Link 1: Early educational influences
Link 2: Two of the schools at which
I teach
Link 3: How to contact me/Mailing
list
Link 4: Korean residents in Japan
Link 5: Where I grew up
Link 6: Bush's war on terrorism
Link 7: Progressive Japanese teachers
group
Link 8: What is alternative media?
What is mainstream media?
Link 9: Sample links
[link 1] References for The
Silent Way (1) and The
Silent Way (2), Community
Language Learning and
Bill
Bernhardt.These are for reference only. I am not necessarily endorsing
them, though they did have an
early influence on my classroom approach.
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[link 2] International
Education Center and Hitotsubashi
University, two of the schools at which I teach.
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[link 3] Email me at paul@tokyoprogressive.org or at the following address:
http://www.gn.apc.org/tokyoprogressive/eric/pagecont/index2.files/bmblogin2.html
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[link4] See here
for some background on Koreans in Japan
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[link 5] Ozone Park is a hop, skip and a jump from the site of a racist murder, Howard Beach.
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[link 6] An article from my newsletter on Bush's "War Against Terrorism" and Japan
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[link 7] Here is one very good group of
teachers I have known for many years. Some of my ideas on introducing
global education and alternative media came from teachers
I met through Shin Eiken.
In years past, some teachers
seemed to be doing lessons which were too broad. For
example, lessons on peace did not provide enough critical
context, or teachers simply assigned peace activities
without trying to help students develop a sense of skepticism
and the ability to think for themselves. A look at one
their recent pages on goals,
however, does indicate they have
moved in a direction that goes beyond content, taking
into account methodology as well as learner autonomy.
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[link 8} What is alternative? To answer that we need to understand what is mainstream about the media.
Here are some excerpts from texts that help provide a
framework for understanding what makes media
mainstream or alternative.
Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman
and Noam Chomsky, Pantheon Books, 1988
All The News Fit To Print by Edward
S. Herman in Z magazine, 1998
How The New York Times Protects Indonesian
Terror In East Timor by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson in Z magazine,
1999
Key Words in the New World Order: Words
that Purr and Snarl by Edward S. Herman in Z Magazine, 2000
All The News Fit To Print, Part II
by Edward S. Herman in Z magazine, May 1998
All The News Fit To Print (Part III): The
Vietnam War and the myth of a liberal media by Edward S. Herman in Z magazine,
October 1998
The NATO-Media Lie Machine: gGenocideh
in Kosovo? by Edward S. Herman & David Peterson
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
by Noam Chomsky, from a talk at Z Media Institute June 1997
Freeing the Media: The Exception to the
Rulers-A Talk Given at the Z Media Institute by Amy Goodman in October
1997
Media Literacy by Cynthia Peters (February
1998) on ZNet
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Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Pantheon Books, 1988
This excerpt is from Third World Traveler:
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands
of a state
bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media,
often supplemented
by official censorship, makes it clear that the media
serve the ends of
a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a
propaganda system
at work where the media are private and formal censorship
is absent.
This is especially true where the media actively compete,
periodically
attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance,
and
aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free
speech and the
general community interest. What is not evident (and
remains undiscussed
in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques,
as well as the
huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect
both on access
to a private media system and on its behavior and performance."
A
propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth
and power and its
multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices.
It traces the
routes by which money and power are able to filter out
the news fit to
print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government
and dominant
private interests to get their messages across to the
public. The
essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set
of news "filters,"
fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated
ownership,
owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant
mass-media firms;
(2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass
media; (3) the
reliance of the media on information provided by government,
business,
and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources
and agents of
power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media;
and (5)
"anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.
These
elements interact with and reinforce one another. The
raw material of
news must pass through successive filters, leaving only
the cleansed
residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse
and
interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy
in the first
place, and they explain the basis and operations of what
amount to
propaganda campaigns.
This is another excerpt from the same article.
In the case of the Vietnam War as well ... even those
who condemn the
media for their alleged adversarial stance acknowledge
that they were
almost universally supportive of U.S. policy until after
large numbers
of U.S. troops had been engaged in the "intervention"
in South Vietnam,
heavy casualties had been taken, huge dollar sums had
been spent, and
elite protest had surfaced on grounds of threats to elite
interests.
Only then did elements of the media undertake qualified
reassessments of
the "cost-benefit" trade-off. But during the period of
growing
involvement that eventually made extrication difficult,
the watchdog
actually encouraged the burglar to make himself at home
in a distant
land, and to bomb and destroy it with abandon.
The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda
system of
a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit-indeed, encourage
spirited
debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain
faithfully
within the system of presuppositions and principles that
constitute an
elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized
largely
without awareness. No one instructed the media to focus
on Cambodia and
ignore East Timor. They gravitated naturally to the Khmer
Rouge and
discussed them freely-just as they naturally suppressed
information on
Indonesian atrocities in East Timor and U.S. responsibility
for the
aggression and massacres. In the process, the media provided
neither
facts nor analyses that would have enabled the public
to understand the
issues or the bases of government policies toward Cambodia
and Timor,
and they thereby assured that the public could not exert
any meaningful
influence on the decisions that were made. This is quite
typical of the
actual "societal purpose" of the media on matters that
are of
significance for established power; not "enabling the
public to assert
meaningful control over the political process," but rather
averting any
such danger. In these cases, as in numerous others, the
public was
managed and mobilized from above, by means of the media's
highly
selective messages and evasions.
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
All The News Fit To Print by Edward S. Herman in Z magazine, 1998
The Times has not been "fearless," even in the face of
gross outrages
against law, morality, and the general interest. During
the McCarthy era,
for example, the management buckled under to the Eastland
Committee by
firing former communist employees, who spoke freely to
management but
would not inform on others, and more generally it failed
to oppose the
witch hunt with vigor and on the basis of principle.
An editorial of
August 6, 1948, attacking the use of the Fifth Amendment
before the
House Committee on Unamerican Activities, was written
by the publisher,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger.
Among other cases, the paper did not oppose the Vietnam
War till late in
the game, and then on grounds of unwinnability and excessive
cost to us;
it failed to oppose the U.S. sponsorship of a system
of National
Security States in Latin America, or the Central America
wars, and
protected these murderous enterprises by eye aversion
and biased
reporting. Even Reagan's "supply side economics" was
treated gently by
the editors ("No one else has yet offered an option half
so grand for
dealing with stagflation," ea., March 17, 1981), and
the paper's top
reporter, James Reston, stated, falsely, that Reaganomics
involved "a
serious attempt...to spread the sacrifices equally among
all segments of
society" (February 22, 1981). The Times played a supportive
propaganda
role in the huge Carter-Reagan era military buildup to
contest the
inflated Soviet Threat; and its highly favorable review
of The Bell
Curve, and more recent extensive publicity given the
Thernstroms, have
been notable contributions to the ongoing assault on
affirmative action.
Ralph Nader asserted in 1993 that Rosenthal "did
more to damage
consumer causes than any other person in the United
States," as the
Times's lead in downgrading consumer issues was
followed by the
Washington Post and then by the rest of the press.
Nader says that more
than a dozen Times reporters complained to him
that they were pushed
away from "hot-potato areas into soft consumer
advice or other
non-consumer assignments." The Times was late on
many key business
stories, like the S&L scandals, the Bank of
Credit and Commerce
International case, the mid-1980s phony liability
crisis contrived by
the insurance industry, the misrepresentations
of the Bush Task Force
on Regulatory Relief, and others. Reporters told
Nader that "New York
doesn't like these stories," or that they must
get company responses to
charges against them-and as Nader notes, the companies
learned "simply
not to return calls, knowing that that tactic would
block the story
deadline. These companies know about Rosenthal
too.
