Reading: Bill Moyers on media consolidation

There has been a glimmer of hope on the communication technology front this week: The FCC handed observers on all sides a surprise by smacking Comcast for blocking peer-to-peer traffic, a clear victory for net neutrality.

Of course, this was also the week that the Senate approved, and Bush gleefully confirmed he will sign, the FISA reauthorization bill that will grant the telecoms retroactive immunity for crimes at the behest of the Bush administration that neither the telecoms nor Bush will admit have occurred. (The motion passed with the support of Sen. Obama, who looks like he's going to be a better campaigner than a leader.)

And behind all this is the much larger problem: the increasing consolidation of the corporate media. That's the topic of an address by Bill Moyers to the National Conference for Media Reform Conference in June.

He's not optimistic:

We must be vigilant. The fate of the cyber-commons - the future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as open architecture - is up for grabs. And the only antidote to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots.

When Verizon tried to censor NARAL's (National Abortion Rights Action League) use of text messaging last year, it was quick action by Save the Internet that led the company to reverse its position. Those efforts also led to an FCC proceeding on this issue.

Wherever the Internet flows - on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new digital television sets - we must ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium of expression.

By 2011, the market analysts tell us, the Internet will surpass newspapers in advertising revenues. With MySpace and Dow Jones controlled by News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft determined to acquire Yahoo!, and with advertisers already telling some bloggers, "Your content is unacceptable," we could potentially lose what's now considered an unstoppable long tail of content offering abundant, new, credible and sustainable sources of news and information.

So, what will happen to news in the future, as the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package?

Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it "communitainment." (Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)

Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it.

Moyer's essay is going onto the Readings list on the sidebar.

Reading: Bill Moyers on "Journalists as Truth-Tellers"

Moyer's acceptance speech for the Ridenhouse Courage Award this week. I could quote more of it, but this will serve:

After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality.

The full text is going on the Readings list in the sidebar.

(Hat tip to Wendy.)

Defense earmarks and the Pacific NW delegation

Last night's Bill Moyers Journal featured a documentary on the efforts by the Seattle Times' to track down the earmarks in the 2007 defense appropriations bill--in the end there turned out to be 2700 of them totaling around $12 billion, but it was no small task finding them and matching them with the corporate donors who received the federal money. Even finding those earmarks inserted by members of the Pacific Northwest delegation--the focus of the documentary and the original focus of the investigation by the Times--wasn't that easy.

You can see the segment (with transcript) here:

The documentary tells the story of a $4.65 million dollar boat that Congress forced the Coast Guard to buy, even though the Coast Guard said they didn't want the boat because it didn't fit their needs. (The USCG ended up selling it to a Northern California county sheriff's office for a dollar.) And then there's the $1 million worth of t-shirts that the military had to purchase for the Marines in Iraq, although they won't be used because the polyester material is inflammable (look it up). And let's not forget the helmet-mounted computer display ($8 million for R&D, then $5 million in military contracts) that the Army didn't use ("it's junk," said one Iraq vet).

There's more to this than simply government waste, though. In each of these cases the appearance of the earmark, usually in late-night conference sessions, tracks disturbingly with campaign donations from the local business benefiting from the government contracting.

The architects of these particular boondoggles are all Pacific Northwest Democrats--the documentary focuses on Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Rep. David Wu (D-OR1), Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA3), and Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA6). Yes, Democrats are back in the earmark-and-donation game again, and for a simple reason: Since 2006 it's the Democrats who have something to deal. Using the Times' database of 2007 earmarks cross-referenced with contributors, here is the Oregon congressional delegation's box scores (click the links to find who the contributor/beneficiares are):

Rep. David Wu (D-OR1):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $14.2 million
2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients: $58,799

Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR2):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $0 2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients: $47,896

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR3):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $14.5 million
2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients: $17,750

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR4):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $13.1 million
2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients:$1,000

Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-OR5):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $0
2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients: $36,350



Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $56.950 million
2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients: $33,575

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR):
2007 Defense Earmarks: $59.830 million
2001-2007 Contributions from earmark recipients: $100,004

Here's another instance involving Murray uncovered by the Times, not mentioned in the documentary. It shows how the process works (emphasis added):

Not long after Nelson Ludlow and his wife started a technology business in Port Townsend with money scraped together from friends, family and retirement accounts, they spent precious dollars in an unlikely way:

They hired a lobbyist and started giving to a congressional campaign fund.

The lobbying paid off. Soon, an $800,000 earmark for the Ludlows was tucked into a 2003 spending bill, giving their tiny startup, Mobilisa, a no-bid contract to provide Internet service on Puget Sound ferries.[…]

Hiring a lobbyist, Ludlow said, was a way to take Mobilisa beyond being just a startup.

