Posts by Azalo

27

Then & Now

by RAYZORBLADE in

i think this post may be an absolute: no brainer

personally, when i was an active naive jw, i studied the bible and could rattle scriptures off, left right and centre.

real good fundie.

Azalo

i do not believe in the bible but i feel i can debate with most people about what it says, even if i dont believe it. to me its just a great piece of literature.

13

Drinking and Bathing Water if Soldiers Convert says Chaplain

by blondie in

jw
friends

report: army chaplain refuses water unless troops baptized

posted: 8:34 a.m. edt april 9, 2003 .

washington -- the president of the interfaith alliance says he's "appalled" at reports that a military chaplain in iraq wouldn't give troops water unless they agreed to be baptized.

Do you Represent God or a Magazine Company ????????????????

by nightwarrior in

the question of whos faith , built the j.w organization ,as we know charles taz russell the founding member, whom started the organization,what did he beleive in,why was he considerd apostate ,what conections astrology of and pyramidology led him to use the pyramids as defining the dates jehovahs witnesess recognise as being evident in there calculations,did jesus use the stars to calculate any significant events pertaining to mans future, why was the founding farther terminated by the society, why were most of his written works suddenly deemed apostate,e.g the aid book ,used when i came into the truth or so called truth ,what is the difference between a magazine printing company and the modern day watchtower organization, one claims to work in gods name ,the other doesnot make any claims at all.. is your faith in jesus or the organization /???

check out the founding farthers history,.

as you owe it to yourself.are you really serving jehovah or just a magazine money mad organization.

Azalo

i remember the Aid book, did they drop hints saying to get rid of it? cause i dont remember my dad getting rid of it yet i dont remember seeing it in a long time either

31

AM or FM? What is your favorite Radio Station?

by JH in

jw
friends

do you still listen to am radio stations?.

older people listen more to am i would think.

all youngsters listen to fm, and never am radio.. .

Azalo

espn radio, talk radio, oddly enough i like listening to rush just because i find everything he says to be infuriating yet comical and on FM i like top 40, 80 and 90's music, hard rock, NPR

104

Liberals have lost the Iraq argument, so please stop whining...

by dolphman in

nothing you said was going to happen has actually happened.

the iraqis have welcomed us with open arms.

we have not decimated baghdad's infrastructure.

Azalo

We are giving away our freedoms just as fast as we can arrange to do so. My in-laws are refugees from Castro's Cuba. They are appalled at seeing the American people give away a LOT of freedom, for a LITTLE security. Soon, we will have neither. My fatherinlaw just shakes his head in disbelief at what he sees going on in the so-called democrat party.

You're right Francois, its called the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, which were pushed through by our republican president Cheney, errr I mean Bush and the republican congress while they had everyone distracted with Operation Enduring Freedom, what an oxymoron. Do you actually read anything of substance or do you just regurgitate the opinions of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and oh yeah your father in law?

38

When The Circuit Overseer Visited, Why Did You Do More Than Usual?

by minimus in

jw
friends

was it pressure, the desire to conform, was it because you thought that you could work in service with him???

were you trying to get appointed?

did you really think it was a "special week of activity"?

Azalo

id didnt but my dad always had them over and stuff and i'm sure he gave them some money (i didnt even know about that little practice, i bet those guys make at least 500-1000 dollars per visit, thats 52000 tax free dollars and they dont have any expenses). i hated the extra long sunday meeting, i dont remember much about it except that it would go on foreeeevveeer.

one time we had the DO visit and CO visit at the same time, what a pissing contest that was. i think the CO was pissed that he wasnt getting all the glory and all the groupies.

102

SEE THE REAL FACE OF THE WAR IN IRAQ, SEE THE HORROR

by justhuman in

since the media in u.s show nothing about the war in iraq, and bush's administration censor everything that is "bad' for the puplic, here are some shocking photos of how bush is setting free the iraqi people.

similar view of how watchtower's god will treat everyone who disagrees with them in armageddon.

bush does not care about the iraqi people.

Azalo

Historical revisionism = U.S.A.

Is the media "liberal" ?

by Azalo in

i believe the media is far from being liberal.

i find it amusing that conservatives actually believe that the media is liberal, i don't know what tv they are watching or what newspaper they read but i think that nothing could be further from the truth.

abc (16 of 92) and cbs (12 of 70) each had 17 percent skeptics.

Azalo

I believe the media is far from being liberal. I find it amusing that conservatives actually believe that the media is liberal, I don't know what TV they are watching or what newspaper they read but I think that nothing could be further from the truth. Fox news is the obvious example of the "conservative" media but even the networks are no better. I know that there are many people who are going to disagree with me, ok, but show me some proof that the media is liberal.

(It seems to be different in the UK, just based on the articles that I have read here.)

http://www.fair.org/activism/war-kills.html

FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001

ACTION ALERT:
Do Media Know That War Kills?

March 14, 2003

Despite daily reports about the "showdown" with Iraq, Americans hear very little from mainstream media about the most basic fact of war: People will be killed and civilian infrastructure will be destroyed, with devastating consequences for public health long after the fighting stops.

Since the beginning of the year, according to a search of the Nexis database (1/1/03-3/12/03), none of the three major television networks' nightly national newscasts-- ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News or NBC Nightly News-- have examined in detail what long-term impact war will have on humanitarian conditions in Iraq. They've also downplayed the immediate civilian deaths that will be caused by a U.S. attack.