Times officials and reporters have other (nonbusiness)
ties to the elite
that make a class and establishment bias inevitable and
natural. In his
gentle history of the Times, Without Fear or Favor, veteran
Times
reporter Harrison Salisbury points out that the paper
was dominated in
the post World War II era by men "of the same social
and geographic
circle,..[who] had gone, by and large, to the same schools,
Groton,
again and again, Groton; they had married into each others
families;
they were Yale and Harvard and Princeton," etc. They
were lawyers,
bankers, businesspeople and journalists; and many were
notables in the
CIA and other parts of the government. These friends
had "a common view
of the world, the role of the United States, the nature
of the communist
peril."
Salisbury devotes many pages to the CIA-Times connection,
questioning
but not disproving the claim by Carl Bernstein in Rolling
Stone in 1977
that Cyrus Sulzberger, the Times's long-time chief European
correspondent, was a knowing CIA "asset," and that the
paper gave cover
to some ten CIA agents from 1950-1966. Salisbury supplies
an impressive
list of CIA people-Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Frank
Wisner, Kim
Roosevelt, Richard Helms, and others, who were good friends
of, and
wined, dined, and vacationed with, a large array of Times
officials and
reporters. He acknowledges that in the early years there
had been a
"relationship of cooperation between The Times and the
Agency, a
relationship of trust between the CIA and Times correspondents,.."
(quoting CIA official Cord Meyer) and that friendly connections
persisted thereafter. When the Times published a series
on the CIA in
1966, it gave a draft to former CIA chief John McCone
for prior review,
an action that Salisbury felt entirely without significance,
as McCone's
reactions could be accepted or ignored by the paper.
But Salisbury
misses the possibility that the willingness to bring
McCone into the
editorial process might reflect the limited framework
and
non-threatening character of the Times's effort.
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
How The New York Times Protects Indonesian
Terror In East Timor by Edward S.
Herman and David Peterson in Z magazine, 1999
Suharto stands alone as the world's only known triple-genocidist,
responsible for perhaps a million deaths in Indonesia
(1965-1966),
200,000--a quarter or more of the population--in East
Timor (1975-1999),
and tens of thousands in West Papua, which shares a common
border with
the Irian Jaya province of Indonesia (1965-1999). But
as his military
regime and New Order moved Indonesia from Sukarno's policy
of
non-alignment to fervent (and murderous) anti-communism
and opened his
country's doors to transnational corporate investment--even
if at a
steep bribe entry price--the West has not only protected
this premier
human rights violator, it has given him tens of billions
of dollars in
economic and military aid.
With the U.S. establishment enthused over the Indonesian
counterrevolution of 1965-1966 and its deadly results,
the mainstream
U.S. media also greeted these developments as a "gleam
of light" (James
Reston) and "positive achievement" (C.L. Sulzberger),
and media
suppressions and apologetics remained in close alignment
with the West's
support of the dictatorship up to Suharto's ouster. The
media's
treatment of the invasion, occupation, and mass killing
in East Timor
from April 1975 onward has fit this pattern of protection
of a favored
regime very closely.
New York Times reporters, for example, have always relied
heavily on
Indonesian officials for information on East Timor, and
treated that
information source with great gullibility (see the accompanying
Appendix).
Thus, from 1975 to the present day these reporters have
spoken of the
1975 Indonesian invasion as an intervention in a civil
war, when in fact
the very brief civil war had ended by August 1975 with
a Fretilin
victory, and was over long before the invaders landed.
From 1975 to the present Times reporters have also regularly
called the
East Timorese resistance fighters "separatists" even
though the
Indonesian incorporation of East Timor as a province
has never been
accepted by either the indigenous people or the United
Nations. This of
course follows the State Department line that we must
accept
"reality"--that "the reality [is] that Indonesia has
possessed East
Timor since 1975 and will not relinquish it" (as the
State Department
explained in 1992).
Times reporters have also repeatedly pretended that some
kind of
equivalence exists between the violence of the Timorese
resistance and
that of the Indonesian invaders, and in sharp contrast
with their
finding of Cambodian deaths in the years 1975-1978 to
be the specific
responsibility of Pol Pot, they have consistently failed
to identify the
source of the 200,000 East Timorese deaths since 1975.
In a further
notable mark of apologetics, Times reporters have also
taken at face
value a stream of expressions of regrets for violence
and promises of
reform by the Indonesian invaders.
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
Key Words in the New World Order: Words
that Purr and Snarl by Edward S.
Herman in Z Magazine, 2000
As the 21st century begins, with the U.S. hegemony and
transnational
capitalism roaming the earth like the dinosaurs of the
distant past, we
should take stock of the key words that help rationalize
their rampages.
Many are heart-warming gpurrh words like gdemocracy,h
gempowerment,h
gfreedom,h greform,h and gresponsibility,h which
are applied to
arrangements and policies that are antidemocratic, disempower,
diminish
freedom, and abandon responsibility on the part of the
rulers of the New
World Order (NWO). But the word usage is effective because
the rulers
dominate the communications system and are free to reengineer
meaning
and rewrite history.
These words are linked together, and they serve as important
components
of an ideological and propaganda apparatus. It will be
seen below that
the language of economics?market, commodities, commodification,
free
trade, growth?flows smoothly into political lingo?freedom,
democracy,
elections, reform, deregulation?and into the key words
relating to
personal behavior and social issues?consumption, compassion,
morality,
family values, law and order, crime, prisons?and also
into the language
of global expansion and the maintenance of global law
and order (g
stabilityh)?free trade, globalization, security, ethnic
cleansing,
human rights, and humanitarian intervention. gFree tradeh
sits astride
both the language of economics and that of global issues
of expansion,
and so do other words in this evolving system.
Humanitarian Intervention
In NWO ideology globalization is portrayed as technologically
driven,
inevitable, and beneficial to all but a few gspecial
interests. But
globalization runs into difficulties with groguesh
and others who fail
to appreciate its wonders. The ongoing global polarization
of incomes,
the widespread ethnic conflict, and the growth of gchaotic
ungovernable
entitiesh are not seen as a product of globalization
(which they are in
considerable measure) but as fortuitous happenings that
interfere with
the wondrous process. As in the case of Russian greform,h
the answer
to seriously negative consequences is an intensification
of their causes.
As with crime in the streets at home, the cure is not
in altering the
workings of the economy serving the elite so well, it
is in prisons at
home and putting the rogues in their place abroad.
This gears well with domestic policy, where gmilitary
Keynesianismh
has long been the acceptable base of macro-stabilization
and Pentagon
subsidization of high tech industry the acceptable form
of welfare. It
is also useful to have a large military establishment
available to keep
the lid on any future internal security threats. Furthermore,
as
Thorstein Veblen pointed out back in 1904, a militarized
society not
only conduces to gthe orderly pursuit of business,h
it gdirects the
popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less
hazardous
matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of
creature comforts,
h and affords ga corrective for esocial unrestf and
similar
disorders of civilized life.h
Nice little wars against rogues bring us together (around
our TV sets,
as in watching the Super Bowl), demonstrate our high
moral virtue in
willingness to prevent gethnic cleansingh with ghumanitarian
bombing,
h and demonstrate to the rest of the world that we are
the fit
policepeople of the globalization process from which
almost everybody
benefits. Of course, when it gets to the condition of
the Kurds in
Turkey and the East Timorese under Indonesian assault,
we must recognize
that we gcanft do everything,h and that there are
cases where g
constructive engagementh is more helpful than threats
and the use of
force. But otherwise, this is clearly the best of all
possible worlds.