"There are two ways to play Little League baseball: One is everyone gets a chance to bat, and the other is that the team decides they want to win," Ludlow said. "And people at Mobilisa decided they wanted to win."

For an investment of about $30,000 in donations to Murray and Baird, plus the lobbyist's fees, Mobilisa brought in over $12 million in non-compete government contracts. You can figure out the ROI on that. Give Ludlow and Mobilisa credit: You'd have to be a chump not to play the game that way.

Doesn't it just give you a thrill to see the free market and representative government working together, hand in hand?

Murray and Baird of Washington, interviewed for the documentary, both stressed that there was no quid pro quo in any of this. I don't doubt them that there's no illegal quid pro quo going on here. The campaign finance laws as they stand not only make these arrangements legal, they make them virtually inevitable.

As Brian Baird elegantly phrases it in the documentary:

If you went to a system where you couldn't take a campaign contribution, then you'd only be able to get--the . . . only people you could get money from are people you've never helped.

And what kind of world would that be? Oh yeah--it would be a world where voters owned the process, not corporate donors. Heaven forfend.

I have no objection to the idea that our congressional delegation brings home federal money for local projects. As a bicycle commuter, for example, I really appreciate the pork Earl Blumenauer has brought home to improve biking facilities in the Portland area.

But that's not what we're talking about here. If you can't call the connection between corporate donations and government contracts--often no-bid contracts--"illegal," it's certainly unwholesome.

Do individual voters have to hire lobbyists and start maxing out their political donations just to get heard in this game?

(Cross-posted at Loaded Orygun.)

Reading: Moyers on Buying the Iraq War

I'm late getting this posted, but it's still a fine thing to let this piece of journalism the way it used to be done sit in the sun a little while longer.

Bill Moyers has returned to PBS with a vengeance. In this piece he begins with the observation that while the print media have, at least to some extent, taken responsibility for their culpability in helping the Bush administration lead us falsely into the Iraq War, television news--which played at least as great a part if not more--has conspicuously failed to examine its own responsibility.

Much of what's in this documentary will be familiar to you: Judith Miller. Ahmed Chalabi. Thomas Friedman. Bill Safire. Bill Kristol. Yellow cake. Aluminum tubes. Mushroom clouds. Mobile bioweapons labs. Liberators. Sixteen words.

What you won't have seen before--and the reason why it's must-see TV--are the new Moyers interviews with journalists (or, in some cases, "journalists") who spent 2002-2003 cheerleading for the impending war and eagerly providing a national platform for the most brazenly dishonest of administration talking points. If anyone ever takes Tim Russert seriously again in his life about anything other than his lunch order, it will be a miracle:

Bill Moyers: Was it just a coincidence in your mind that Cheney came on your show and others went on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that story appeared?

Tim Russert: I don't know. The NEW YORK TIMES is a better judge of that than I am.

Bill Moyers: No one tipped you that it was going to happen?

Tim Russert: No, no. I mean-

Bill Moyers: The- the Cheney- office didn't make any- didn't leak to you that there's gonna be a big story?

Tim Russert: No. No. I mean, I don't- I don't have the- this is, you know, on MEET THE PRESS, people come on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any question we want. I did not know about the aluminum-tube story until I read it in the NEW YORK TIMES.

Bill Moyers: Critics point to September eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable.

Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It's a circular, self-confirming leak.

Tim Russert: I don't know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

Tim Russert: What my concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

Bill Moyers: ["60 Minutes" reporter] Bob Simon didn't wait for the phone to ring.

At this point, Moyers cuts to an interview with Bob Simon:

Bill Moyers: When you said a moment ago when we started talking to people who knew about aluminum tubes. What people-who were you talking to?

Bob Simon: We were talking to people - to scientists - to scientists and to researchers and to people who had been investigating Iraq from the start.

Bill Moyers: Would these people have been available to any reporter who called or were they exclusive sources for 60 minutes?

Bob Simon: No, I think that many of them would have been available to any reporter who called.

Bill Moyers: And you just picked up the phone?

Bob Simon: Just picked up the phone.

Bill Moyers: Talked to them?

Bob Simon: Talked to them and then went down with the cameras.

Russert, who summers in Nantucket with such NBC swells as Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC, which means he, in turn, owns Russert), has obviously forgotten that black plastic thingie on his desk with the numbered buttons is good for more than confirming dinner party invitations. He did not appear particularly embarrassed about his confession.

Neither did Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic and war proponent nonpareil , appear embarrassed when he explained to an obviously bemused Moyers that he saw his role as a "journalist" as consisting of taking what other working journalists have already found out, and then writing about that. Rather than embarrassed, he seemed more puzzled and taken aback by Moyers polite disdain.