The closest thing to a report on the likely humanitarian impact to appear this year on the nightly newscasts was a January 23 CBS Evening News story about the mood in Iraq. Noting that "many [Iraqis] are genuinely scared" of war, the report stated that "almost half" of the country "would starve without government food handouts." But CBS's report shifted responsibility for any humanitarian disaster away from the U.S., suggesting that what Iraqis fear "perhaps even more than an American military attack" is that domestic "hatred and revenge could tear [Iraq] apart" in the aftermath.

The networks' failure to integrate humanitarian concerns into their war coverage is especially striking in light of the numerous humanitarian and relief agencies that have issued urgent warnings about the impending crisis. Human Rights Watch, for instance, issued a 25-page briefing paper (2/13/03) warning of a "humanitarian disaster" impacting hundreds of thousands of people if the U.S. attacks Iraq. ABC, CBS and NBC did not cover HRW's findings.

Nor did they cover the announcement made (also 2/13/03) by the United Nations' undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Kenzo Oshima, that as many as 10 million people might need food assistance during and after an Iraq war, 50 percent of Iraq's population might be without potable water, and that between 600,000 and 1.45 million people might become refugees and asylum seekers.

Also unreported on ABC, CBS and NBC were the internal U.N. estimates revealed in leaked documents publicized by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq and the Center for Economic and Social Rights. The U.N. predicted that 30 percent of Iraq's children under five "would be at risk of death from malnutrition" in the event of war (CASI press release, 2/17/03), and that 500,000 people could "require medical treatment… as a result of direct or indirect injuries," with potentially 100,000 Iraqi civilians wounded "and another 400,000 hit by disease after the bombing of water and sewage facilities and the disruption of food supplies" (London Guardian, 1/29/03).

It's worth noting that the silence on ABC was not total; it did address some humanitarian issues on Nightline (2/24/03). In a segment about the "aftermath" of war, Nightline reported that "millions of Iraqis will need food, fresh water and medical care" and that "tens of thousands" of refugees may be created. But the central question posed was: "Who will take care of them? The American military or private humanitarian groups?" Seen through Nightline's lens, the main humanitarian problem would be the quandary confronting the U.S. as it both attacks Iraq and attempts to relieve the devastation it wreaks there; as correspondent Chris Bury put it in his introduction, "how exactly does an invading force juggle its military and humanitarian hats?"

Reporter John Donvan presented valuable information about the potentially "catastrophic" impact of war, but bracketed this with a tortured attempt to suggest that the U.S. would not be the real cause of civilian suffering: "And even if Saddam is the source of so many of the Iraqi people's problems, very likely it's the U.S. the world would choose to blame." Therefore, said Donvan, the U.S. was developing a relief plan, because "it is in American interests" and because "it's the right thing to do."

What could charitably be called Nightline's credulity was topped off by Donvan's closer. Humanitarian assistance is necessary to ensure that the war will have a "positive impact," he said, because "it is assumed that some Iraqi civilians, perhaps many, will be killed…. Not deliberately, but as a result of what is called collateral damage."

Unfortunately, Nightline is not alone among major media outlets in asserting that civilian deaths can be considered accidental even if the Pentagon predicts them ahead of time and factors them into its battle plans; it's a conceit that's widespread in the mainstream press.

NBC Nightly News, for instance, aired a story (2/19/03) about the Pentagon's "growing worries" about civilian casualties, in which it reported that military officials predict that thousands of Iraqi civilians may "be killed entirely by accident in an intensive bombing campaign." Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski offered details of the "devastating" air assault planned, and explained that "despite the most advanced technology" and "all the painstaking efforts the U.S. military," a large percentage of bombs "will stray off target, increasing the likelihood that civilians will die." Of course, predicted deaths from an aerial bombardment of a major city cannot be said to come about "entirely by accident."

Civilian casualties also came up in an earlier NBC Nightly News report (2/10/03) about the financial costs of war. Reporter Campbell Brown raised the question of "human costs, casualty numbers impossible to pinpoint," and addressed it with a soundbite from an academic analyst stating that "if there are going to be heavy civilian casualties, they'll mainly be caused by the Iraqis." Brown let this assertion stand without comment, and failed to contextualize it (with information about casualties from the Gulf War, for example, or about the people who can be expected to die as a result of damage to the public health infrastructure over the long term).

Commendably, CBS Evening News aired one segment on the prospect of "door-to-door urban warfare" in Iraq (1/13/03) that took a more grounded approach. CBS's Bryon Pitts reported that fighting in cities like Baghdad, "filled with women, children and unarmed men," would involve heavy casualties, both military and civilian. Offering a rare glimpse of an ordinary soldier's criticism of the planned urban fighting, Pitts interviewed a private who said, "If it was up to me, I don't want no part of it. You know, it's too dangerous, too deadly."

There have been other scattered mentions of civilian deaths on the three network nightly newscasts. All made brief mention (3/3/03) of Iraq's charges that U.S. and British warplanes killed six civilians near Basra in early March. CBS and NBC (2/16/03) reported on the anniversary of the U.S. destruction of the Amiriyah bomb shelter during the Gulf War, an attack which killed over 400 civilians. (CBS thoughtfully noted that "apart from the tragedy" involved, "the images of the civilian dead and wounded were a major public relations setback.") All three have also done stories about peace activists volunteering as "human shields;" these stories necessarily alluded to the activists' concerns about civilian casualties, but did not elaborate.