"
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
All The News Fit To Print, Part II by Edward S. Herman in Z magazine, May 1998
The New York Times is a strongly logical paper, whose
biases and
frequent propaganda service give its logo phrase "all
the news that's
fit to print" an ironical twist. James Reston acknowledged
that "we left
[out] a great deal of what we knew about U.S. intervention
in Guatemala
and in a variety of other cases" at government request
or for political
reasons satisfactory to the editors. The government lied,
but the Times
published their claims even though the "Times knew the
statements were
not true"(Salisbury). Strategic silences, the transmitting
of false or
misleading information, the failure to provide relevant
context, the
acceptance and dissemination of myths, the application
of double
standards as virtual standard operating procedure, and
participation in
ideological bandwagons and campaigns, have been extremely
important in
Times coverage of foreign affairs. Obviously the Times
is not merely a
biased instrument of propaganda. It does many things
well and its
reporters often produce high quality journalism. This
is especially true
where the paper's editorial slant on issues ("policy")
and ideological
biases are not at stake and where major advertisers are
not threatened.
In those sensitive areas (some described below), critical
and probing
articles are hardly more common than dogs walking on
their hind legs.
Furthermore, the paper's reporters are frequently "generalists"
moving
from field to field, country to country, who must make
up for being out
of their depth by glibness, a reliance on familiar (and
English-speaking)
sources, and an ideological conformity that will meet
"New York"
standards.
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
All The News Fit To Print (Part III):
The Vietnam War and the myth of a liberal media by Edward S.
Herman in Z magazine, October 1998
It is part of conservative mythology that the mainstream
media,
especially the New York Times, opposed U.S. involvement
in Vietnam, and,
effectively "lost the war." Liberals, on the other hand,
while often
agreeing that the press opposed the war, regard this
as a display of the
media at its best, pursuing its proper critical role.
But they are both
wrong: conservatives, because they identify any reporting
of unhelpful
facts as "adversarial" and want the media to serve as
crude propaganda
agencies of the state; liberals, because they fail to
see how massively
the mainstream media serve the state by accepting the
assumptions and
frameworks of state policy, transmitting vast amounts
of state
propaganda, and confining criticism to matters of tactics
while
excluding criticism of premises and intentions.
In his Without Fear Or Favor, Harrison Salisbury acknowledged
that in
1962 the Times was "deeply and consistently" supportive
of the war
policy. He also admitted that the paper was taken in
by the Johnson
administration's lies on the 1964 Bay of Tonkin incident
that impelled
Congress to give Johnson a blank check to make war. Salisbury
claims,
however, that in 1965 the Times began to question the
war and moved into
an increasingly oppositional stance, culminating in the
publication of
the Pentagon Papers in 1971. While there is some truth
in Salisbury's
portrayal, it is misleading in important respects. For
one thing, from
1954 to the present, the Times never abandoned the framework
and
language of apologetics, according to which the U.S.
was resisting
somebody else's aggression and protecting "South Vietnam."
The paper
never used the word "aggression" to describe the U.S.
invasion of
Vietnam, but applied it freely with respect to North
Vietnam. Its
supposedly liberal and "adversarial" reporters like David
Halberstam and
Homer Bigart referred to NLF actions as "subversion"
and the forced
relocation of peasants as "humane" and "better protection
against the
Communists."
The liberal columnist Tom Wicker referred to President
Johnson's decision to "step up resistance to Vietcong
infiltration in
South Vietnam." The Vietcong "infiltrate" in their own
country while the
U.S. "resists." Wicker also accepted without question
that we were
"invited in" by a presumably legitimate government, and
James Reston, in
the very period when the U.S. was refusing all negotiation
in favor of
military escalation to compel enemy surrender, declared
that we were in
Vietnam in accord with "the guiding principle of American
foreign
policy...that no state shall use military force or the
threat of
military force to achieve its political objectives."
In short, for all
these Times writers the patriotic double standard was
internalized, and
any oppositional tendency was fatally compromised by
acceptance of the
legitimacy of U.S. intervention, which limited their
questioning to matters of tactics
and costs. Furthermore, although from 1965 onward the
Times was willing
to publish more information that put the war in a less
favorable light,
it never broke from its heavy dependence on official
sources or its
reluctance to check out official lies or explore the
damage being
wrought by the U.S. war machine. In contrast with its
eager pursuit of
refugees from the Khmer Rouge after April 1975, the paper
rarely sought
out testimony from the millions of Vietnamese refugees
from U.S. bombing
and chemical war-fare. In its opinion columns as well,
the new openness
was towards those commentators who accepted the premises
of the war and
would limit their criticisms to its tactical problems
and costs to us.
From beginning to end, those who criticized the war as
aggression and
immoral at its root were excluded from the debate.
In October 1972 an agreement was reached
between the Nixon administration and Hanoi that would
have ended the war
on terms similar to those the U.S. had rejected in 1964,
with the NLF
and Saigon government both recognized in the South and
an electoral
contest to follow. The U.S., however, following the heaviest
bombing
attacks in history on Hanoi in December 1972, proceeded
to reinterpret
the agreement as leaving the South to the exclusive control
of its
client, in contradiction of the clear language of the
document. The
Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, accepted
the Nixon
administration's reinterpretion without question, and
continued
thereafter to repeat this false version and to cite the
incident as "a
case study of how an agreement with ambiguous provisions
could be
exploited and even ignored by a Communist government"
(Neil Lewis,
August 18, 1987).
Postwar Imperial Apologetics After the Vietnam War ended,
and during
the ensuing 18 years of U.S. economic warfare against
the newly
independent Vietnam, the Times' adherence to the traditional
and
official viewpoints never wavered. That the U.S. was
guilty of
aggression has never been hinted at; the U.S. fought
to protect "South
Vietnam." In 1985 the editors chided public ignorance
of history,
evidenced by the fact that only 60 percent knew that
this country had
"sided with South Vietnam"-a creation of the U.S. with
no legal basis or
indigenous support, but legitimized for the Times because
it was
official doctrine. In reconstructing imperial ideology
it was also
important that-the enormous damage inflicted on the land
and people of
Vietnam by this country be downplayed and that the Vietnamese
now in
command be put in an unfavorable light. The Times accommodated
by giving
the damage minimal attention and by consistently attributing
the
difficulties of the smashed (and then boycotted) country
to communist
mismanagement. While featuring selected refugees who
presented the most
gruesome stories and blamed the communists, the Times
repeatedly sneered
at the "bitter and inescapable ironies...for those who
opposed the war"
and who had "looked to the communists as saviors of the
unhappy land"
(ed, March 21, 1977). This not only implicitly denied
U.S.
responsibility for the unhappiness, but misrepresented
the position of
most antiwar activists, who did not look on the Communists
as saviors,
but objected to the murderous aggression designed to
deny their rule,
which the Times supported.
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
The NATO-Media Lie Machine: gGenocideh
in Kosovo? by Edward S. Herman & David Peterson
Media & Left NATO Propaganda
Having encouraged the disintegration of Yugoslavia from
1991, and
actually obstructed peaceful solutions to the problem
of protecting
minorities in breakaway states, the policies of Germany
and the United
States in particular assured ethnic violence. Their chosen
villain was
Serbia, and an intense official and media focus on Serb
crimes followed.
