Bad American

The New York Times reports that the San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million every week.

Imagine that.

How long can this hemorrhaging in print media go on?

Recently an old co-worker from The Cleveland Press came into my bookstore (who now works for the PD) and we renewed an old acquaintance and talked about the shitty state of the business.

She agreed with me that print seemed to be on its deathbed and said the PD hadn’t hired anyone in. . . quite awhile. Not that she needed to fear that I was buttonholing her for a job - far from it. If offered a staff reporter job at the PD next to a GS-5 paper shuffler job with the Feds the choice would be ridiculously easy and surprising noting my personal history.

In any case, she seemed genuinely worried about the state of the business and articles like this one, talking about the plummeting ad revenue across the board.

What I found interesting was this:

Since the fall, when Media General, the owner of a major newspaper chain in the South, set its 2008 budget, “We have pulled our thinking down twice with respect to revenue,” said Marshall N. Morton, the chief executive.

Over the next few years, he predicted, “There’s got to be some assimilation,” with some major American newspapers going out of business or merging. At the corporate level, he said, “I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see combinations.”

Remember the Widget (the World Journal Tribune)? I remember the guy whose job it was to evict people from their Flint, Michigan apartments in the movie Roger and Me. He said when a poor man meets a poor woman and makes a house together, well, two poor people don’t make it together any better than one.

I can’t imagine that combining newspapers that are both hemorrhaging ad revenue is going to create a situation any financially better together than they were apart. Many of the newspapers that have folded in recent years, take The Cincinnati Post for instance, had joint operating agreements with the ‘competing’ morning daily and it wasn’t nearly enough to save them in the end.

This former co-worker said the biggest problem was that the future of news may be online but that traditional newspapers can’t make enough money online. Well, who does?

My biggest problem which I told her, as a newsie, was opening newspaper’s pages up to unattributed commentary which is cheapening public discourse. She agreed and said the matter was being discussed at the PD. I remain unconvinced that the PD will do the right thing. They’re not alone. I sense such desperation among print management that they’d try guest editorial page editors as a gimmick.

Imagine that - win a drawing and you get to choose the day’s columnists for the page and write your own lead editorial. Hey, can’t do any worse than Kevin O’Brien and might do appreciably better.

Or maybe revisit Wide Open Blog.

Nahhh.

My point to her is and remains that fossilized newspaper management has no one but themselves to blame for most of their financial difficulties. If it isn’t hamfisted and embarrassing attempts at appearing ‘relevant’ or ‘hip,’ it’s a slavish editorial obedience to Corporate America. Why should people be exposed to the same Corporate bullshit in print that they get bombarded with on radio and television? And when the average Clevelander (or working class suburbanite) opens up the PD, they see news and ‘lifestyle features’ more relevant to people in Pepper Pike.

The PD doesn’t lead like the Press used to. It’s merely a corporate status quo broadsheet that the vast majority of people read for entertainment tips, sports stories, comics or classifieds.

The PD offered me weekends for two months for $14 so I took it. I can still bulldoze the Sunday PD in about 30 minutes or less. That’s how much interesting reading I find in the Sunday PD. Even though I really can’t stand the New York Times that much either, I can usually kill a full hour with the Times National Sunday edition.

I see no hope for corporate print but they’re digging their own grave. They just won’t admit it. Ever.

“It’s going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company. Even with less severe losses, “You’re going to see structural changes: papers could drop a day or two per week, they could outsource printing.”

And that will only speed their demise. Think of it in the same way that charging $15 for the first bag carried on the airplane is hastening the demise of the American airline industry. And more people need airline travel a lot more than they need the morning rag.

And will enough people read online only newspapers to make them any more financially feasible than print editions? They sure as hell won’t pay for them online so put that out of your capitalistic minds.

Seems like an insoluble problem.

Saint Timothy of Buffalo?

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) — The Holy See, speaking on the authority of Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, announced that it was investigating deceased American news commentator Tim Russert for beautification.

That move would put Russert on the fast track toward sainthood. Russert, 58, died of a massive heart attack Friday, preparing for his Sunday NBC television show Meet the Press.

Angelo Bunarotti, spokesperson for the Vatican, said that Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of the Washington Archdiocese had already begun the first step toward sainthood, the investigation.