Overall, however, death and disaster have been discussed as troubling details rather than fundamental facts of war-- unless media can blame Saddam Hussein. One segment on ABC News' Good Morning America (2/20/03), for instance, focused on the evils that Hussein may wreak. ABC News reporter Claire Shipman opened with a strident emphasis on Hussein as "somebody who's happy to kill his own people." Explaining "what the Bush Administration most fears," Shipman asserted that Hussein might "starve thousands of his own people, destroy their infrastructures, even cities in order to slow down U.S. troops, and then blame the United States." This remark was followed by a soundbite from a spokesperson from the Center for Strategic & International Studies asserting that Hussein "is very likely to try and commit some kind of humanitarian disaster" in the event of war.

It's important for journalists to investigate the Iraqi regime's atrocities, but media must just as tirelessly investigate the U.S.'s role in Iraq's sufferings-- and not merely as actions committed "by accident." Journalists might remember, for example, that the U.S. deliberately targeted Iraq's water system during the Gulf War, even while predicting that this would lead to large-scale epidemics (The Progressive, 9/01). When media fail to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of deaths that U.S. policy has contributed to in Iraq, they obscure the plain fact that war is always, in its own right, a humanitarian disaster.

ACTION:
Please urge ABC, CBS and NBC to do in-depth reporting about the impact that war will have on civilians in Iraq, both in terms of immediate deaths and long-term suffering and death from infrastructure damage.

CONTACT:
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
[email protected]

CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
[email protected]

NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
[email protected]

As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc [email protected] with your correspondence.

http://www.fair.org/activism/iraq-sources-networks.html

FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001

ACTION ALERT:
In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views

March 18, 2003

Network newscasts, dominated by current and former U.S. officials, largely exclude Americans who are skeptical of or opposed to an invasion of Iraq, a new study by FAIR has found.

Looking at two weeks of coverage (1/30/03-2/12/03), FAIR examined the 393 on-camera sources who appeared in nightly news stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The study began one week before and ended one week after Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation at the U.N., a time that saw particularly intense debate about the idea of a war against Iraq on the national and international level.

More than two-thirds (267 out of 393) of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the U.S. guests, a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources-- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.)-- expressed skepticism or opposition to the war. Even this was couched in vague terms: "Once we get in there how are we going to get out, what’s the loss for American troops are going to be, how long we're going to be stationed there, what’s the cost is going to be," said Kennedy on NBC Nightly News (2/5/03).

Similarly, when both U.S. and non-U.S. guests were included, 76 percent (297 of 393) were either current or retired officials. Such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be underrepresented. Of all official sources, 75 percent (222 of 297) were associated with either the U.S. or with governments that support the Bush administration's position on Iraq; only four out of those 222, or 2 percent, of these sources were skeptics or opponents of war.

Twenty of the 297 official sources (7 percent) represented the government of Iraq, while a further 19 (6 percent) represented other governments-- mostly friendly to the U.S.-- who have expressed doubts or opposition to the U.S.'s war effort. (Another 34 sources, representing 11 percent of officials, were current or former U.N. employees. Although members of the U.N. inspection teams made statements that were both critical of Iraq's cooperation and supportive of further inspections, because of their official position of neutrality on the question of war they were not counted as skeptics.) Of all official sources, 14 percent (43 of 297) represented a position skeptical or opposed to the U.S. war policy. (Sources were coded as skeptics/critics if either their statements or their affiliations put them in that category; for example, all French government officials were counted as skeptics, regardless of the content of their quote.)

The remaining 96 sources-- those without a current or former government connection-- had slightly more balanced views; 26 percent of these non-official sources took a skeptical or critical position on the war. Yet, at a time when 61 percent of respondents in a CBS poll (2/5-6/03) were saying that they felt the U.S. should "wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time," only sixteen of the 68 U.S. guests (24 percent) who were not officials represented such views.

Half of the non-official U.S. skeptics were "persons in the street"; five of them were not even identified by name. Only one U.S. source, Catherine Thomason of Physicians for Social Responsibility, represented an anti-war organization. Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups.

Overall, 68 sources, or 17 percent of the total on-camera sources, represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy-- ranging from Baghdad officials to people who had concerns about the timing of the Bush administration's war plans. The percentage of skeptical sources ranged from 21 percent at PBS (22 of 106) to 14 percent at NBC (18 of 125). ABC (16 of 92) and CBS (12 of 70) each had 17 percent skeptics.

ACTION:
Please urge ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS to broaden the sources they rely on in coverage of the Iraq crisis.

CONTACT:

ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
[email protected]

CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
[email protected]

NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
[email protected]

PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Phone: 703-998-2150
[email protected]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A14686-2000Nov14¬Found=true.

Bush Cousin Made Florida Vote Call For Fox News

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Election Day is just the beginning. Keep up with Al Kamen's In the Loop, Steve Barr's Federal Diary and news from The Post's Federal Page.


