Posts tagged politics
This Will Not Appear on TED: Nick Hanauer on Income Inequality
Last week TED, the smarty conference series for the well-healed set, faced accusations of censorship when it came out that they were not going to publish Nick Hanauer’s recent talk on income inequality.
The reason given for its omission by Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, was twofold: the talk was too political for an election year despite the fact that the words “Democrats” and “Republicans” are used only once, and in the same breath and the same vein; and that the organization only posts one video a day from a pool of 250 TED Talks and another ten thousand TEDx Talks (the conference’s licensed third-party conferences from around the world).
However Anderson tried to spin it, you can’t really say the talk was censored. Hanauer, a very wealthy, serial entrepreneur, did appear, did talk and the video — as seen above — is available online. It’s just not featured at TED.com.
Salon’s Alex Pareene has an interesting critique of TED as currently constructed. At it’s most blunt:
At this point TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism, with multiple events worldwide, awards and grants to TED-certified high achievers, and a list of speakers that would cost a fortune if they didn’t agree to do it for free out of public-spiritedness.
I don’t agree that TED is as worthless as Alex makes it sound, but his article has important ideas about what constitutes partisanship today, and how political and economic consensus is created by ruling classes today. Well worth the read. — Michael
It’s a fairly basic constitutional issue for the press, whether or not there is a reporter’s privilege. It’s something a lot of people outside the press don’t really understand, don’t really care about. I think the basic issue is whether you can have a democracy without aggressive investigative reporting and I don’t believe you can. So that’s why I’m fighting it.
James Risen, reporter, New York Times, in a talk at the National Press Club. ‘Reporter’s Privilege’ Under Fire From Obama Administration Amid Broader War On Leaks.
Background: The Obama Justice Department continues its attempts to force Risen to testify against CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling by arguing that Reporters’ Privilege does not exist when the information revealed is considered illegal.
In this case, the CIA’s Sterling is charged with leaking classified information about a plot against the Iranian government that Risen then used in his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
Via the Huffington Post:
While the Obama administration hasn’t prosecuted those responsible for torture during the Bush years, it is taking a strong stand against a former official believed to have supplied information to the media about use of torture and other controversial tactics during the previous administration.
In January, the Justice Department charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou with disclosing classified information to the media; The FBI claims to have evidence linking him to a 2008 New York Times story detailing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
In another notable case, the DOJ charged Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act, claiming the former National Security Agency official provided classified information of gross NSA mismanagement to a Baltimore Sun reporter. The government’s case collapsed in 2011 and Drake pleaded guilty only to a misdemeanor.
The crackdown hasn’t gone unnoticed among reporters, with tension recently spilling out into the White House briefing room after the administration praised Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin, journalists who died while covering the bloody conflict in Syria.
Jake Tapper, the senior White House correspondent for ABC News, asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney how public support of those journalists’ work “square[s] with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court.”
“There just seems to be a disconnect here,” Tapper added. “You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don’t want it in the United States.”
Twitter’s terms of service make absolutely clear that its users ‘own’ their own content. Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.
Ben Lee, lawyer, Twitter, to the BBC. Twitter resists US court’s demand for Occupy tweets
The News: A New York state court asked Twitter to release posts written by New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris who was arrested last fall during Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.
Twitter said no.
Via the BBC:
Mr Harris’s lawyer had tried to block access to the postings, but a judge ruled that once the messages had been sent they became the property of Twitter, meaning the defendant was not protected by Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure.
Twitter’s lawyers argued that the judge had misunderstood how the service worked, noting that the Stored Communications Act gave its members the right to challenge requests for information on their user history.
“Law enforcement agencies… are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to obtain information about what people are doing on the internet,” Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, writes at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If internet users cannot protect their own constitutional rights, the only hope is that internet companies do so.”
A depressing hope, but good for Twitter.
Face Off: Boy vs Russian Police
Via the NY Daily News:
The New Yorker and Foreign Policy magazine correspondent Julia Ioffe snapped the photo with her iPhone during violent protests by anti-Putin demonstrators on the day before Putin’s inauguration, ABC News reports. She tweeted the photo to her more-than-6,000 followers with a reference to Tiananmen Square.
Ioffe was referencing the huge pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, China in 1989, iconized by a photograph of one man standing still in front of a row of tanks.
At least 20,000 people rallied Sunday at Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in protest of Putin’s election.
Violence erupted as the protesters marched toward the Kremlin and police fought back with clubs, injuring several people and leading to more than 400 arrests, reports the Associated Press.
The Price of Sex (Trailer):
The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who’ve been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives. Learn more at www.priceofsex.org .
FJP: The Price of Sex was written, directed and produced by Mimi Chakarova, won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.
If you’re in DC there’s a screening of the film this evening.
For Mainstream Media, Occupy and Economic Inequality are Yesterday’s News
Via Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:
Occupy Wall Street is rightly credited with helping to shift the economic debate in America from a fixation on deficits to issues of income inequality, corporate greed and the centralization of wealth among the richest 1 percent. The movement has chalked up other victories as well, from altering New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax plan (New York Times, 12/5/11) to re-energizing activists and unions, but bringing some discussion of class into the mainstream dialogue has been one of its crowning achievements.