In the investigation, a postulator, in this case, colleague Chris Matthews, also a Roman Catholic, acts as an advocate for the candidate and will examine the candidate’s life, his writings, teachings, acts of holiness, heroic acts and any other virtues that would indicate that the person being proposed for sainthood is truly worthy of such a declaration.

Matthews said he felt honored to serve in the role of the postulator for his colleague and friend.

“There is no doubt from anyone who knew him that (Russert) embodied the best qualities of a Catholic layman and his work on earth certainly can be held to have elevated the status of all mankind,” Matthews said. “But Tim went above and beyond the mere mortal in his work and life and you can see that being  acknowledged in the outpouring of grief on his death.”

Matthews said he had never seen so many touching tributes to a newsman upon his death as those being given to Russert.

“It’s amazing,” Matthews said. “It seems like every five minutes there’s another memorial on television. (Edward R.) Murrow never got that kind of recognition when he died and I doubt (Walter) Cronkite will either.

“But that’s the difference between mere journalism and the elevation of the human condition that Tim is being honored for,” Matthews said.

Bunarotti said Pope Benedict regards Russert as a perfect modern candidate for beatification and is waving the customary five year waiting period after a person’s death for consideration.

“We we’re particularly impressed by the almost mystical quality that was attributed to Russert’s work on American television,” Bunarotti said. “Testaments are pouring in from all over the United States that only Russert made the connection between the political and the sacred understandable for most Americans.

“He achieved a certain transcendence in that respect,” Bunarotti said. “It may be considered to be miraculous.”

Russert will need to have a miracle certified by the church for beatification, the next step to a possible canonization and eventual sainthood.

Timothy Joseph “Big Russ” Russert, Tim Russert’s father and subject of his bestselling book, said Tuesday that the family was deeply honored for Tim’s sake by the actions of the church.

“He’s already been canonized in the media, now the church will make it official,” the senior Russert said.

Why anyone can make oodles of money by starting their own small business! You could be the next Bill Gates!

So if you’re without health insurance, what’s life insurance anyway?

$512 for 12 months? Yeah, right.

So the woman at my State Farm office (not my agent but an office assistant), was telling me about her husband dying at Cleveland Clinic and how much she’s glad she had his life insurance to look forward to.

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that (a) the story is true and (b) she’ll use the money to pay for the funeral expenses (funerals are a classic American ripoff but that’s a subject for another day) and the gargantuan medical bills that she wouldn’t have to worry about if we lived in a civilized country with single payer national health care insurance.

So life in America becomes being beholden to an interlocking series of official scams whether it’s for-profit health insurance or life insurance or medical care providers. Not to mention all the other scams that are cleverly designed to separate you from as much of your money as possible. Conservatives love to talk about the ‘right to life’ but once you’re born, your ass belongs to capitalism baby!

What a sap I was to buy off on the whole ‘American dream.’ Yeah, start your own small business. Run lean and mean! get involved in your community. Give people a good product at a fair price. Donate to local causes.

Get screwed anyway. Of course, a lot of the reason is the wonderful George W. Bush Economic Miracle.

It reminds me of a now politically incorrect comedy routine that George Carlin used to do. He would say “we’re all Nixon’s n*****s now” Well, unless you’re part of George W. Bush’s “haves” and “have mores” base, we’re all Bush’s n*****s now.

Indeed.

Well, don’t get me wrong. I love my book store. I love my customers. I love it when I find the books people are looking for. I love parents helping their kids discover the love of reading in my store. I love talking about books and authors. I love not having to answer to anyone but myself.

But I also would love not to have to worry about one hospitalization costing me everything. And I would love being able to make enough money to have even a modest living - to be able to afford the rent, health insurance, life insurance; the basic accoutrements of a decent life. But that dream is now receding into memory for most of us.

I told my mother this morning after my life insurance passed into history that if I should die before her, just to remember the words “direct cremation.” That’s when they ship your carcass directly to the funeral home and they incinerate you on receipt. I told her they could put my ashes in a empty Folgers can (yeah, like The Big Lebowski) and you can either throw my ashes in Lake Erie or use them as a butt can when smoking friends come to call. I couldn’t care less.