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By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 14, 2000; Page C1

In yet another bizarre twist to an already surreal campaign, the head of Fox News's Election Night decision desk who recommended calling Florida, and the election, for George W. Bush turns out to be Bush's first cousin.

Even as he was leading the Fox decision desk that night, John Ellis was also on the phone with his cousins "Jebbie," the governor of Florida, and the presidential candidate himself giving them updated assessments of the vote count.

Ellis's projection was crucial because Fox News Channel put Florida in the W. column at 2:16 a.m. followed by NBC, CBS, CNN and ABC within four minutes. That decision, which turned out to be wrong and was retracted by the embarrassed networks less than two hours later, created the impression that Bush had "won" the White House.

Which is why media circles were buzzing yesterday with the question of why Fox had installed a Bush relative in such a sensitive post.

"Appearance of impropriety?" asks Fox Vice President John Moody, who approved Ellis's recommendation to call Florida for Bush. "I don't think there's anything improper about it as long as he doesn't behave improperly, and I have no evidence he did. . . . John has always conducted himself in an extremely professional manner."

But Moody admits that Ellis's Election Night conversations with the cousins "would cause concern."

Ellis whose mother, Nancy Ellis, is the sister of former president George Bush boasted to the New Yorker that "everyone followed us." He also said the morning after the election that "Jebbie'll be calling me like eight thousand times a day." Ellis did not respond to an interview request yesterday.

Ellis's support for his cousin was hardly a secret. He wrote in The Washington Post's Outlook section nine days ago that the Texas governor is "smart, engaging, enormously energetic, possessed of dynamic leadership skills, funny, wry [and] optimistic," as opposed to "the morally berserk universe of the Clintons."

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said: "The notion that you'd have the cousin of one presidential candidate . . . in a position to call a state is unthinkable. Fox's call precipitated all the other networks' calls. That call wrong, unnecessary, misguided, foolish has helped create a sense that this election went to Bush, was pulled back and he is waiting to be restored."

Critics say the Ellis connection will reinforce Fox's reputation as a conservative network whose anchors include Tony Snow, a former Bush White House staffer, and such commentators as Newt Gingrich. Fox maintains it merely provides a balanced alternative to the liberal networks. But, says Rosenstiel, "the marketing slogan 'We report, you decide' is obliterated by the fact that one candidate's first cousin is actually deciding, and then they report."

Marvin Kalb, Washington executive director of Harvard's Shorenstein press center, calls Ellis "a fine writer and columnist, and he's always sensitive about his relationship with his first cousin. His mother is very, very close with former president Bush. Therefore I am puzzled as to why he'd put himself in a position where he would seem to be the one making the call for his cousin. It clearly conveys the wrong impression."

As a Boston Globe columnist last year, Ellis wrote after some reader complaints: "I am loyal to my cousin. . . . I put that loyalty ahead of my loyalty to anyone else outside my immediate family. That being the case, it is not possible for me to continue writing columns about the 2000 presidential campaign."

Ellis worked for NBC News as a producer and researcher in the political unit from 1978 through March 1989, soon after President Bush took office. Fox says it hired Ellis this year for work during the primaries and on Election Night. He also worked for Fox in 1998 when, Moody says, he called George Bush's reelection in Texas (though that was a landslide).

Ellis, who lives in Irvington, N.Y., was among those briefing Fox News President Roger Ailes last Tuesday night, but he was not a total Bush loyalist. At 7:52 p.m., Fox called Florida for Al Gore based on Ellis's recommendation, though Fox was not the first to make that projection. After Fox's report, according to the New Yorker, Jeb Bush called and asked Ellis: "Are you sure?"

The Gore call, based heavily on exit polls from Voter News Service, also turned out to be wrong and was retracted by the networks two hours later.

At 2 a.m., Ellis called his cousins to say it was "statistically impossible" for Gore to win Florida. "Their mood was up, big-time," Ellis told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer. "It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now that was cool."

But it was decidedly uncool to some Fox staffers, angry at what they see as Ellis exaggerating his role. Some are calling him "John 'Alexander Haig' Ellis," declaring himself to be in charge.

Whatever the Yale graduate's job description, it remains unclear why a television network allowed him to call the election for his cousin.

"You factor that in to everything else, but John is a professional," Moody says. "It would be as strange not to hire him because of who he's related to as to hire him especially because of who he's related to."

30

Wish You Were Here

by DakotaRed in

for all the free people that still protest.

we protect you and you are protected by the best.

your voice is strong and loud, .

Azalo

The Myth of The Liberal Media

"Beyond the 2000 Election, this conservative media tilt has become a dominant reality in modern U.S. politics. The imbalance also was not an accident. It resulted from a conscious, expensive and well-conceived plan by conservatives to build what amounts to a rapid-response media machine. This machine closely coordinates with Republican leaders and can strongly influence - if not dictate - what is considered news."

The Media Is the Mess (July 17, 2001 article)

"I admit it -- the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
William Kristol, as reported by the New Yorker, 5/22/95

"In the west, 10 or 20 years, there has been massive research documenting the fact that the media are extraordinarily subordinated to external power. Now, when you have that power, the best technique is to ignore all of that discussion, ignore it totally, and to eliminate it, by the simple device of asserting the opposite. If you assert the opposite, that eliminates mountains of evidence demonstrating that what you are saying is false. That's what power means. And the way we assert the opposite is by just saying that the media are liberal."
Noan Chomsky, in FSTV's documentation The Myth Of The Liberal Media

Based on its recent direct-mail campaign, one of the [Leadership Institute's] primary fund- raising strategies is to convince conservative donors that its graduates can neutralize what it regards as left-leaning news media.