This involved not only selectivity of outrage and a misreading
of causes
and locus of responsibility, but also a demonization
process helped
along by the one-sided, ahistorical portrayal of events
frequently
infused with disinformation (as in the British news station
ITNfs
fabrication of a gdeathh or gconcentrationh camp
at the Trnopolje
refugee center in 1992; see Thomas Deichmann, gThe Picture
That Fooled
the World,h Living Marxism, Feb. 1997).
Demonization and the continuous purveying of atrocity
news created a
moral environment receptive to charges of genocide. This
reached deeply
into the liberal and left communities and media, with
many liberals or
leftists passionate supporters of gdoing something,h
including the
NATO bombing war. This was to be expected of the New
Republic, where the
notion of collective Serb guilt a la Daniel Jonah Goldhagenfs
Hitlerfs
Willing Executioners, conveniently justifying attacking
Serbian civil
society and committing war crimes, found a happy home.
(Stacy Sullivan,
gMilosevicfs Willing Executioners,h New Republic,
May 10, 1999). But
it also affected the Nation, whose UN Correspondent Ian
Williams was
pleased to see the UN bypassed in the interest of humanitarian
bombing
(April 2, 1999), and where Kai Bird (June 14, 1999) and
Christopher
Hitchens (November 29, 1999, among others) both found
Serb behavior g
genocidalh in the course of their quasi-defenses of
NATO policy. Only
Hitchens seemed to suggest that the Serbs were trying
to exterminate a
people (based on ludicrous arguments; see Herman, gHitchens
on Serbia
and East Timor,h Z Magazine, April 1999).
In the mainstream media, genocide was used even more lavishly
and
uncritically. Often it was presented in the form of assertions
by
officials, with numbers like Cohenfs 100,000, but reporters
or
commentators rarely if ever challenged the figures or
questioned whether
the actions designated as genocidal were intended to
exterminate a
people. It was rare indeed to mention the difference
between trains to
Auschwitz and to the Albanian border, as did Julie Churchill
in the
Guardian.
Genocide was used as a symbol of aversion and disapproval,
justifying
extreme measures against the gdictatorh and his people?the
media felt
impelled to call Milosevic a gdictatorh even though
this put a crimp
in condemning gordinary Serbsh as responsible for his
actions, but
they managed to do both at the same time (Anthony Lewis,
gThe Question
of Evil,h NYT, June 22, 1999). Some commentators were
carried away by
their own passion, David Rieff, a New York Times, Wall
Street Journal,
and Chistopher Hitchens favorite, asserting that gthe
Milosevic regime
was trying to eradicate an entire peopleh (gWars Without
End?,h NYT,
September 23, 1999). But most commentators were satisfied
with using the
word without getting specific as to meaning or providing
facts. They
never acknowledged any military rationale to the post-bombing
expulsions
and killings: it was evil people doing evil things for
evil reasons.
In a masterpiece of the NATO anti-genocide apologetics
genre, the New
York Times provided Sebastian Jungerfs gA Different
Kind of Killingh
(NYT Magazine, February 27, 2000), where it is explained
that even if
the number of bodies found in Kosovo were not of genocidal
scope and
some stories turned out to be untrue, nevertheless gA
single murder can
be considered an act of genocide if it can be shown that
there was an
intent to kill everyone else in that personfs group.h
Junger then
recounts his visit to the site of an unclaimed body of
a teenage woman,
allegedly kidnapped, raped, and killed by Serbian girregular
forces.h
Junger then says that, git was not until this century
that a mechanized
army carried out such crimes in the service of its government.
That is
genocide; the rest is just violence.h Junger makes not
the slightest
effort to show that the girregular forcesh had done
this as part of a
government plan and gin the service of its governmenth
rather than on
their own, or that the KLA or U.S. army didnft carry
out similar acts.
In short, this is completely worthless nonsense?but it
pins the word
genocide on the official enemy, and therefore the New
York Times allows
this travesty to appear in its sunday magazine.
Some Comparative Data
We can also measure the spectacular politicization of
the word genocide
by comparing its lavish use in describing Serb conduct
in Kosovo with
its minimal use for Turkeyfs treatment of its Kurds
in the 1990s
(indeed, for decades) and Indonesiafs treatment of East
Timorese in
1999 as well as in earlier years. The force of this comparison
is
strengthened by the facts that Turkey killed far more
Kurds in the 1990s
than the Serbs killed Albanians in Kosovo, not only before
the bombing
(whose number presumably elicited the ghumanitarianh
intervention) but
even including those killed during the 78-day bombing
and war (see
Chomskyfs New Military Humanism). Indonesiafs invasion-occupation
led
to the death of almost a third of the East Timor population
(1975-1980),
and Indonesia was subsequently responsible for the 1998-1999
slaughter
and expulsion of a still untold number of East Timorese
associated with
a UN-sponsored election. The number of East Timorese
killed in this
latest round of Indonesian terror far exceeded the pre-bombing
total of
Kosovo Albanian victims?estimates run from 3,000-6,000
killed even
before the August 30, 1999 referendum unleashed unrestrained
Indonesian
destruction and murder?and the grand total for 1999 is
surely far larger
than the overall total of Kosovo Albanians killed by
the Serbs in 1998
and 1999.
But as Turkey and Indonesia are clients of the United
States and the
recipients of aid, military supplies, and diplomatic
support from the
United States, Britain, and the Western powers generally,
their human
rights crimes are never referred to by Western officials
as genocide. In
fact, in a droll feature of the NATO campaign against
Serb genocide in
Kosovo, Turkey, a member of NATO, took part in the war
against
Yugoslavia with direct bombing missions and the provision
of bases for
flights of other NATO powers, perhaps generously reallocating
its own
forces from the ethnic cleansing of Kurds toghumanitarianh
NATO
service.
Given this warm relationship between the NATO powers and
Turkey and
Indonesia, we would expect the NATO media to follow in
the footsteps of
their leaders and treat Turkey and Indonesia kindly,
refraining from
serious investigative effort and the enthusiastic searches
for gmass
gravesh they pursued in Kosovo, and avoiding the use
of an invidious
word like genocide in reference to these client states,
no matter how
applicable and inconsistent with their usage of the word
as regards
Serbia. This expectation is fully realized.
We will limit ourselves here to usage in the New York
Times, although we
believe the findings applicable to the general run of
mainstream media.
In the Times the bias is startling, and has some unexpected
sidelights.
The accompanying table shows that in the year 1999, the
word genocide
was ascribed to the Serbs in Kosovo in 85 different articles,
including
15 that began on the front page, and in 16 editorials
and op-ed columns.
In some of these articles the word was used repeatedly.
(In one
remarkable example, during the current year and outside
our sample
proper, Michael Ignatieff repeated the word genocide
11 times in a
single op-ed [February 13, 2000]).
By contrast, the word showed up in the Times in only 9
items referring
to East Timor in 1999, only once in an editorial or opinion
piece, and
only 15 times for East Timor in the entire decade of
the 1990s. The word
was never used in a front-page article during the 1990s.
Furthermore, no
Times reporter or editorial writer ever used the word
genocide in
application to East Timor over the entire period, 1975-1999.
(That is to
say, in all instances where the word did appear, it did
not express the
opinion of the Times writer, but was attributed to another
source.)