As for medical care, I have plenty of aspirin, band aids and, if I should get a very bad diagnosis, I always have my .38. I wouldn’t want to burden my family with crushing medical bills nor do I want the medical establishment getting my bookstore AND my kid’s college fund. And no, I’m not saying that for effect or to make some dramatic political point. It’s stark reality in Bush’s America - and I’m not the only one. Should the time come, from what I’ve seen of the future in this county, I’m more than ready. I’ll be damned if anyone is going to do a fund raiser for my cancer surgery. As if.

Until I started this business, I had no idea how many people in my (supposedly) prosperous little town struggle everyday to make ends meet for themselves and their families. Many of these people have no health insurance and many of them are greatly in debt. And no, they don’t live in the lap of luxury either.

It breaks my heart to see so many hard working people walking the same tight wire that I am. I’m single now and my kids are older and fairly much on their own so it’s not the same as many of the people who have younger kids.

And with the higher gas and food prices, things are getting worse.

So here I am 10 years after I swore I’d never go back - trying to get a cubicle job with the Federal Government where I can rediscover the lost joys of a decent income and affordable health and life insurance and paid annual and sick leave. Where else can a 45 year old man with my history get that kind of deal? The private sector? ‘Scuse me while I laugh ruefully.

But in the meantime, I’m one of those sole proprietors with my own small business. Living the American Dream.

And scared shitless.

Now read this from Lynette at Big Ass Belle. Incredible that we both moved these posts on the same day.

First Jessica Yellin tells the truth (which any media savvy person already knew):

CNN’s congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin, appearing on last night’s Anderson Cooper 360 as a part of a panel discussing Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened, admitted that during the run-up to war, “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.”

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives — and I was not at this network at the time — but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

You could almost hear her bosses scream: GET THAT B&@*& IN HERE - SHE TOLD THE TRUTH!!!

As Chez Panzienza notes, it didn’t take long for Jessica to do a ‘180′

“Let me say: No, senior corporate leadership never asked me to take out a line in a script or re-write an anchor intro. I did not mean to leave the impression that corporate executives were interfering in my daily work; my interaction was with senior producers. What was clear to me is that many people running the broadcasts wanted coverage that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the country at the time. It was clear to me they wanted their coverage to reflect the mood of the country.”

The statement ends, amusingly, with Yellin saying, “And now I’m going back to work covering the Puerto Rico primary from San Juan.”

From which I’ll never return.

Heh heh. Can you see the metaphorical gun pointed at her head? The one that had ‘your career’ written on the bullets?

As someone who knows, there is no greater sin in the American media, on any level, than to tell the truth about corporate pressure in the newsroom. And Yellin stepped over that line and admitted what most people, Panzienza among them, knew to be true - Corporate Media, far from being ‘liberal’ in any sense, are conservatives at heart and that bias is reflected in the presentation.

Yellin is lucky to keep her job unlike someone such as Phil Donahue who was axed in a obvious political hit.

Panzienza:

Without realizing it, Yellin may have just helped to illustrate a pretty repugnant truism within the rubric of corporate journalism these days: Everything seems designed to insulate the people at the top, protecting them from exposure to accountability. The only factor that truly has the ability to affect the lives of the executives in the adminisphere or their corporate overlords is the ratings. The numbers are the end that will always justify the means; what those means may be is irrelevant — not when ad revenue is at stake. If you think it’s something bordering on tragic that the hierarchy within most modern news operations works like the Mafia — or maybe Congress — you’re right.

For just a moment, Jessica Yellin spoke her mind and pulled back the curtain to reveal the reality of what went on within America’s spineless news media during the rush to war — then thought the better of it and either through subtle coercion or with the unfortunate knowledge that her career may be on the line, “corrected” herself.

The thing is, of course that there are a lot of people within CNN who know how the ‘game’ is played. They don’t like it, but the kids need braces:

Panzienza:

(By the way, the link to Yellin’s statement was sent to me by a senior producer within CNN whom I’ve never met. Gotta love that.)

Like Soviet era dissidents, all they can do is try to leak the truth out to the bloggers who can bring it before a wider audience.

The fallacy, of course, is that anything will change. There is a reason that armed guards and bulletproof glass now rings most large media studios: they are in service to the state and corporate elite and there is a fear at some point, perhaps during a ‘national emergency,’  that the masses may commandeer the airwaves.