"Liberal media bias is out of control," said the letter, which was mailed over [Rep. J.C.] Watts's signature, but which [the institute's founder and president] Mr. Blackwell said was written at the institute. "It's indecent. It's time you and I did something about it."

When asked for examples of how bias by news organizations was undermining the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Blackwell complained about what he described as excessive press attention paid to Mr. Bush's critics, like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

An alumna of the institute, who was recommended by Mr. Blackwell, found it difficult to cite cases of "out of control" liberal bias in recent news coverage.

"I have been in local TV newsrooms in Phoenix, Seattle and Pittsburgh, and I don't think there is bias, either liberal or conservative," said the alumna, Tallee Whitehorn, 27, an assistant news director at WTAE- TV, an ABC affiliate in Pittsburgh. "This is not really a place for it, unless I wanted to get a lot of hate mail, which I don't."

The young people in Mr. Montini's class were also hard-pressed to come up with examples of the news- media bias mentioned in Mr. Watts's fund-raising letter.

Mr. Tietz said he had been sensitized to such matters in recent months by reading conservative books, including Whitaker Chambers's "Witness." That book, Mr. Tietz said, "explains the deep-down meanness of the left."

But as for seeing that meanness in coverage of President Bush, Mr. Tietz said, "Honestly, I haven't noticed it one way or another."

from a June 11, 2001 New York Times article on the Leadership Institute (a training camp for conservative journalists) titled "In Virginia, Young Conservatives Learn How to Develop and Use Their Political Voices"

"Throughout 2000, with less pretense of objectivity than ever, [Tim] Russert dutifully echoed the Republican theme that the Democratic nominee was “dishonest”. Week after week, the topic on Meet The Press was the “repeated lying” of Al Gore. One lowlight of Russert’s descent into shameless propagandist occurred when it was revealed that George W. Bush had been convicted of drunk driving in Maine, thereby proving that the Republican candidate had been deceitful when he was questioned about whether he had ever been arrested.

Russert’s immediate response on national television was, “The question on everybody’s mind is, ‘Did the Gore campaign have something to do with the release of this information?’” That was not the question on everybody’s mind; a poll taken immediately after the revelation showed that most Americans did not believe that Gore was involved.

It was, however, the question being faxed nationally by the Republicans in a memo circulated to their operatives who were responsible for diverting attention from the fact that their candidate was guilty of, for want of a better term, “repeated lying”.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Russert established a link between Meet The Press and the G.O.P. opposition research team that was responsible for digging up dirt/manufacturing dirt on Al Gore. On election night, after conferring with Welch, Russert demanded that Gore quit the race before the legally mandated recount took place in Florida. The next morning, on the Today Show, he repeated the demand.

(...) He exaggerates Democratic wrongdoing, going to the extreme of inventing criminal behavior. Conversely, he has been unrelentingly oblivious to all Republican scandals; his infinite fascination with the missing intern in the case of Democrat Gary Condit was accompanied by total disinterest in the dead intern who was found on the office floor of Republican Joe Scarbrough. Russert spent years obsessing about an ill fated land deal called Whitewater that involved a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but he remains indifferent to the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer funded kickbacks that George W. Bush has been ladling out to his campaign contributors. "

from a January 9th, 2002 article on GE's leading media whore, Tim Russert

F or conservatives of every persuasion, it is a self-evident truth that the mass media are liberally biased. As a proud liberal myself, I wish it was true: where are those liberal TV channels? Could I please sign up for them? All I get on my satelite system are center-right channels such as CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and far-right channels such as the "we distort, you deride", Fox News, owned by equally far-right media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and assorted christian nutball channels such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network or Pat Robertson's The 700 Club, carried by Fox Family.

Believing in freedom of speech, I do not mind that far-right viewpoints are presented on TV on a daily basis. What I strongly object to is that these viewpoints are not balanced by equally far-left viewpoints. Tune to CNN's Capital Gang, and you'll see a centrist TIME columnist (Margaret Carlson) and a socially liberal but economically conservative Wall Street Journal Editor (Al Hunt) debate two rabid right wingers, Kate O'Beirne and Robert Novak. Progressive voices are completely shut out from the program. Or tune to Fox News' Hannity & Colmes which is nothing but a thinly veiled solo show for far-right firebrand Sean Hannity who is so "balanced" by the tame Colmes that he might just as well be opposed by a scarecrow made to look like Colmes. College dropout Hannity does almost all of the talking; he introduces guests from the "Family Research" Council as "our good friend from the FRC", habitually refers to his own views and those of regular guest Jerry Falwell as "christian" without any qualifier (ignoring the fact that religious right views are not representative of mainstream christianity), and treats liberal guests as mere props to get his own point of view across, which usually involves interrupting and screaming. Fair and Balanced?