Anthony Lewis, who repeatedly referred to Serb action
as genocidal and
called for Western intervention there, spoke of ghuman
rights abuses in
East Timorh (July 12, 1993), but he never called it
genocide or urged
intervention. Barbara Crossette repeatedly complimented
Suharto for
bringing gstabilityh to the region. In a notable mention
of the word
genocide, veteran Times reporter Henry Kamm explicitly
denied its
application to East Timor, calling such usage ghyperbole,h
and
allocating the mass deaths to gcruel warfare and the
starvation that
accompanied it on this historically food-short islandh
(February 15,
1981).
Equally remarkable, the table also shows that the word
genocide was
never once used in application to Turkey and its treatment
of its Kurds
in 1999, and was used only five times for such a relationship
in the
decade of the 1990s, never in a front-page article. However,
in a
wonderful illustration of how the Times follows the line
of U.S. foreign
policy, the table shows that Iraqfs mistreatment of
its Kurds in the
years 1990-1999 was described as genocidal 22 times,
in five cases in
front-page articles.
In short, only gworthy victimsh?that is, the victims
of officially
designated enemies like Yugoslavia and Iraq?suffer from
genocide; those
that are unworthy, like East Timorese and the Turkish
Kurds, are merely
subject to gcruel warfareh and adverse natural forces,
as Henry Kamm
explained in regard to East Timor. So the Western media
and g
international communityh will be mobilized on behalf
of the former, and
the latter will be compelled to suffer in silence. But
as we have
stressed, there never was genocide in Kosovo, so that
the NATO war there
was based on a lie. And that lie, like the May 27 indictment
of
Milosevic by the War Crimes Tribunal, served mainly to
provide a moral
cover that allowed NATO to bomb the hostage population
of Serbia into
submission. That population now joins Iraqfs in being
subject to
further gsanctions of mass destructionh whose effects
offer a much
closer fit to ggenocideh than the Serb actions which,
allegedly,
precipitated NATOfs war.
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream by Noam Chomsky, from a talk at Z Media Institute June 1997
By Noam Chomsky
If youfve read George Orwellfs Animal Farm which
he wrote in the
mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian
state. It
was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote
an introduction to
Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30
years later.
Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction
to Animal Farm was
about "Literary Censorship in England" and what it says
is that
obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and
its totalitarian
structure. But he said England is not all that different.
We donft have
the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty
much the same.
People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong
kind of
thoughts are cut out.
He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional
structure.
He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the
press is owned by
wealthy people who only want certain things to reach
the public. The
other thing he says is that when you go through the elite
education
system, when you go through the proper schools in Oxford,
you learn that
there are certain things itfs not proper to say and
there are certain
thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization
role of
elite institutions and if you donft adapt to that, youfre
usually out.
Those two sentences more or less tell the story.
When you critique the media and you say, look, here is
what Anthony
Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry.
They say, quite
correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write
anything I like.
All this business about pressures and constraints is
nonsense because If
m never under any pressure." Which is completely true,
but the point is
that they wouldnft be there unless they had already
demonstrated that
nobody has to tell them what to write because they are
going say the
right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk,
or something,
and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never
would have made it
to the positions where they can now say anything they
like. The same is
mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological
disciplines.
They have been through the socialization system.
Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system.
What do you expect
the news to be like? Well, itfs pretty obvious. Take
the New York Times.
Itfs a corporation and sells a product. The product
is audiences. They
donft make money when you buy the newspaper. They are
happy to put it
on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money
when you buy the
newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product
is privileged
people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers,
you know,
top-level decision-making people in society. You have
to sell a product
to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers
(that is, other
businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers,
or whatever, they
are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to
other corporations.
In the case of the elite media, itfs big businesses.
Well, what do you expect to happen? What would you predict
about the
nature of the media product, given that set of circumstances?
What would
be the null hypothesis, the kind of conjecture that youfd
make assuming
nothing further. The obvious assumption is that the product
of the media,
what appears, what doesnft appear, the way it is slanted,
will reflect
the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions,
and the power
systems that are around them. If that wouldnft happen,
it would be kind
of a miracle.
Okay, then comes the hard work. You ask, does it work
the way you
predict? Well, you can judge for yourselves. Therefs
lots of material
on this obvious hypothesis, which has been subjected
to the hardest
tests anybody can think of, and still stands up remarkably
well. You
virtually never find anything in the social sciences
that so strongly
supports any conclusion, which is not a big surprise,
because it would
be miraculous if it didnft hold up given the way the
forces are
operating.
The next thing you discover is that this whole topic is
completely taboo.
If you go to the Kennedy School of Government or Stanford,
or somewhere,
and you study journalism and communications or academic
political
science, and so on, these questions are not likely to
appear. That is,
the hypothesis that anyone would come across without
even knowing
anything that is not allowed to be expressed, and the
evidence bearing
on it cannot be discussed. Well, you predict that too.
If you look at
the institutional structure, you would say, yeah, sure,
thatfs got to
happen because why should these guys want to be exposed?
Why should they
allow critical analysis of what they are up to take place?
The answer is,
there is no reason why they should allow that and, in
fact, they donft.
Again, it is not purposeful censorship. It is just that
you donft make
it to those positions. That includes the left (what is
called the left),
as well as the right. Unless you have been adequately
socialized and
trained so that there are some thoughts you just donf
t have, because
if you did have them, you wouldnft be there. So you
have a second order
of prediction which is that the first order of prediction
is not allowed
into the discussion.
The last thing to look at is the doctrinal framework in
which this
proceeds. Do people at high levels in the information
system, including
the media and advertising and academic political science
and so on, do
these people have a picture of what ought to happen when
they are
writing for each other (not when they are making graduation
speeches)?
When you make a commencement speech, it is pretty words
and stuff. But
when they are writing for one another, what do people
say about it?
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
Freeing the Media: The Exception to the
Rulers-A Talk Given at the Z Media Institute
by Amy Goodman in October 1997
Excepted from the full article
Three years ago NPR commissioned Mumia to do a series
of commentaries
not related to his case. When the editor left the prison
she said that
these were some of the finest commentaries she had ever
heard on any
subject. They were set to air. They promoted them heavily.
Then the day
before they were scheduled to air the Fraternal Order
of Police was
having a national meeting in DC. They put tremendous
pressure on NPR not
to air these commentaries. NPR knew what they were doing.
They had
promoted this heavily, they weighed whether to air this,
but they just
could not take the heat. So they pulled the commentaries,
saying they
werenft anything special. They put them in a vault.
No other commentary
is possible now because of the crackdown on all prisoners
in the
Pennsylvania system.
I am not sure why it is NPR wonft release the Mumia tapes.
Perhaps if
Mumia is executed they can have an exclusive airing of
the only unaired
commentaries of Mumia Abu-Jamal. They say it is because
the case is in
litigation. Mumia and the Prison Radio Project are suing
NPR to release
these commentaries.
You see the kind of ripple effect that a cowardly act
like NPRfs has.
They set precedent three years ago and then they turn
it into a
principle. Then you have smaller networks like Temple
University Public
Radio Network citing NPR as the example of why they wonft
do it. Fewer
and fewer journalists will dare to do these kind of stories,
they do not
want to be frozen out of the mainstream network of which
NPR is very
much a part. Many now call NPR National Police Radio
for what they have
done.
When we aired the Mumia commentaries we held a news conference
at the
National Press Club. NPR would not comment, saying Mumiafs
case was in
litigation. Every death row prisonerfs case is in litigation
until they
are executed. Until it is resolved. So in saying they
wouldnft cover it
until it was resolved, they are saying they are not going
to cover the
case.