They know they’re lying. They don’t care. It’s their job.

Paul Craig Roberts writes more on the subject here.

Two of the worst handmaidens, Billy Kristol and Thomas Friedman, have been rewarded for their treachery to America by the New York Times, which pays these men, who have never been right about anything, to pontificate from columns on its pages. Others, such as Peter Beinart, are installed at the Washington Post and other publications.

The benefit of being a name columnist at a name newspaper is that it puts you on the lucrative speaking circuit. Raimondo reports, for example, that Friedman is paid $65,000 for a speech.

Yes, you may call them whores. Because they are. And note how lucrative the business of lying is in America.

There are far better columnists available than Friedman and Kristol. There’s Raimondo himself. There’s Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Pat Buchanan, Lew Rockwell, to name just a few. If the print media had columnists of intelligence and integrity explaining events, instead of propagandists for government and interest groups, the United States would not have wasted eight years (so far) in pointless, illegal, and immoral wars of aggression that have been financed by foreign loans, thus sapping the strength of the dollar and American power.

In America, money, not truth, has the power. If the New York Times had Cockburn instead of Friedman and the Washington Post had Raimondo instead of Beinart, the newspapers would lose advertising revenues and connections with the power brokers.

Roberts is right but he doesn’t drive the point home far enough. WHY would they lose advertising revenue? Because advanced capitalists tend to espouse conservative principles and demand that the media they control through advertising do the same. This goes for your mom and pop weekly newspaper as well as NBC. And these corporate advertisers also know that the network executives share this worldview.

And WHY do these corporate types espouse conservative principles? We don’t discuss this enough. On that level, it’s not simply that conservativism, as practiced in the US, simply allows for the more unfettered accumulation of profit. That’s true. But on the second level, support for the nation’s military-industrial complex in the form of supporting the nations’ wars also sends a great profit ripple across every company that ever supplied a widget to the Pentagon.

And most people who are driven to acquire a great deal of money have a predatory mindset to begin with. So it all fits.

The corporations, the state and the military form a three headed beast that runs the nation on every level and reinforces that control through the media - both in news and entertainment.

Roberts does advance this point that the influence of the three headed beast reaches into academia, again, another so-called bastion of liberalism:

The same problem exists outside the media. Studies produced by think tanks and university professors serve the causes of those who finance them. Does anyone think we will ever see a study from the American Enterprise Institute, for example, that is critical of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, the military-industrial complex, or the offshoring of American jobs? With rare exceptions, think tanks serve the interests of donors.

The same constraint on truth exists everywhere. I once asked the proprietor of a distinguished engineering firm why he didn’t publicly express his doubts about the World Trade Center buildings. He said it would be the end of his business, that he would be denounced as an anti-American and demonized as a terrorist sympathizer. The fact that he would be an expert giving an expert opinion would carry no weight.

Now let those last two sentences sink in. All the media has to do is smear anyone - no matter how much of an expert - as ‘unpatriotic’ and their opinion carries no weight. Paging Hermann Goering at Nuremberg.

Only a nation of morons could be so controlled. Draw your own conclusions, re: our ‘education’ system.

This is what I teach my sons: in America, the truth is a dangerous thing. It is neither sought nor welcomed at any level - on your job, in your church, and in your town meeting. Even among your own kin. And, instead of setting you free, too much uttering of the truth in this society could very well put you behind bars.

Ask Don Sieglelman.

But the other things the American people don’t know or don’t want to know is how this works on every level, as I wrote above. The day after 9-11 at the radio station I worked at, WJBC AM1230 in Bloomington/Normal, Illinois, Station Manager Red Pitcher came in to the studio and told me in no uncertain terms that, from this day forward, we would be “red, white and blue, 24/7.”

What that meant was no criticism of the President, the attacks on Afghanistan or Iraq, or the civil liberties killing measures of the War on Terror ™. I could not, in good conscience, stop questioning the obvious problems with all three. So a few months after that, I was fired.

And in the end, the truth is a funny thing: it keeps popping it’s head up no matter how many times the right wingers in this country hammer it. Looking back, pretty much everything I said on the air after 9-11 has come true.