Hardly. But by Fox standards, Hannity & Colmes is about as fair and unbiased as it gets. Usually, Fox News' idea of fairness and balance involves having a center-right conservative disagree with a far-right conservative, and calling that travesty a debate, or letting a conservative (but never a liberal) have his own show altogether. How come that everytime Bill O'Reilly takes a break from The O'Reilly Factor, his substitute is someone from the far right of the political spectrum, such as former congressman and now syndicated radio host Bob Dornan or hard-right nitwit Michael Reagan (who left the GOP because it was not radical enough)? And why is it that 8 years of unrelenting, non-stop demonization of Clinton and his wife by these people is okay, but suggesting that Bush is illegitimate is "partisan rancor"? The answer is of course that Foxnews is a conservative news outlet, even though its on-air personel asserts the contrary ("fair and balanced") like a mantra.

But the situation is hardly any better on the other (supposedly liberal) cable news channels. Liberals or centrists may not be on unless their viewpoints are 'balanced' by conservative viewpoints (as in CNN's Capital Gang or Crossfire), while hard-right pundits such as Christ Matthews get their own shows. ABC's 20/20 regularly features the views of pro-corporate extremist John Stossel, but does not bother to balance those views by a progressive perspective. Commenting on a 1998 Stossel piece which made the case that greed is good, FAIR demanded "to see an equally outspoken progressive journalist given an hour to explain why greed is a serious problem in American society". Needless to say that that demand went unanswered. Stossel, despite a documented history of using deceptive statistics, one-sided witness testimony, distortions and outright lies to promote an extremist agenda is still on the job at ABC.

To make matters worse, it is not just the conservative punditocracy which is less than fair and impartial. The mass media as a whole are seriously biased - the conservative way. It was the mass media that have co-opted and thus legitimized the Republican code phrase "marriage penalty". There is no tax in the tax code that is called "The Marriage Penalty Tax", yet the media have been using this propagandistic phrase without any qualifiers, making "the marriage penality (tax)" an objective fact of life, just as they routinely report on "partial birth" (instead of "late term") abortion. Similarly, they have been using the right-wing codephrase "death tax" to con a significant fraction of the population into thinking that the inheritance tax concerns ordinary people (as opposed to the super-rich).

The mass media's coverage of the presidential race 2000 was slanted in favor of Bush from day one. As early as 1999, the media had picked their winner, George W. Bush, and started to tell the public that W's victory was a foregone conclusion. Throughout the campaign and the Florida aftermath, they stayed "on message": that Gore was a lier and exaggerator, while Bush was a "different kind of Republican", a likeable guy, and a real pal. They put every real or alleged inappropriate behavior, inaccuracy or exaggeration from Gore under the magnifying glass, and simultaneously ignored W's big lies and blunders: that he weaseled himself out of jury duty to cover up a DUI arrest, that he refused to admit to being a recreational drug user and that he went AWOL while in the national guard. All of it with impunity of course, thanks to Daddy's connections.

The mass media never found it worth mentioning that this man who in the debates prided himself on being a succesful businessman and Washington outsider had in fact driven several oil companies into bankruptcy, one after an other, and was bailed out every single time thanks to his family connections. As a son of wealth and privilege, Bush had never had to work for anything, and got away with acts that would have gotten anyone else into jail. Bush's dirty tricks, both against McCain and against Gore, were revolting even by Republican campaign standards, but the media never challenged Bush to explain himself. Only when Gore pointed these out, they blasted him for "negative campaigning".

As the campaign drew to a close, it became even more apparent that the mass media would go to any lengths to discredit Gore while giving Bush a free ride. In the presidential debate in Boston, on October 3, 2000, Bush had the audacity to claim that

"[Gore] has outspent me, the special interests are outspending me (..)"

while the truth is that Bush broke all spending records in US history and outspent everyone, including the Republicans who ran before him by a wide margin! It was a flat-out lie, but the "liberal" mass media let him get away with it. This hypocrisy of the mass media has been well documented by a FAIR article titled Serial Exaggerators: Media's double standard on political lying. I also recommend Rolling Stone Magazine's article The Press vs. Al Gore.

Then, on election night, Fox News dropped all pretense of being unbiased and let Bush's cousin John Ellis call Florida for Bush at 2:16 am, prompting the other four networks to do the same within minutes. From that point onward, Gore had to fight an uphill battle against the perception that Bush had won Florida, which we know today he has not.

After election day, the pro-Bush campaign of the media only intensified. Chris Matthews, who only days before the election had found the idea of Gore losing the popular vote but winning the electoral one wholly unpalatable, developed selective amnesia and was now arguing for Gore, the winner of the popular vote, to concede! The rest of the punditry joined into this rousing chorus of "concede, concede", ominously warning that simply counting the votes in Florida would create a constitutional crisis. They even rewrote history in the process, popularizing the myth that Nixon conceded gracefully in 1960 without putting up a legal fight (the opposite is true).

Naturally, the transparent hypocrisy of the GOP's position went unnoticed or was downplayed. Hand-counting, which is universally accepted as more accurate than machine-counting (even by Bush himself, and by his lawyers in New Mexico, who demanded a hand-recount at the same time that Baker was succesfully discrediting the method in Florida) now became unreliable. That House Majority Whip Tom DeLay was behind the GOP mob that shut down the Miami-Dade recount: hardly worth reporting. The paid republican rioters with their professionally made "Sore Loserman" signs and t-shirts: reported as grassroots protestors. That minority voters had been intimidated from voting by GOP operatives: not worth any headlines. That Katherine Harris had 12,000 predominantly black voters falsely removed from voter rolls as convicted fellons: reported in the British Newspaper Observer, but ignored by the US media.