A few months ago NPR called poet Martin Espada and asked
him to do a
series of poems to air as commentaries on "All Things
Considered." So
Martin said great. He happened to be going to Philadelphia
and he said
"hmm, what is on peoples minds in Philly." The one thing
that
came up
that was on everyonefs mind was Mumia Abu-Jamal. So
he wrote a poem
about that and faxed it in and he didnft get a call
back. He couldnft
understand it. They had pursued him to get these poems
and he thought it
was a very good poem. In the poem he talks about Walt
Whitman, poetry,
Mumia, and the witnesses that were coming forward to
say that they were
coerced by the police. It was done the way NPR wanted
it: as poetry but
also dealing with the news of the day.
He finally called them and said "whatfs up." They said
"no, we wonft
be airing it." He said "but you asked me for a poem."
NPR said "yes but
we canf t do this poem." He said "Why canft you." They
said "because
it deals with Mumia Abu-Jamal." He said "what are you
talking about." He
was completely out of the loop when it came to "national
police radio."
He said "wait a second. Youfre saying that youfre not
going to air
this for political reasons?" And they said "yes." They
donft even cover
it up anymore. This is the arrogance of a very powerful
corporate-
supported network.
"Democracy Now!" did an interview with Martin Espada talking
about this
case. NPR said they had every right not to air his poetry.
So they can
choose what voices are heard. Which is true of any outlet.
But because
it is public we have more of a responsibility to protect
the airwaves.
They are not Pacificafs, NPRfs, ABCfs, or NBCfs.
They are not owned
by these corporations. They are leased. They are public
airwaves. We
should protect them and use them. It has always been
my philosophy that
it is our job to go to where the silence is and say something.
We are
not entertainers. We are reporters. We go to places that
are unpopular.
We bring voices out that are unpopular. We are not here
to run
popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues
that we feel are
critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure
the media, to
shame the media to go to these places where so many in
certain
populations end up.
Press Briefings
I want to talk about going to press conferences of
President Clinton. Sometimes getting in a question there
is even harder
than getting into a prison. I had been in Washington
for the last year
covering the election and going to a lot of press briefings
at the White
House. If you watch CSPAN or the news you might notice
that Mike McCurry,
the White House press secretary, is asked a lot of questions
but they
all seem to be of the same ilk. Why is it that when there
are a lot of
journalists there, and youfre always seeing people fighting
to get a
question in?
Well, every day the White House press secretary has two
meetings. I
havenft been to the first. I just learned about it.
In the morning he
has something called a "gaggle," an off-the-record meeting
with
reporters where they basically get the agenda straight
for the day. I
donft think journalists should be meeting with these
guys off the
record because it is their chance to spin the news, of
course. You can
also say, based on those meetings, "a source said," and
then you can
quote Mike McCurry in the next paragraph and it sounds
like McCurry and
the source are agreeing, when it is the same person.
It is a way for
those in power not to be accountable because they can
put out anything
they want and they are simply a source. So, there is
the gaggle in the
morning. In the afternoon there is the White House press
briefing where
the White House journalists--these are the ones that
hang out at the
White House all day; people like Wolf Blitzer and others
from the
various networks--get the latest news that the White
House wants to put
out. Now, think about who can be at the White House all
day. Most news
organizations--certainly the smaller ones, the alternative
ones, the
ethnic press, the nonprofit press--cannot afford to have
a person sitting
at the White House all day because we have one person
covering all of
Washington. So you end up with the most powerful corporate
press being
the ones that are part of the "White House press corps."
Even when Clinton goes abroad, say, to Indonesia in 1994,
and you go to
that press conference or you see it on TV you say "God,
the same
questions are asked. Does every reporter in the world
have the same
question? Display the same ignorance?" No, it is the
same set of
reporters that travel with him everywhere.
This year when Clinton was holding a news conference after
his
reelection, I tried to get into that press conference,
as opposed to the
press briefings that I can go to every day. Although
even in the press
briefings you see the gold plates on each of the chairs,
The Wall Street
Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times. Pacifica
doesnft have
one of those gold plates. I have to stand at the back
of the room. Of
course someone is always absent, so I run to the front
and sit down.
When it is really crowded I climb up on the camera ladders
and hang
there so I can get my questions in. All this makes reporters
from
smaller news outlets, from alternative news outlets,
look a bit crazy.
Because youfve got Andrea Mitchell and Wolf Blitzer
in the front, they
spend their five minutes combing their hair, because
they know the
camera is going to be on them. When the White House spokesperson
or the
President is there, they say from the front row, calm
and secure, "Mr.
President" and he says, without fear, "yes Wolf." Wolf
asks his question,
no need to rush. He talks quietly and the President listens.
Youfve got
me 20 rows back yelling "Mr. President," jumping up and
down, wearing
the brightest colors you can wear. This is how it really
works. You look
crazed, and you are by the time you get into one of these
press
conferences.
Ifll give you an example of the first and last one I
went to. July
Griffin, the Washington bureau chief at Pacifica, called
to reserve me a
seat at Clintonf s press conference. The White House
liaison to the
press said, "Ifm sorry you wonft be having a reserved
seat, but we can
put you in the next room. Amy can watch it on TV." Now,
I can stay at
home in New York and watch it on television. I do shout
questions at him
from my TV, but that doesnft have much effect.
So, Julie said "No. She doesnft want to watch him on
TV. She wants to
be, not only at the press conference, but in the front
row.
The liaison said "Sorry, you canft be in the front row.
That is
reserved for White House reporters."
Julie asked "Why is it reserved for a certain set of people?"
He responded, "Because they have a special relationship
with the
President."
Well, clearly that is the special relationship we want
to cover as media
critics, and that we feel has to be broken. The liaison
finally said
"Donft take it up with me. Take it up with the heads
of the White House
press corps."
Julie said "You mean we have to ask Westinghouse, GE,
and Disney whether
Pacifica can be included in this news conference? I think
we have the
answer."
So, I went to this press conference. We were led across
the street to
the old executive office building. I was running as fast
as I could. I
wanted to be the first person into the room. I raced
up the stairs when
everyone else was taking the elevator. I went to the
first row and there
were the name plates for Andrea, Wolf, etc. Then I went
to where they
had just white pieces of paper with journalists names,
about six rows
back. I could not find my name. I ended up viewing with
the cameramen at
the back. Every time I poked my head up they would say
"get down"
because I was in the way of the cameras.
That is the way it works. That is why it is so difficult
to break
through this media blockade that is actually created
by the media itself.
So, if youfre wondering why the tough questions are
not asked, this
explains it.
I have gotten a chance to ask a number of questions of
Mike McCurry, and
also, at the State Department briefings, of Nicholas
Burns. One the
questions Ifd been persuing is the issue of Indonesia
and East Timor
before it became a major issue. I was pressing Mike McCurry
as to why
President Clinton would be trying to sell F-16s to the
Indonesian
dictatorship when you look at the genocide that is occurring
in East
Timor, with a third of the population killed there. The
first time I
asked a question along those lines, I had then walked
out of the press
briefing and I heard one of the big journalists saying
to another "Why
do they let people in like that?" Then I looked over
and she said in
quizzical condescending fashion, "East Timor?"
I said "Yes. Would you like to know something about it.
In fact, this
week is a particularly critical time."
Looking down her nose she said "No. I donft want to know about it."