Does it matter in a nation which runs on lies and bullshit? Probably only for the dwindling number of educated and aware people in this country. All one has to do is wrap themselves in the flag and scream I’M A PATRIOT!! And then, the argument is over.

So Ms. Yellin gets to keep her cushy job spinning that which she knows to be lies. They say everyone has their price - even for their own soul. And our culture is full of sellers.

McKay in Huffpo

I like his anger but he’s too easy on us Americans:

McCain called his wife the C word in public. It’s in Cliff Schecter’s new book The Real McCain. And three reporters verified the incident. Here’s an excerpt:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Hold on, let me drop the facetious tone I was using for the front part of this piece. John McCain called his wife the C-word (or for people from England: cunt) in front of a bunch of people?!!!!! And we’re talking about Obama’s preacher? McCain dropped a C-bomb and we’re spending hours on Hillary exaggerating a trip to Bosnia?!!!

Okay, I get it. We let all Republicans and most Democrats off the hook because they will roll over for the companies that own the media and in McCain’s case literally get blown by lobbyists, but come on! Are we not even remotely pretending anymore?

George W. Bush was a silver spoon dolt with no record to speak of other than bankruptcy and selling tropical plants and we let him sail into the White House but Barack talks about religious fundamentalism and guns being prevalent in poor areas and we roast him for weeks?

That isn’t just a bias, that’s deranged. Big money has seriously warped us. When there is a school shooting the news doesn’t talk about basic gun control they talk about video games and their influence on kids. When we learn that the Vice President planted false news stories to take us to war we get outraged about Simon being too mean to contestants on fucking American Idol. And why? Because big money has log jammed our voice and we know it’s too hard to do anything about it. So the dollar drops, the insane war continues, polar bears drown, school shootings continue, the trade deficit soars, gas prices go through the roof and this country fades as quietly as someone falling asleep in front of the TV.

We’re not a stupid country, we’re comfortable and afraid. Afraid to hear the truth. Our leaders talk to us like a parent avoiding the subject of sex with an eight-year-old and we eat it up. And when someone like Obama talks to us like grown-ups we vet him. And vet him.

Um, first of all Adam, we ARE a STUPID country - and getting dumber all the time. You can’t write the material you’ve just written and just chalk it up to beong comfortable and afraid - yeah, we’re those things too but we are very, very stupid. In fact, our stupidity has made us the laughingstock of Western nations.

Not that Americans care. We’re still Number One because we have NASCAR, the NFL, country music, bigSUVs and Big Macs baby - whoo hooo!

Now on to the issue at hand - why is McCain getting the pass for having called his wife a cunt in public?

Easy.

First, you’re absolutely right about the media being in the hands of corporate right wingers who want a McCain presidency to ensure their continued dominance of the airwaves. And, most media barons, like Murdoch, are right wingers themselves. They see themselves in McCain - old, greedy, inarticulate, with a great trophy wife, etc. They love the guy. Hillary reminds them of their first wives and Obama, well, do we have to SAY it? It’s bad enough they might have to run into OJ on the golf course but to have one of them in The White House!? Perish the thought.

Now the men who support McCain secretly LOVE him for calling his wife a cunt. Yes, it’s true! Most of them have been calling women that in derision since the second grade and, since misogyny and patriarchy are the building blocks of the conservative mind, they probably high five each other whenever the subject of McCain’s insult comes up. “Yeah man! That’ll teach the bitch to keep her trap shut!”

And many of the men who secretly think this ALSO work in the news business.

Now for the women, well, again, we’re talking about the peculiar breed known as conservative women here. They probably side with their men, horrified that the trollop had the temerity to make a joke about hubby’s receding hairline! After all, most Republican women, in the Marybel Morgan mold, make their man feel like the king of the castle every time he comes home. In fact, many of them probably would have understood completely if McCain had slapped Cindy in the puss for such a comment. After all, the Bible commands women to be subservient to their men, so there.

See now why this doesn’t work, Adam? This is America, not Denmark. We’re a land poisoned by so much violent misogyny masquerading as religious faith that such comments are hardly startling to millions of American women. And while the Democratic women are fighting the Hillary-Obama wars, the good Christian Republican woman will be voting in a great big block for their strong, masculine Christian ‘war hero’ John McCain. Along with their strong, masculine, take-no-shit-from-any-broad men.