The day after the GOP majority on the Supreme Court had installed Emperor Bush on the throne, the mass media started to echo conservative calls for "unity" and "healing". The good of the nation, we were told by the corporate media outlets, required us to support President "elect" Bush. How that healing is supposed to take place when the dagger is still firmly lodged in the wound, they did not say. John Gibson, guest-hosting the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News on 12/15/00, even suggested that the Florida ballots should be locked away for eight years or burned, because the legitimacy of George W. Bush's presidency is a higher good than the truth. Is it even conceivable that a Fox pundit would suggest that Clinton should not have been investigated, to preserve the public's respect for the office of president?

The sad and morally repugnant story of coup d'etat 2000 continues to this day. The truth - that Bush lost the election and has not one iota of legitimacy to push his far-right agenda - has become a non-fact for the mass media. That Bush jettisoned all pretense of being a "different kind of Republican" with his hard-right cabinet appointments was dismissed as slander from the usual liberal special interest groups and never examined in detail. Ashcroft and Norton got a free pass. They were dutifully referred to as "controversial", but the mass media were silent on exactly how and why these people are controversial. The protests against His Fraudulency's inauguration were downplayed and protestors marginalized as "fringe groups", while commentators were drooling over inauguration trivia.

As President Bush is preparing to ram his tax cut for the wealthy through congress, the mass media are silent on the fact that Governor Bush's tax cuts in Texas have left the state unable to pay its bills, leaving the republican state legislature and governor no choice but to raise taxes again. But try to call in on some of the political shows on the cable news channels and mention the inconvenient fact that the American people elected Al Gore to be their president, and you will be chided by the pundits for being a complete moron - get over it, will you?

On November 12, 2001, the pro-Bush bias of the mass media reached a level that can only be characterized as Orwellian. The media recount study had just shown that by the only legitimate standard (clear intent of the voter), the majority of legal votes in Florida had been cast for Gore, by a margin of tens of thousands of votes. But the headlines said the exact opposite! It was one of those "IBM commercial" moments - for the past 11 months, you had already gotten used to the mass media slanting their coverage in favor of Bush and the Republicans, but you were still clinging to the sentimental notion that they could not outright fabricate the news. And then it hit you - they can, and they do! The degree of deceptiveness varied depending on the outlet. While the Drudge Report - incredibly! - gave a completely objective assessment of the situation ("Gore topped Bush if all under/over votes counted; legal strategy destroyed chances"), the supposedly liberal New York Times and Washington Post both reported Bush as the recount winner in their headlines.

But it fell to supposedly leftist CNN to deliver the most brazen example of pro-Bush reporting. On the evening of Sunday, 11, 2001, CNN ran a report (click on video, then "Study suggests Bush still winner") by CNN's senior political correspondent Candy Crowley that made me want to vomit. She first discusses irrelevant hypothetical scenarios under all of which Bush would have won, then makes an oblique reference that Gore would have won if overvotes had been counted as well, but does not see fit to mention that those overvotes were legal votes because they left no doubt as to the intent of the voter. She then makes the following, incredible appeal to blind, mindless patriotism:

Now, try to remember the kind of September we just had. (pictures of World Trade Center ruins, then George W. Bush with his arm around a firefighter, people shouting "USA,USA") What consumed us last December is a paragraph for history now. A recent poll shows that if the election was held today, George Bush would beat Al Gore by 21 points. But the election cannot be held today, and we cannot, would not hold last year's election again. (video shows Al Gore speaking, "George W. Bush is my commander in chief") Maybe the best thing of all is that the messy feelings of the Florida ballot box have really only proven the strength of democracy.

To link the terrorist attacks to the 2000 election in this manner is not journalism, it is propaganda. The suggestion that the current office holder would beat a former opponent by a wide margin if the election was held just after a national disaster is a no-brainer, and does not prove anything. That CNN would run such transparantly partisan advocacy masquerading as journalism shows one thing - CNN's bias is not a liberal one.

But enough anecdotal evidence. Maybe I'm just suffering from selective perception of reality, seing what I expect to see? Objective data is required to substantiate the claim that the bias of the media is in fact a conservative one, and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has been compiling just that kind of data for 15 years now. FAIR has documented that conservative or right-leaning "think" tanks (like Heritage, Cato, RAND or our favourite, the "Family Research" council) received more than 50% of media citations in 1998 and 1999, while left-wing and progressive think tanks overally received less than 13%. FAIR's issue collection reveals, among other things, how the mass media

have helped create the myth that social security is failing, paving the way for the realization of one of the right's political wet dreams: privatization of social security
perpetuate conservative myths about wellfare and simultanously turn a blind eye to corporate wellfare
sensationalize street crime and ignore corporate crime
treat religious right groups such as the Promise Keepers with kid's gloves and thus help legitimize them in the public perception
generally avoid reporting on the lunatic fringe of the right, such as militias, neo-Nazis and anti-abortion terrorists, and in particular, avoid examining the personal and ideological connections these groups have to the Republican party
created the perception that there is widespread popular opposition to affirmative action when in fact most people support it
all but ignore waste, mismanagment and corruption in the military-industrial complex, especially as it relates to the planned missile defense system
downplayed protests against the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO by portraying protestors as leftist fringe groups, communists and anarchists
report corporate PR as legitimate scientific research.