As Occupy slowed down for the winter, though, would corporate media continue to talk about our increasingly stratified society without a vibrant protest movement forcing their hand? The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.
From June 2011 through March 2012, mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in the four papers first increased dramatically, then decreased slightly more slowly. The number of mentions per month ranged from 8 to 15 between June and September. Then in October, when OWS coverage peaked, “income inequality” mentions increased nearly fourfold to 44, and reached 52 mentions in November. January had a total of 64 mentions, though 13 of those stories focused on President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
By March, there were only 16 mentions of “income inequality,” half from the New York Times—which also far outpaced the other papers in coverage of OWS that month, at 45 mentions to the L.A. Times’ 12, the Post’s 10 and USA Today’s three, due in part to the scores arrested in New York City on the movement’s six-month anniversary on March 17.
Network broadcasts followed the same pattern, albeit with significantly lower numbers. From June to September, there was only one mention of income inequality (ABC, 8/10/11). Mentions across ABC, CBS and NBC jumped to seven in October and held fairly steady through January, but returned to zero by February.
Similarly, “income inequality” was barely mentioned on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News in the early months of the study. October saw a dramatic increase on MSNBC and CNN, with 10 and 14 mentions, respectively, while Fox News stayed low at only five mentions. The numbers peaked at 54 total in January—again, partially due to the SOTU—but by March, “income inequality” was mentioned only six times across all three cable news channels, four times on CNN and once each on MSNBC and Fox.
NPR followed the same pattern, with a peak of 18 mentions in October and only one mention each in February and March.
When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.
Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies…
…As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, put it: “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”
What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.
So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.
Primary Season Political Ads Bring New Low to Negativity
Can the soaring music, sunrises and deep gazes, the Wesleyan Media Group analyzed political advertising through the presidential campaign primary season and finds that negativity isn’t just on the rise, it’s the norm.
Above we see the difference between positive and negative advertising during the primaries in 2008 and 2012. We’re showing the difference by candidate and by special interest (eg., PAC and Super PAC).
Overall, in 2008 nine percent of ads were negative. In 2012, 70 percent are.
Read on at the Wesleyan Media Project for more analysis.
TLDR: Citizen United and the rise of Super PACs are behind the negativity.
TV Mentions for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: April 25 to May 1
Note the words most associated with them.
Via Bejan Siavoshy.
Select to embiggen.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The FJP wishes all a happy and safe World Press Freedom Day.
Shepard Smith Teaches Us How to Read the News
Regarding Mitt Romney’s statement on the departure of Newt Gingrich from the campaign: “Politics is weird… and creepy.”
Brilliant.
H/T: Anthony DeRosa
5 Ways to Spot a BS Political Story in Under 10 Seconds
Political journos and junkies take note: Cracked creates a handy guide to evaluate an article’s newsworthiness:
#5. The Headline Contains the Word “Gaffe”
A politician accidentally misspoke in a way that made him or her look silly, and the opponents are pouncing on it.#4. The Headline Ends in a Question Mark
A news story so questionable the publication literally felt the need to mark it as such.#3. The Headline Contains the Word “Blasts”
A politician or other prominent person has taken to a microphone to say something inflammatory about the other side, usually by rephrasing their own party’s talking points over and over.#2. The Headline Is About a “Lawmaker” Saying Something Stupid
A low-level politician with no power said something incredibly stupid, and the opposing party is trumpeting it from the mountaintops to make everyone in the low-level politician’s party look stupid.#1. The Headline Includes the Phrase “Blow To”
Neglecting to explain hugely important policy changes in favor of focusing on the drama, and how it affects the personal political careers of the politicians involved.
Read through for explanations and examples of each.
WikiLeaks: Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit
Last night’s FJP field trip brought us to the Whitney Museum in New York City to hear a talk organized by the documentarian Laura Poitras about the national security state in the United States.
The speakers were Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney.
Binney is the former technical director of the National Security Agency’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. He retired in 2001 when the NSA started to turn its surveillance capabilities on US citizens.
Applebaum is a noted privacy rights evangelist, and is most visible as a spokesperson for the Tor Project, a software solution to protect individuals from online surveillance, and for his work with Wikileaks.
All have been targeted by the US government for their activities.
Earlier in the day, Democracy Now interviewed each about their work and the national security state. The segment with Binney is here, the segment with Applebaum is here and the segment with Poitras is here.
Bonus: James Bamford’s March cover story for Wired: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say).
Image: A WikiLeaks truck parked outside the Whitney Museum in New York City.
In Memoriam: Facts, 360 BCE - 2012 CE
We are saddened to learn about the passing of Facts:
To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.
“It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”
Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as “universal principles that everybody agrees on” or “shared assumptions.”
Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune. After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.
- Page 1 of 12
- Next »