And they won’t even have to sacrifice their sons for McCain’s future wars! The lower classes will bleed for them! How cool is that?

Just in case you haven’t read it, here’s the full printable version of the weekend story in the New York Times.

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

So let’s recap - it’s all about eternal war and eternal profits and to hell with anything that America once supposedly stood for like truth and justice. If we can make a buck pimping the death machine, well, that’s the American Dream, baby! There are summer homes and Lexus convertibles to be bought!

Many of the comments on the story in HuffPo,

despair and rightfully so, in my opinion, that anything will come from this. It won’t because the American people have made the conscious or subconscious decision that they are powerless to stop it. Who is going to go up to a four star hero, retired or no, and call him a liar to his face? That’s far more moral courage than any American, whether in the media or not, is capable of drumming up these days. After all, we are taught that anyone in uniform is a “hero” regardless of what they do and say. Many American still consider Lt. William Calley a true American hero and patriot even to this day. After all, all he did was kill gooks. What’s the problem with that?

So the Pentagon sends retired generals with a financial stake in the death machine to lie to Americans on the idiot tube. What else is new?

We get and will get, exactly what we deserve.

You know what’s the saddest thing in not having the Plain Dealer delivered to my store since April 1?

I don’t miss it at all.

Seriously, I’m not just saying that to be cute, in the grand scheme of my daily life, I just don’t miss it at all.

And the REALLY sad thing is that, after 30 plus years of having a daily newspaper delivered to me, whether it be in Ohio, Illinois or Iowa, I don’t miss not having it delivered at all.

f you had told me even 10 years ago that I would feel this way, I would have thought you didn’t know me very well.

After all, I was the kid who would run outside on a cold February afternoon to retrieve The Cleveland Press from a snowbank and bring it back to the warmth of our family living room to read from page to page, front to back.

And I was 11 years old.

Sad, really.

While on one hand, I do miss the reliability of having something to read with coffee and cereal, this laptop (not TV) has taken the place of the newspaper. And I do not miss all the garbage space taken up by discarded newspapers every week.

And I don’t have to even try to miss Kevin O’Brien’s weekly vomit in the Plain Dealer (or Ted Diadiun’s weekly excuse for that matter). And I don’t miss all the “lifestyle” crap that has all but crowded real in-depth news from most of America’s daily newspapers. No more having to see LeBron James on the front page. If aliens came from another planet and all they had to go by was the Plain Dealer, they’d have to assume that LeBron James was the King of Cleveland or some kind of local deity.

I saw the Plain Dealer at the local Wal-Mart the other day desperately trying to give free copies of the paper to people leaving the store. Poor guys: there were so few takers.

I have tried and tried and tried and tried for many years to get the editorial barons of the newspapers I have worked at lately - The Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Peoria Journal-Star especially, to do what was necessary to make their newspapers read and relevant again. But the people who are promoted to high levels in the field are not real journalists anymore but corporate hacks. In Diadiun’s case, he always WAS a corporate butt sucker - while I don’t know O’Brien’s history, one can reasonably assume he was never a friend to ordinary working people.

But hey, they have nice houses, decent cars and probably fun wives and isn’t that what people get into the business for anyway?

Professionalization. Send junior to J school and pretty soon he’ll be reporting the daily government news from the Green Zone in Baghdad like he/she actually believes it! All you have to do is be willing to sell your soul and life can be pretty good in the biz.

Oh hell, why bother? Roldo Bartimole has been writing the same things I do here only better and for over 30 years and exactly nothing has changed. And as long as the money men treat newspapers and media outlets like Wall Street profit centers, nothing will ever change. Because in our country and culture that’s all that matters.

So it’s essentially the useless ravings of a crank (in this case, me) who made the supreme mistake of falling in love early and hard with journalism just as it was becoming more of a business than a craft. Just before the First Amendment became a quaint anachronism of an America that probably never existed anyway; where now anything and everything is a marketable commodity and we don’t ever pause to think perhaps life might have meant more than that.

But if the corporate denizens that run newspapers and media outlets keep wanting to make the payments on their summer homes, they should heed well the reality that I am by no means, the only person who doesn’t miss their daily newspaper at all.

We can play my favorite blog game: what do these two stories have to do with each other?