The heartbreaker of the show, though, was Moyers interview with John Walcott and Jonathan Landay, two reporters from Knight Ridder who didn't wait for Bush administration officials to call them. They worked and worked their own sources and did most of what serious, skeptical journalism about the run-up to the war got written.

And it went largely ignored, to an important extent because Knight Ridder didn't have any newspapers in New York or Washington DC, so they had almost no chance to crack the TV talking heads circuit where the pro-war stories were being trumpeted over and over. (Keep that in mind the next time a media merger threatens to reduce yet again the number of TV, radio, or newspaper outlets in your town--or the number of owners, which amounts to the same thing.)

Transcript and video of Moyer's report are going on the new and improved reading list on the sidebar.

Gratitude for the little breaks

It's amazing, and yet perversely comforting in some small way, to realize:

Someday, historians (if we're still allowed to have them) may determine that the constitutional form of government in America managed to hang on by its fingernails in the first decade of the 21st century in no small part because Jon Stewart--bless his heart--really sucked as a comedy actor.

Here he is on Bill Moyers Journal last week:

Just think: If Death to Smoochy or Big Daddy had been worth a dime, Bush and Cheney might have already won.

We might have come that close, people.

Reading: Moyers and the corporate media "plantation"

For all my condescension about the inability of conservatives to handle humor, we who hold Brother Bill in high esteem will have to live with the fact that begins with a joke stolen from Emo Philips, and--worse--didn't tell it as well (because he rushed both the setup and the punch line).

Nevertheless, Moyers' take on the concentration of media ownership, and its inevitable hostility to the democratic responsibilities we still (rightly or wrongly) expect our news/information media to shoulder, is passionate and detailed--worth the read, as always.

There are several "best moments," but I'll tease you with this one:

By no stretch of the imagination can we say the dominant institutions of today's media are guardians of democracy. Despite the profusion of new information "platforms" on cable, on the Internet, on radio, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and MySpace, among others, the resources for solid original journalistic work, both investigative and interpretive, are contracting rather than expanding. I'm old fashioned in this, a hangover from my days as a cub reporter and later a publisher. I agree with Michael Schudson, one of our leading scholars of communication, who writes in the current Columbia Journalism Review that "while all media matter, some matter more than others, and for the sake of democracy, print still counts most, especially print that devotes resources to gathering news. Network TV matters, cable TV matters, but when it comes to original investigation and reporting, newspapers are overwhelmingly the most important media." But newspapers are purposely dumbing down, driven down - says Schudson - by "Wall Street, whose collective devotion to an informed citizenry is nil, and seems determined to eviscerate newspapers." Meanwhile, despite some initial promise following the shock of 9/11, television has returned to its tabloid ways, chasing celebrity and murders - preferably both at the same time - while wallowing in triviality, banality and a self-referential view.

(Emphasis added.) Of particular interest to p3 readers may be Moyers tracing the high hopes for democratic conversation proponents held for each of the 20th century's new media: radio, then television, then cable--all dashed as corporate and advertiser money and clout overwhelmed the popular democratic possibilities of the medium. And the internet is now in the cross hairs of the same antidemocratic forces.

The text and extended video clips of Moyer's speech will be on the Readings list on the sidebar.

Readings: Moyer and America's story

Never really able to warm up to that whole "stern father"/"nurturing parent" framing metaphor stuff as a handle on American political discourse? Me neither.

Here's something with a little more ability to stick to your ribs. It's Bill Moyers on the persistent, unwholesome effects of the story that Ronald Reagan popularized: Reducing the Reaganite story to its Karloffian essentials, it's this: "Government--bad. Greed-good."

Not so, says Brother Moyers--and not just on the economics of it, but on the history as well:

[C]ontrary to what we have heard rhetorically for a generation now, the individualist, greed-driven, free-market ideology is at odds with our history and with what most Americans really care about. More and more people agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics is corrupting democracy and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help when the market system fails to generate shared prosperity. Indeed, the American public is committed to a set of values that almost perfectly contradicts the conservative agenda that has dominated politics for a generation now.

The question, then, is not about changing people; it's about reaching people. I'm not speaking simply of better information, a sharper and clearer factual presentation to disperse the thick fogs generated by today's spin machines. Of course, we always need stronger empirical arguments to back up our case. It would certainly help if at least as many people who believe, say, in a "literal devil" or that God sent George W. Bush to the White House also knew that the top 1 percent of households now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. Yes, people need more information than they get from the media conglomerates with their obsession for nonsense, violence and pap. And we need, as we keep hearing, "new ideas." But we are at an extraordinary moment. The conservative movement stands intellectually and morally bankrupt while Democrats talk about a "new direction" without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass. The right story will set our course for a generation to come.

Moyer's piece is going onto the neglected Readings list on the sidebar.