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
Media Literacy by Cynthia Peters (February 1998) on ZNet
Excerpted
from the full article
When my daughter came home from kindergarten telling me
that her school
was teaching her about the media, advertising, and such
things as toy
packaging, I was impressed. She was beginning to get
the tools necessary
to think critically about the blizzard of advertising
and commercialism
we confront everyday. Itfs always been clear that no
matter how much
parents de-emphasize TV or avoid the malls and the Disney
stores, kids
will be hit hard by the corporations that want them to
consume their
products and their values. We canft protect kids from
all the media
messages, but we can empower them to be critical. We
can make them
"media literate," the goal, I discovered, of an important
political
movement that has gained momentum in the last few years.
With programs sprouting all over the country, finding
outlets in schools
and churches, the media literacy movement aims to equip
children with
the skills they need to critically view commercials and
be better
consumers. Some media literacy programs also teach children
how to use
various mediums themselves. According to the Aspen Institute
Leadership
Forum on Media Literacy (1992) and the Canadian Association
for Media
Literacy, media literacy is the ability to "access, analyze,
evaluate
and produce communication in a variety of forms."
Is this a long overdue anti-corporate critique of the
media? Not exactly.
The people who preach media literacy hail from all over
the political
spectrum. Their funding sources are everything from the
Catholic Church
to Disney Corporation and MTV. They use media literacy
as a tool to
counter whatever media messages they find particularly
abhorrent or as a
neutral form of "education."
For the Right, therefs too much emphasis on birth control,
homosexuality, and single motherhood on TV. For the Methodists,
TV
violence stands in contrast to their biblical faith that
"every person
whom we encounter is as precious as one created in the
image of God."
For Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services,
teachers who
bring a media literacy curriculum into the classroom
are doing nothing
less than "protecting the future of our country" by educating
kids to
say no to smoking, drinking and marijuana use.
For liberals, advertising that does not deliver on its
promise abridges
our rights as consumers. For grassroots organizations
that put
communication tools directly into the hands of urban
youth, for example,
media literacy helps young people "navigate modern times."
Almost no one wants to look at key questions of who owns
and controls
the media. There is little attention to the profit-driven
nature of our
economy and how that gives rise to a commercially driven
media. With the
exception of organized religion, most of the media literacy
movement
emphasizes awareness over social change, and places responsibility
for
mediating the media squarely on the shoulders of parents
and teachers,
and the children themselves. As several authors from
the media center of
the Judge Baker Childrenfs Center in Boston put it,
"We need to teach
children how to watch television safely." [Boston Globe,
December 14,
1997]
The media literacy movement has the potential to be an
important
educational and social change tool. It should provide
the opportunity to
educate children not just about deceptive toy packaging,
but about where
we look, in this consumer culture, to get our needs met.
We could be
investigating not just how well the dollfs body-fluid
mechanism works,
but how sexist toys demand certain kinds of play from
girls. Beyond
being critical of the inane sit coms and troubling TV
violence from the
broadcast world, we could investigate the industry more
deeply and begin
to understand how, as a system, it is designed to produce
shows that
deliver advertising. We could ask what sort of pressures
are at work on
the TV producers given that they work in a monopolized,
profit-driven
industry. We could ask how schools have come to deliver
captive
audiences to the corporate world. The media literacy
movement should
lead us to ask deep questions about the nature of our
economy, the way
we get our needs met, and the way we experience culture.
It should
persuade us that being knowledgeable about the media
is not enough, that
being vigilant about our childrenfs use of toys and
TV is not enough,
and that joining forces to reform the worst of the industry
is not
enough. The media literacy movement should not leave
it to the Right and
organized religion to put forward alternative values
to those delivered
by TV and consumer culture. "
Back to link 8: What is alternative media? What is mainstream media?
[link 9] Some alternative sources of news and media criticism are listed here. Scroll down to see all of them.
Terror/Afghanistan and other issues from
FAIR and Institute for Public Accuracy
More current stuff on media and war
More Media Resources
Other Sections of TokyoProgressive
My students interact with media/Teaching
Links
If you came from the presentation, this will take you back there.
If you came from the Link Table of Contents, you will be returned there.
Terror/Afghanistan and other issues from FAIR and Institute for Public Accuracy
BBC changes policy on Israeli "assassinations"
Fair Site
FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering
well-documented
criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We
work to invigorate
the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity
in the press and
by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public
interest,
minority and dissenting viewpoints. As an anti-censorship
organization,
we expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists
when
they are muzzled. As a progressive group, FAIR believes
that structural
reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant
media conglomerates,
establish independent public broadcasting and promote
strong non-profit
sources of information.Fair Action Alerts
CNN Says Focus on Civilian Casualties Would Be "Perverse"
Fox: Civilian Casualties Not News
Op-Ed Echo Chamber: Little space for dissent to the military line
Other
Action Alerts and media Advisories
Institute for Public Accuracy's News Releases
War: Information, Analysis, Policy Options
Afghan Women Warn Against the Northern Alliance
WTO Summit in Qatar: 'Globalization' in a Time of War
War on Terrorism? * Bombing Campaign * Cluster Bombs
* Cipro Patenting * Civil Liberties
Terror Aftermath: Deeper Analysis
Institute for Public Accuracy's News Releases
Resources on Trade, World Bank and IMF
Trade and Terrorism: Interviews Available
Critics Blast Treasury Secretary For Comments on Debt Relief
Trade Policies: Africa and China
Perspectives on Africa and Aids
Back to link 9: Alternative media links
More current stuff on media and war
Reporters
Have to Press Harder About Afghanistan by Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan
No Surprise at Rumors of New Atrocities by Our 'Foot-Soldiers' by Robert Fisk
RAWA's appeal to the UN and World community
TERRORISM
AND A JUST WAR Let's Not Fool Ourselves About What We're Doing In
Afghanistan
by Howard Zinn
TokyoProgressive's ChocoPaul Newsletter
Back to link 9: Alternative media links
Other Sections of TokyoProgressive
Other Research Areas from TokyoProgressive
Includes links and articles on Disability, Education,
East Timor, Globalization, Japan, Labour, Language
Learning, Latin America, Law and Human Rights, the Middle
East, Race, Sexuality, Yugoslavia and more. Such as:
Education: Rethinking Schools, Child Prostitution, and more
East
Timor/Indonesia: East Timor Questions And Answers,
Answers -Chomsky, Shalon and Albert,
East Timor Restrospective-Chomsky, U.S. Trained
the Butchers of East Timor-Ed Vulliamy and
Antony Barnett, U.S. Guilty of War Crimes-Alan Nairn
(arrested journalist) and many more
Environment
and Health: Warming and Corporate Profit, 17 Reasons To Avoid
GE (GM) Food, Trade
Wars: Where's the Beef, Monsanto's Cremation Starts in
Karnataka, India, Vandana Shiva: Stopping
Biopiracy, HOW BIG BUSINESS IS HURTING US! , Lawsuit
seeks to force FDA to test genetically engineered food
you're probably already eating, AIDS and South Africa,
Gore and Big Business, Rainforest Action Network, Center
for Science in the Public Interest (Health and Nutrition),
Global Watch / Genetically Modified Food,
AIDS controversies, Biotech Watch, GM Food
Food: (Cross referenced with Environment and./or Globalization): Food Standards, Food Safety, Food Quiz,
Alcohol, International Organizations, Antibiotics and food
Globalization,
Economics and Business: Global Warming and Corporate Profit,
No Logo--Naomi Klein,
Mad Cow in Japan--Coverup?, Ajinomoto and Other Corporate
Criminals, Ralph Nadar:
Tokaimura and Brit-Rail Accident Both Caused by Privatisation,
AIDS and
South Africa, Gore and Big Business,Chomsky-Privatising
Education, Vijay
Prashad-Indian Workers Fight Pepsi Cola, Chomsky- Forgiving
World Bank
and IMF Loans: Why?,Patrick Bond-Zimbabwe's Crisis Showcases
Reasons for
Bank/IMF Protest, IMF and WTO Killing Kids in the Name
of "Free Trade",
Cancel Third World Debt, MAI (Multilateral Agreement
on Investment):
U.S. media Fails to Inform Public on Dangerous
Plan, Hahnel- Fighting
Corporate Sponsored Globalization, Sonia Shah-Our Deeply
Twisted
Understanding Of the World, Hahnel-The Right and Wrong
Reasons for
Opposing China's Entry into the WTO, The APEC Meeting:
Property Rights
Over Human Rights -Again, Weisbrot-The Looting of Russia
Also: Just Stop It! (Do Nike factories
exploit workers?, Olympic
Living Wage Project,Sweatshop Watch, Corporate Watch
Intl. Site,
Corporate Watch Japanese Site, Students organizing Against
Sweatshops,
Fair Trade Federation, Jubilee 2000 Debt Forgiveness,
Economy Watch,
Global Economic Crisis, ZNET Global Economic Crisis Page
Japan:
Mad Cow Coverup?--Aug 2001, Hitotsubashi University Student reports,
Looking into Japanese Police Corruption, Japanese History
Textbooks,
Nanking and Tinanmen, Okinawa and the U.S. Military in
Northeast Asia,
Okinawa Citizens, U.S. Bases and the Dugong, Playing
Cat and Mouse with
North Korea, Japanese Military, SDF, Unemployment, Japanese
Activists
Fight Globalization, Japanese Election Cheating, Japan
and East Timor,
Greenpeace, San Francisco Newspaper Report on Tokaimura,
Japanese
Nuclear Industry Unsafe, REALLY Free? A Typical
Japanese Newspaper Day
(Why I feel like Throwing Up), Japanese Democracy:
Is it dying?