Greg Mitchell in HuffPo:

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent “bitter” gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin — while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations.

Then it was back to Obama to defend his slim association with a former ’60s radical — a question that came out of right-wing talk radio and Sean Hannity on TV, but was delivered by former Bill Clinton aide Stephanopoulos. This approach led to a claim that Clinton’s husband pardoned two other ’60s radicals. And so on. The travesty continued.

More time was spent on all of this than segments on getting out of Iraq and keeping people from losing their homes and — you name it. Gibson only got excited complaining that someone might raise his capital gains tax. Yet neither candidate had the courage to ask the moderators to turn to those far more important issues. Talking heads on other networks followed up by not pressing that point either. The crowd booed Gibson near the end. Why didn’t every other responsible journalist on TV?

Oh, let’s pile on - here’s Mitchell’s buddy Will Bunch:

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because — like many other Americans — I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” — especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another — tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I’m a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues — trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space — and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited — to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues.

And now, Tim Robbins’ address to the National Association of Broadcasters:

Imagine a new broadcasting industry aesthetic, that respecting the better nature of the American people, produces shows that promote strength instead of fear. That does not divide, but inspires, that does not promote hate, but unity, that will not tear the weak down, but build up their strength. Imagine a world of broadcasting where the American people are encouraged to reject despair and distrust. And when they turn their TVs and radios off at night and go to sleep they possess strength, and unity and compassion for those they disagree with. That’s not out of the question. You can make that happen. It will be difficult, and will fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and standard operational procedures. But do we have any choice? The road we are on is leading us to a corruption of our former selves. We are better than that. You can help us reclaim our better nature, our perfect union. It isn’t necessarily a matter of country before profit, or of patriotism and truth before personal comfort. There could be money to be made in appealing to our better selves. Wouldn’t that be great?

And if there isn’t and we came out of it a little less rich but more unified and healthier as a nation wouldn’t that be something we could all be proud of?

Let’s make this very simple.

In the absence of any governmental regulations (like the Fairness Doctrine) forcing capitalist broadcasters to produce television in the public good, FORGET IT! They serve Wall Street, first, foremost and always.

And elections are just another product to package for the masses, who would be bored by substantive policy debates. They’re delivering an audience for people who are selling soap.

Besides, we all know what a farce these elections have become in this ‘democracy’ anyway.

Did you really expect the hosts, bought and paid for network corporate shills, to ask questions about peak oil, the collapsing economy, Bush’s admission he and his administration plotted the illegal torture of prisoners at Gitmo, the illegal and immoral war in Iraq and what to do about it, the millions across the US who face foreclosure and why nothing will be done to reform the system - the basic problems with our capitalist system, global climate change emergency measures, etc. etc. etc.

You gotta be kidding me!

Network television does the bidding of its corporate partners the same as the government. The American people are to be distracted with bread and circuses and treated to the election as a ‘horse race’ and have it packaged as some kind of Grand Struggle of Democracy played out betwixt numerous entreaties to buy useless junk.

Which is why I find it amusing that all these critics are shocked, shocked, at ABC’s superficial coverage and questions. You people know better. Perhaps you’re writing these thundering denunciations so that someday you can produce them to show your children that you really, really, DID try to do something about the state of American journalism before everything went to hell.

And as for Tim Robbins, perhaps he just likes to hear the sound of his own bloviating rhetoric. Of course, I agree with most of what he said. But his words will have absolutely no effect on their intended audience. If Robbins had delivered the harangue with the convention ringed by fellow travelers armed with submachine guns, well, perhaps THEN they would have taken his words seriously.

As it is, the NAB’s real reply to Robbins will be a simple sneer.

Hell, Stan Freberg tried 40 years ago to get the industry to self-examine with his brilliant parody Green Christmas. The industry responded by banning the song on several radio outlets and delivering a understated but deadly ultimatum to Freberg, who took the hint and never did anything like that again.

Only the hand of government, acting on behalf of the American people, can force these broadcasters to operate in the public interest. And as far as the implications for American politics, I seriously doubt whether either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has the testicular fortitude to ram legislature through Congress to reform the American media. This system, despite their transparent protestations, serves them very well - protecting them from questions they cannot answer honestly.

