel Comics, is known in the publishing industry for zealously guarding its brand, regularly declining tie-in and licensing opportunities.
Many will raise an eyebrow at the firm's apparent UN love-in, but a look at the comic company's history reveals a long tradition of promoting political causes, and acting as a touchstone for American ideals and patriotism. In Spider-Man, the international body may have found a public relations supremo worth a thousand besuited Manhattan marketing executives.
Marvel burst on to comic store stands in 1939, on the eve as the Second World War, as Timely Publications. Founded by a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman, its first hit superhero was Captain America, who wore his politics on his star-spangled sleeve more overtly than any of his Marvel successors. Created by Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby, the first edition was published in March 1941 – nine months before Pearl Harbour. It featured "Cap", as fans came to know him, the alter ego of sickly Steve Rogers, punching Adolf Hitler on the jaw.
Such gung-ho scripting sent circulation of wartime editions spiralling to more than a million a month, outstripping that of news publications such as Time.
To date, more than 200 million copies of Captain America comic books have been sold in more than 75 countries. A post-war lull in sales followed Captain America's heyday but, in the 1960s, other characters who walked out of the Marvel stable continued to reflect the politics of the day. The early 1960s, at the height of the cold war, saw the emergence of a new generation of superheroes, including a quartet called the Fantastic Four.
Channelling Cold War and nuclear paranoia, the work, created by Jack Kirby and comic book legend, Stan Lee, featured four Americans who gain super powers after being exposed to solar rays on a scientific mission to outer space. In one story, the foursome must do battle with the Silver Surfer, whose presence on Earth threatens the future of the planet.
Spider-Man, easily the most successful of Marvel's gallery of superheroes, was not immune to political influences. Another Cold War-era hero – Peter Parker's alter-ego first appeared in the comic book Amazing Fantasy in 1962 – Spider-Man also reflected American city-dweller's increasingly angst-ridden relationships with their metropolises. Here was a hero who could single-handedly rid the streets of crime.
In one controversial story, published in 1971, Stan Lee defied the Comics Code Authority with a story about the perils of drug taking. Responding to a request from the US Government to highlight the destructive force of narcotics, Lee penned a tale that saw Spider-Man facing up to the Green Goblin's son, Harry Osborn, who is hospitalised after taking LSD. This went against convention because the story depicted drug use, but Lee published anyway, and the CCA subsequently loosened its code to permit the negative depiction of drugs.
The early 1960s also saw the launch of one of Marvel's most politically astute superheroes. First seen in 1963, Iron Man was at first an anti-communist. In his first incarnation, the patriotic engineer Anthony Stark travels to wartime Vietnam, where he is captured by an evil warlord called Wong Chu, but later creates an iron suit of armour that gives him super powers and allows him to defeat the communists.
Iron Man's anti-red stance softens as opposition to the war grows and subsequent storylines see him turn his attention to Iraq in the first Gulf War.
This year sees the release of a mega-budget film version of Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr. Produced by Marvel itself, the film sees Iron Man travelling to Afghanistan to introduce a new missile design to US Air Force chiefs. This time, he is captured by Afghan rebels and is ordered to make a missile for them. Instead, he conceives his indestructible iron suit and saves the day.
The film can expect to be greeted by huge audiences at US military bases on its release next May. Back at the UN, chiefs have been quick to point out it was not they who came up with the idea for the new comics. That distinction lies with French filmmaker, Romuald Sciora. But a close look at his CV shows him to be something of a UN loyalist – his portfolio includes "À la maison de verre" (In the glass house), a series of short documentaries looking at the leadership and accomplishments of the last four UN Secretaries-General.
UN bosses will be eagerly anticipating the latest attempt to restore the organisation's reputation. They will also hope that the characters based on UN staff fare better than the character who started it all – Captain America. In an apparent shift from the tradition for getting behind American causes, Marvel killed off the Captain last April. He is felled by an assassin's bullet 66 years after he began battling villains.
Commenting on the hero's demise, Marvel writer Jeph Loeb said: "Part of it grew out of the fact that we are a country that's at war, we are being perceived differently in the world. [Captain America] wears the flag and he is assassinated – it's impossible not to have it at least be a metaphor for the complications of the present day."
Co-writer Ed Brubaker also alluded to the superhero's role in a more complicated political climate, where the increasingly blurred line between good and evil has become more of a struggle for comic book cartoonists to draw. "What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the street corner against the Bush administration," he said, "and all the really right-wing fans all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein."
So now the United Nations announces that they have signed a deal with Marvel to apply comicbook status onto global governance.
Brilliant. I can't wait to see world leaders pounding on the address podium with Hulk hands.
Kapow! A Hero for our Troubled Times
Simon Usborne
The Independent
Spider-Man's challenges have so far been pretty small beer. Since he first spun his web in the 1960s, he has squared up to a gallery of rogues, from the multi-limbed Doctor Octopus to the shape-shifting Sandman. Yet so far he has only been tasked with rescuing the citizens of New York.
Now he is set for the truly big time. In a story out later this year, the Marvel hero will be called upon to rescue the battered image of a very real-world institution – the United Nations.
In a move that will add grist to the mills of critics of the UN, who say the New York-based international organisation is ineffective and is suffering a communications crisis, particularly in the US, the body is joining forces with Marvel Comics, the creative force behind a stable of superheroes that includes Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and theX-Men. The unlikely partnership will create a new comic book that will include UN characters working alongside "Spidey" and other superheroes to settle bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.
Details of the plot have not yet been released but, according to the UN Office for Partnerships, the script is being written and the final storyline is set to be approved next month. Cartoonists and writers are working for free. The comic is expected to be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature heroes including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, as well as workers from UN agencies such as children's charity UNICEF and blue helmets of the peacekeeping forces.