And:
Japanese Domestic Human Rights Violations and 2 songs
by Paul, Issue: GM
Food, HIV Murderer Acquitted, Japanese Injustice (Nepali
defendant),
Net censorship, March 5 2001 Intl Women's Day Petition
to Make War
Illegal , February 28 Ehime Maru: Answering Richard Cohen
in the
Washington Post, Japan Computer Access, Darrell Moen,
William Wetherall,
Watanabe Takesato, Rights of the Disabled (Tokyo Observer
18),
Balancing the Tax System? The 5% Consumption Tax (The
Tokyo Observer 1)
The Search for Labor, the Search for Work (The Tokyo
Observer 1),
Lock-Out: Unemployment in Japan (Feb. 1999), Youth and
the Economy (Mar.
1999)
And
Language Minorities in Japanese Schools (Aug. 1998) ,
Language Reform on
the Kitchen Table (Nov. 1998), Is the Foreign Population
a Hotbet of
Criminals? (Jan. 2001), Shinjuku's Homeless (The Tokyo
Observer 2), The
Homeless: Villains, or Victims? (Aug. 1999), A History
of Abuse (The
Tokyo Observer 2),Abuse in Detention (Feb. 1999), Movement
for Residence
Rights of Undocumented Workers Begins (Nov. 1999), Why
Can't We Get the
Pill in Japan? (Tokyo Observer 19), Before You Sign That
Organ Donor
Card, Rearming Japan (May 1999), North Korea (The Tokyo
Observer 18),
Questions on the Tokaimura Accident (Nov. 1999), Genpatsu
Gypsies (Oct.
2000),
And
Japan's secret war: Japan's race against time to build
its own atomic
bomb (Jun. 1999), The Nago Election (Apr. 1998), Attached:
Tokyo,
Inamine and the Struggle for Okinawan Self-Determination
(Dec. 1998),
The Ishihara Victory: Will They Throw Us Out of Tokyo?
(June 1999),
Foreign Worker Groups Protest Gov. Ishihara's Racist
Remarks (May 2000),
Soldiers in the Subways: Ishihara's Tokyo Wargames (Oct.
2000), Mori's
Anti-Foreign "Gaffes" (Jun. 2000),Toward Reform in Criminal
Reporting
(Dec. 1999), Reference: Amnesty International's Report
(Not from our
archives)
And The Pachinko Scam (The Tokyo Observer 18), The CIA
in Japan (Tokyo
Observer 13), Review: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the
Wake of World War
II (Mar. 2000) The Politics of Amnesia: Reconstructing
the Asia-Pacific
War (Sep. 1999)
And:
Japan
Progressive Links: Progressive Networks,Portals /ĢŖlbg[NĢüč,
Foreign
Residents in Japan/ ŻśOlĢ¶ÉĀ¢ÄEFuTCg,
Individuals'
Sites on Japanese Society andCulture/ ĀlĢEEFuTCg:
ś{ŠļA¶
», Human Rights, Peace, Globalization and Social Justice/
l A½aA
O[o[C[VAŠļ³`, Union-Related and Legal/
Jg/@I
āč
Latin
America: Latin America Watch, Colombia Crisis Pages, Chiapas,
Puerto Rico (The
American "Okinawa"), Sanctions: Killing Cuba, Pinochet
and Chile, Joyce
Horman on the Killing of Her Husband : Why Pinochet
Must Go on Trial,
U.S. Role in Death of Charles Horman, Corporate Involvement
in the
Pinochet Coup, CIA Involvement In Chile Coup, Free Lori
Berensen, a
young woman held prisoner in Peru, ZNET en Espanol
Justice,
Law and Human Rights: Wrongful Executions, Int Court of
Justice, Immigration, Police Brutality,
Death Penalty, Amnesty International, Human Rights World
Map, World
Organization Against Torture, Human Rights Watch, Nichibenren/Japan
Federation of Bar Associations, Japanese Injustice
(Nepali defendant),
FBI: Federal Bureau of Intimidation (Howard Zinn, U.S.
Historian), The
APEC Meeting: Property Rights Over Human Rights -Again,
Japanese
Domestic Human Rights Violations and 2 songs by Paul
North
and South: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Pentagon, International
War Crimes, CIA,
Transnational Corporations, South Asia on ZNET, Pakistan
Sexuality
and Gender: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive
Power of Advertising,
by Jean Kilbourne, Advertising and Women--Norman Solomon,
Feminist Collections: A
Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, Feminism and
Gender, Queer Watch
Yugoslavia
and Kosovo: Bombing of Chinese Embassy was Intentional
(U.S. media Ignores Story),
Kosovo and Doublespeak-Herman, Rambouillet: Another
Gilf of Tonkin
-Ackerman, NY Times Ignores Violation of War Powers
Act by U.S., Kosovo
Lesson/Victory for Whom? ,Bombing of Chinese Embassy
was Intentional
(U.S. media Ignores Story), War Diary from Belgrade-20-year-old
woman,
Kosovo (and Yugoslavia) on ZNET and more
Back to link 9: Alternative media links
My students interact with media/Teaching
Links
Tesolers for Social Responsibility
Professor Dennis Fox (Radical Psychology)
Professor Robert W. Jensen (Journalism)
Professor Darrell Moen (Anthropology, U.S. Policy)
Same student discusses what he has read on the same two issues