Given these facts, the claim of the liberal media bias is shaky enough as it relates to major newspapers and television networks. But when one admits radio stations into the picture, the claim becomes wholly preposterous. Conservative hate radio has been carpet bombing the nation with hard-right ideology, unbridled hatred towards liberals and Clinton, distortions, lies and bogus science for years. Hate radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan and Oliver North are heard by millions of people every day, and they have no progressive counterparts of any significance. Not exactly surprising, considering that corporate sponsors have a vested interest in supporting pro-business voices, and suppressing progressive ones.

In a June 30,2002 Commentary in the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, Edward Monks writes about the demise of the Fairness Doctrine,

Talk radio shows how profoundly the FCC's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has affected political discourse. In recent years almost all nationally syndicated political talk radio hosts on commercial stations have openly identified themselves as conservative, Republican, or both: Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Michael Reagen, Bob Grant, Ken Hamblin, Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, Robert Dornan, Gordon Liddy, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al. The spectrum of opinion on national political commercial talk radio shows ranges from extreme right wing to very extreme right wing - there is virtually nothing else.

On local stations, an occasional nonsyndicated moderate or liberal may sneak through the cracks, but there are relatively few such exceptions. This domination of the airwaves by a single political perspective clearly would not have been permissible under the Fairness Doctrine.

Eugene is fairly representative. There are two local commercial political talk and news radio stations: KUGN, owned by Cumulus Broadcasting, the country's second largest radio broadcasting company, and KPNW, owned by Clear Channel Communications, the largest such company. On local stations, an occasional nonsyndicated moderate or liberal may sneak through the cracks, but there are relatively few such exceptions. This domination of the airwaves by a single political perspective clearly would not have been permissible under the Fairness Doctrine.

KUGN's line-up has three highly partisan conservative Republicans - Lars Larson (who is regionally syndicated), Michael Savage and Michael Medved (both of whom are nationally syndicated), covering a nine-hour block each weekday from 1 p.m. until 10 p.m. Each host is unambiguous in his commitment to advancing the interests and policies of the Republican party, and unrelenting in his highly personalized denunciation of Democrats and virtually all Democratic Party policy initiatives. That's 45 hours a week.

For two hours each weekday morning, KUGN has just added nationally syndicated host Bill O'Reilly. Although he occasionally criticizes a Republican for something other than being insufficiently conservative, O'Reilly is clear in his basic conservative viewpoint. His columns are listed on the Townhall.com web site, created by the strongly conservative Heritage Foundation. That's 55 hours of political talk on KUGN each week by conservatives and Republicans. No KUGN air time is programmed for a Democratic or liberal political talk show host.

KPNW carries popular conservative Rush Limbaugh for three hours each weekday, and Michael Reagan, the conservative son of the former president, for two hours, for a total of 25 hours per week.

Thus, between the two stations, there are 80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative hosts of political talk radio, with not so much as a second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.

For anyone old enough to remember 15 years earlier when the Fairness Doctrine applied, it is a breathtakingly remarkable change - made even more remarkable by the fact that the hosts whose views are given this virtual monopoly of political expression spend a great deal of time talking about "the liberal media."

Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society, where government commissars or party propaganda ministers enforce the acceptable view with threats of violence. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it. Yet the almost complete right wing Republican domination of political talk radio in this country has been accomplished without guns or gulags. And yet, the conservative agenda is and remains singularly unpopular with the population at large, as evidenced by the fact that the GOP can only win elections by hiding its true objectives and playing moderate, running scorched-earth campaigns of personal destruction, smear and slander, intimidation of minority voters and other means of depressing voter turnout - and even then only barely. As Rush Limbaugh gets never tired of telling his white, male and angry audience - it must be someone else's fault. Unable to face the fact that a majority of the population simply does not want theocracy, social darwinism and corporate supremacy, they had to find a scapegoat - or invent one if needed. Thus The Liberal Media myth was born.

The Liberal Media myth is a propaganda tool employed by conservative radio hosts, columnists and pundits as a convenient excuse why after 20 years their ideology has failed to convince the public at large, and as a memetic inocculation of the public against the evidence that the media bias is in fact a conservative one.

Not only does the liberal media claim have no basis in fact, it also does not make sense considering the issues of media ownership and influence of advertisers. Most media outlets are owned by a handful of conservative corporations and individuals, and funded by usually economically conservative advertisers who have no need for an educated, alert, independent and critical citizenry. What they need is a dumb, bored, cynical and apathetic public that has abandoned all critical faculties and is easily distracted by celebrity gossip and mindless sports games. A public that will believe anything it is told, or nothing at all, which amounts to the same end result. This pro-corporate conservative bias of the media is well-documented and shows itself in consistent under-reporting or ignoring of any information that would lead people to question the fundamental status quo.

Wish You Were Here

by DakotaRed in

for all the free people that still protest.

we protect you and you are protected by the best.

your voice is strong and loud, .

Azalo

http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/bureau_ac/wmeat98/highlights.pdf
see the link, you're rght czar we defnitely dont spend enough on defense even though its more than all of europe combined and more than double that of africa and asia combined.