Eventually, the work will be translated into several other languages and widely distributed, but it is American schoolchildren who the UN plans to target first in a bid to rescue its image; the comic will be distributed free to one million US school children later next year. The UN says on its website, "By making the complex UN system accessible to youth, the partners hope to teach children the value of international co-operation, and sensitise them to the problems faced in other parts of the world."
There is, of course, no mention on its website of the UN's troubled image but the initiative can only serve to bolster the organisation's reputation, which has become embroiled in accusations of corruption and ineptitude. Relations between the UN and the US have become particularly tense during the presidency of George Bush. More than 10 years ago, former US ambassador the UN, John Bolton went so far as to say there was "no such thing" as the UN and called the US the world's "only real power". He also declared that if the 38-storey UN building "lost 10 storeys today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference".
Marvel Entertainment, the parent company based in New York that owns Marvel Comics, is known in the publishing industry for zealously guarding its brand, regularly declining tie-in and licensing opportunities.
Many will raise an eyebrow at the firm's apparent UN love-in, but a look at the comic company's history reveals a long tradition of promoting political causes, and acting as a touchstone for American ideals and patriotism. In Spider-Man, the international body may have found a public relations supremo worth a thousand besuited Manhattan marketing executives.
Marvel burst on to comic store stands in 1939, on the eve as the Second World War, as Timely Publications. Founded by a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman, its first hit superhero was Captain America, who wore his politics on his star-spangled sleeve more overtly than any of his Marvel successors. Created by Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby, the first edition was published in March 1941 – nine months before Pearl Harbour. It featured "Cap", as fans came to know him, the alter ego of sickly Steve Rogers, punching Adolf Hitler on the jaw.
Such gung-ho scripting sent circulation of wartime editions spiralling to more than a million a month, outstripping that of news publications such as Time.
To date, more than 200 million copies of Captain America comic books have been sold in more than 75 countries. A post-war lull in sales followed Captain America's heyday but, in the 1960s, other characters who walked out of the Marvel stable continued to reflect the politics of the day. The early 1960s, at the height of the cold war, saw the emergence of a new generation of superheroes, including a quartet called the Fantastic Four.
Channelling Cold War and nuclear paranoia, the work, created by Jack Kirby and comic book legend, Stan Lee, featured four Americans who gain super powers after being exposed to solar rays on a scientific mission to outer space. In one story, the foursome must do battle with the Silver Surfer, whose presence on Earth threatens the future of the planet.
Spider-Man, easily the most successful of Marvel's gallery of superheroes, was not immune to political influences. Another Cold War-era hero – Peter Parker's alter-ego first appeared in the comic book Amazing Fantasy in 1962 – Spider-Man also reflected American city-dweller's increasingly angst-ridden relationships with their metropolises. Here was a hero who could single-handedly rid the streets of crime.
In one controversial story, published in 1971, Stan Lee defied the Comics Code Authority with a story about the perils of drug taking. Responding to a request from the US Government to highlight the destructive force of narcotics, Lee penned a tale that saw Spider-Man facing up to the Green Goblin's son, Harry Osborn, who is hospitalised after taking LSD. This went against convention because the story depicted drug use, but Lee published anyway, and the CCA subsequently loosened its code to permit the negative depiction of drugs.
The early 1960s also saw the launch of one of Marvel's most politically astute superheroes. First seen in 1963, Iron Man was at first an anti-communist. In his first incarnation, the patriotic engineer Anthony Stark travels to wartime Vietnam, where he is captured by an evil warlord called Wong Chu, but later creates an iron suit of armour that gives him super powers and allows him to defeat the communists.
Iron Man's anti-red stance softens as opposition to the war grows and subsequent storylines see him turn his attention to Iraq in the first Gulf War.
This year sees the release of a mega-budget film version of Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr. Produced by Marvel itself, the film sees Iron Man travelling to Afghanistan to introduce a new missile design to US Air Force chiefs. This time, he is captured by Afghan rebels and is ordered to make a missile for them. Instead, he conceives his indestructible iron suit and saves the day.
The film can expect to be greeted by huge audiences at US military bases on its release next May. Back at the UN, chiefs have been quick to point out it was not they who came up with the idea for the new comics. That distinction lies with French filmmaker, Romuald Sciora. But a close look at his CV shows him to be something of a UN loyalist – his portfolio includes "À la maison de verre" (In the glass house), a series of short documentaries looking at the leadership and accomplishments of the last four UN Secretaries-General.
UN bosses will be eagerly anticipating the latest attempt to restore the organisation's reputation. They will also hope that the characters based on UN staff fare better than the character who started it all – Captain America. In an apparent shift from the tradition for getting behind American causes, Marvel killed off the Captain last April. He is felled by an assassin's bullet 66 years after he began battling villains.
Commenting on the hero's demise, Marvel writer Jeph Loeb said: "Part of it grew out of the fact that we are a country that's at war, we are being perceived differently in the world. [Captain America] wears the flag and he is assassinated – it's impossible not to have it at least be a metaphor for the complications of the present day."
Co-writer Ed Brubaker also alluded to the superhero's role in a more complicated political climate, where the increasingly blurred line between good and evil has become more of a struggle for comic book cartoonists to draw. "What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the street corner against the Bush administration," he said, "and all the really right-wing fans all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein."
The United States of Denial
A country is what it does.
Despite the year-end hang wringing in the New York Times editorial, America, you are what you do and what you have done - just like the rest of us.
Looking at America
Editorial
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.
Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
Despite the year-end hang wringing in the New York Times editorial, America, you are what you do and what you have done - just like the rest of us.
Looking at America
Editorial
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.
Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
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