Everything you see and hear on television has two main purposes: revenue generation and social cohesion. That is all you can expect under the current system and that is all you will get.

Unless people are willing to demand better or start burning down TV studios like they do in South America.

Fat chance that.

i.e. to be kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

Glenn Greenwald

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”
Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”

Of course one looks for solutions. There are few. How do essentially powerless people destroy the power of the media and the military-industrial complex through a rigged ballot box? Many have brought up how easy it is for the media to marginalize candidates like Kucinich, Gravel and Paul. The American people do exactly what they are told. They are allowed to grumble, but they are kept powerless.

Katrina VandenHeuvel is trying to speak truth to the totally bought child of privilege Cokie Roberts and George Will on my TV. Good luck with that. Cokie says America wants to win. Will wants Iranian blood. And VandenHeuvel is the only real voice of sanity and is outnumbered 3-1 on this panel. And even she doesn’t go far enough.

We are all complicit in this when we keep silent.

When the blood is spilled in Iran, we will deserve what we get. We have opted to remain willfully ignorant. We have opted to remain greedy and stupid.

There is no solution short of absolute catastrophe. I wish it were otherwise but I see no hope for any reasonable, rational, peaceful solution. The powerful want what they want. And they will not go down without a fight.

The London Independent

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

Isn’t it ironic that it takes a British newspaper to tell the truth to the American people? You don’t have to look to the British press to know how bad it is on Main Street. I see the pain around here every day and it’s getting worse. And I’m in a small town that is still fairly flush by comparison with similar small towns in adjacent counties.

Let no one look down their nose in the checkout lines at people using food stamp cards anymore. There are a growing number of people who never in a million years thought they would need the food assistance program - but here they are.

I’m going to be blunt here - George Carlin once said: “we’re all Nixon’s ni**ers now.” Well guess what - We’re all George W. Bush’s ni**ers now.

More from the story:

Richard Enright, the manager at this Morgan Williams, says the numbers of customers on food stamps has been steady but he expects that to rise soon. “In this location, it’s still mostly old people and people who have retired from city jobs on stamps,” he says. Food stamp money was designed to supplement what people could buy rather than covering all the costs of a family’s groceries. But the problem now, Mr Enright says, is that soaring prices are squeezing the value of the benefits.

“Last St Patrick’s Day, we were selling Irish soda bread for $1.99. This year it was $2.99. Prices are just spiralling up, because of the cost of gas trucking the food into the city and because of commodity prices. People complain, but I tell them it’s not my fault everything is more expensive.”

The US Department of Agriculture says the cost of feeding a low-income family of four has risen 6 per cent in 12 months. “The amount of food stamps per household hasn’t gone up with the food costs,” says Dayna Ballantyne, who runs a food bank in Des Moines, Iowa. “Our clients are finding they aren’t able to purchase food like they used to.”

Ladies and gentlemen, what we are seeing is just the beginning of what will be PERMANENTLY VERY BAD TIMES. The price of most foodstuffs are spiraling out of control for a number of reasons, chief of which are the rising fuel costs (costs to bring to market), and corn, especially, is being grown for ethanol production rather than food. Also, global climate change is starting to hurt certainly growing areas.

In fact there are now rice riots in several Southeast Asian countries as governments are putting an end to exporting rice since its needed for domestic consumption. This is going to happen in countries all over the world and, even in the United States, we’re going to have to shelve all the ‘global marketplace’ crap and start thinking about what we can do to feed ourselves more efficiently in the age of rising oil prices which also affect fertilizer products which make mass agriculture possible.

The most obscene part of all of this is that neither Bush, nor the three remaining candidates are being straight with the American people on what we face and will face in the near future. There is no room for any Churchillian “blood, sweat, toil and tears” speeches. They wouldn’t play well in focus groups.

But there will come a time in which no lies will be sufficient. The people will KNOW that things are very bad and, hopefully, will not tolerate being fed any more bullshit by their elected leaders. Someday soon, they will be forced, kicking and screaming, to tell the truth. Oil, water, food - its all in peril over the long run. We need to get real and start thinking about the world we’ll leave our children, before it’s too late.

In the meantime, if Americans want to read the truth about their own country, sadly, they will have to go to the foreign press. American journalism is dead - bought, paid for and ruthlessly controlled by corporate America.