Facing South reports that BP is attempting to hire marine faculty at southern universities to do research on the oil spill. The catch: they cannot reveal the results of their research without BP’s permission. In addition, they are to communicate through BP’s lawyers, a provision obviously intended to clothe their results in attorney-client privilege.

Backlash grows against BP's effort to 'buy up' Gulf scientists

Tags: BP, Oil Spill

The media transformation has already began. Like it did in the Katrina disaster, it took only a couple of days for the media to switch its focus from the almost unbearable suffering of the hapless victims to stoking the fears of looting.

The same thing is happening in the media this very moment, before the bodies have begun to be buried, and while people are still dying from lack of water and food.

Like the media treatment of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a purpose to this sudden obsession: to erase any compassion on the part of the American People. If people become too concerned about Haiti they might start looking deeper into its miserable history—especially the heavy hand of the U.S. that has played such a large part in creating that misery, from the invasion by the Marines under the southern racist president, Woodrow Wilson in 1915 to the ouster of its first legally-elected president in modern times, Aristide, in 1993.

This column was inspired by a column on tomdispatch.com by Rebecca Solnit, When the Media is the Disaster.

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud.  Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.”  It might be logic.  It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them.

The Clarion-Ledger is running without comment the AP wires that are increasingly turning their attention from suffering to looting:

Pockets of looting and violence also are hindering a slow improvement in getting aid to victims.

Just four blocks from U.S. troop landing at the palace, hundreds of looters were rampaging through downtown.

Even the venerable New York Times has shown its concern over looting.

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret) put it all together in 1933:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Follow the money.

You owe it to yourself to read the Solnit column. It’s an eye-opener.

Tags: Looting, Haiti, earthquake

Via Carmine Gallo’s new book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, the Plain English Campaign is an instructive and entertaining treasure trove of free hints on writing easy-to-read text.

Supporters of the organization chose (in a 2994 survey) “at the end of the day” to be the most annoying of all clichés. Second was “at this moment in time,” which tied with the constant use of the word “like” as if it were a form of punctuation.’'With all due respect' came fourth.

Their admonition: “George Orwell's advice is still worth following: 'Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’”

The site also provides a Javascript program, Drivel Defence, that analyzes either pasted text or a web page for over-long sentences.

The site is worth exploring.

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/

Tags: Writing, plain English

Via Al Poynter, Laura Frank has nailed it about as well as anyone: greed.

The news industry's profit margins have remained consistently above 15 percent to 20 percent for at least the past quarter century. Even in the last recession, the industry averaged an 18 percent return.

But the industry's relative monopoly until now has meant that it doesn't really know how it makes money, contends [Esther] Thorson, who developed the profit formula. And so, she says, the industry continues to do the exact opposite of what her data shows it should be doing: producing in-depth, accurate, fair, issues-oriented, enterprise reporting.

* * *

"The place you invest your dollar to get the most bang for the buck is in the newsroom," Thorson said. "And that's where they're cutting the worst. They've done exactly the very thing that guarantees that circulation and advertising will follow each other down the ever-speeding death spiral.

"And that's what's happening to them."

We who have lived in Jackson most of our life can remember when the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News played—for better or worse—a far more prominent place in the mindscape of central Mississippi than the crippled Gannet cash cow to which the Clarion-Ledger has been reduced in the last 20 years. I picked up an issue the other day at Primos on Lakeland Drive and was treated to columns by right-wing radical Ann Coulter and a mindless column by David Broder of the living dead, sandwiched between wire service reports that substitute nowadays for investigative journalism.

There are still a few fine reporters on the staff of the Clarion-Ledger, but they are becoming a rare breed. Charles Overby, where are you?

Read the article on the PBS web site:

Laura Frank: The Withering Watchdog. What really happened to investigative reporting in America.

It is now clear that Obama’s presidency will be a very public presidency. In the two and a half months since his inauguration, he has likely accumulated more media exposure than George Bush did in his first two years of office.

No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.

So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.

For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.

Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.

The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.

Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.

The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.

In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.

John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.

Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.

My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.

While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.

I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.

And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.

In over eight years, the Jackson Progressive has never asked for contributions, nor has it ever earned a dime from the Amazon ads on the sidebar. I fund it out of my own pocket, and consider it my contribution to the public conversation.

Greg Palast, whose book appears in the sidebar, is, in my opinion, one of the most important independent journalists in the world. More than any other single reporter, Palast has uncovered and reported the massive criminality and fraud of the Bush administration and its oil-besotted, election-stealing, kleptocratic underwriters, co-conspirators, enablers, abettors, and sycophants. The documented facts set out in Palast's book Armed Madhouse, by themselves, would, in a just world, lead to at least three impeachments--beginning with George W. Bush--and hundreds of indictments.



I was therefore upset when I learned that the Palast Investigative Fund is out of money. His organization is being forced to lay off people and shut down vital projects, at least temporarily.

So I'm asking, no, begging, you to give money.

Immediately.

Palast's work is simply too important to the life of our republic to let it fail. The fund is tax-exempt under Section 510(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. I gave money and will probably be giving more.

Click here to make a donation. Add three cents to your donation (i.e., $100.03) so they can identify this site as the referrer.

Tom Lowe, Editor, Publisher, Blogger

Elizabeth Edwards, according to an article in the NY Times, asked Ann Coulter to stop the personal attacks upon her husband, presidential candidate John Edwards. Coulter had previously made the remark, among others, that she wished he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.

Coulter's response to Ms. Edwards revealed more than she probably intended:

Coulter responded with a laugh and charged that Edwards was calling on her to stop speaking altogether.

In other words, all she has to offer is hate-filled venom. Take that away and she would have nothing left to say. A scary prospect.

According to the NY Times, class A shareholders of the newspaper--including some large institutional investors--who elect 30 percent of the board want the Sulzberger family, owners of non-traded class B shares to give up some of their control over the newspaper.

A Difficult Annual Times Meeting for Sulzbergers

It's hard to have much sympathy for the class A shareholders, however, since they bought their stock in the full knowledge that the Sulzbergers would be controlling the paper for the foreseeable future.

Considering the seemingly inexorable process of consolidation of the news media and the simultaneous dumbing down of the contents, it is hard not to conclude that the only way the press can fulfill its function as contemplated by the founding fathers is when it is owned privately. Only a private owner has the power to risk financial losses for actions grounded on principle that would otherwise be swiftly punished by shareholders. In the market economy, quality is a cost, not a benefit. A rational actor seeking to maximize returns on investment is looking for the sweet spot where marginal cost and marginal revenue intersect, which means that he will reduce quality (defined in the broadest sense) until such time as the savings are outweighed by a loss of revenue. If those curves intersect at a low quality, that's fine, because return is maximized. Gannett is a perfect example of this process.

Which is not to say that the New York Times is a sterling example of private ownership. The newspaper has time and time again betrayed the nation and its readers by printing shameless propaganda (as when Judith Miller became a mouthpiece for the Bush administration in favor of invading Iraq) or in suppressing vital news at the behest of the government, as when the newspaper waited a year before it revealed that the NSA was listening in on U. S. citizens in criminal violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

In our own city, the Hederman family, former owners of the Clarion-Ledger, published a racist and reactionary newspaper that did incalculable damage to our state and its citizens for generations.

On the other hand, editors, publishers and owners have often risen to great challenges, fighting dangerous and unpopular battles against the rich and powerful, to the benefit of the entire nation. The Watergate scandal is only the most illustrious example of many truly heroic acts by American newsmen undertaken simply because it was what they were supposed to be doing. If you want to see what a newspaper can do, read the Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, one of the original muckrakers around the turn of the 20th Century.