the power of words: who controls the agenda?

Fierce media critic Glenn Greenwald excoriates the New York Times and other members of the mainstream media for backing down from using the word "torture" to describe water-boarding at the behest of the Bush administration.

This, according to a study by Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The Bush administration-dictated euphemism of choice? "harsh interrogation techniques."

What's in a word? Lots. It's a pernicious case of letting the folks with the most vested interest in the outcome control the agenda: the press abdicating its role of watchdog.

There could be any number of reasons why the NYT played the toad in this case. I suspect a lot had to do with access to a very closed an secretive White House. Piss off your limited sources, and what access you had tends to dry up. All of which, it seems to me, seems to me to turn the First Amendment, and all its intent, on its head.

Back to Greenwald:

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate. Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did: by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture. Yesterday, the NYT's own Brian Stelter examined this controversy and included a justifying quote from the paper's Executive Editor, Bill Keller, that is one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I've seen from a high-level media executive in some time (h/t Jay Rosen):

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Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study -- by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories -- is somewhat misleading and tendentious."

You can find the above links, a pdf of the Harvard story, and more thru Greenwald's piece. bk

when is a media star a journalist?

Probably never.

That's the answer, according to salon'com's Glenn Greenwald. In the wake of Walter Cronkite's death, he remembers not only the iconic television anchor, but also the late David Halberstam, contrasting them both to today's newsmedia stars. Read his piece here.

The former distinguished themselves by standing up to government. The latter, possibly in the name of access, toe the party line.

Implied, if not stated, is the suggestion that the hand-wringing and eulogizing in the wake of the deaths of these two legendary journalists smacks of a certain amount of hypocrisy. Speaking truth to power these days? Not even. Greenwald ends his piece thus:

In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won't see, in which Cronkite -- when asked what is his biggest regret -- says:

What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation.

It's impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite's death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.

going to where the silence is ...

... and remaining independent..

Go here for the transcript of the above video -- a Bill Moyers Journal interview between Moyers and Independent Media Izzy Award (named for I.F. Stone) winners Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman.

Moyers once wrote that "the greatest moments in press history came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it." In this interview, the two alt-media heavyweights talk specifically with Moyers about political reporting and how so many Washington-based news media elites spend way too much time chatting up the powers that be. The result: too many voices -- and opinions -- left out off the radar.

From the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: I think the way the media works is they show the spectrum of opinion between the Democrats and the Republicans in Washington. Often that is very narrow. You look at the lead up to the invasion in Iraq, the core, the major Democrats joined with the Republicans in enabling that. And you look at now with health care, the same thing. But the fact is, the majority of Americans fall outside of that opinion. And it's our role in the media not just to bring you that spectrum, but to, well, provide — I see the media as a huge kitchen table that we all sit around and debate and discuss these critical issues. To open up. That's what the American people want. And it's our responsibility to do it.

says who?

We all talk a lot about the dangers of anonymity, especially when it comes to using anonymous sources to report on major issues. There's little accountability, problems with credibility.

In an updated piece on "the distorting effect of anonymity" posted yesterday on salon.com, Glenn Greenwald gets closer to the real damage that can be done when journalists are too quick to grant anonymity: manipulation -- and outright distortion -- of the message. In order to get the story, to look like an insider, journalists get used. The public gets deceived.

From his piece:

But the most important point is that journalists are not required to serve as message-carriers. The mere fact that you agree to a "background" discussion doesn't obligate you to then go forth and obediently publish whatever the person on background utters. If all they're doing is trying to inject claims (or "spin") into the public discussion in order to be able to influence or manipulate the debate without accountability (because they're allowed by the journalist to do so anonymously), then the journalist can -- and should -- simply refrain from allowing themselves to be used in that way. There's no value, and there is often great harm, when a journalist passes on false claims or even just "spin" on behalf of a political figure whose identity the journalist is shielding from the public.

There are very narrow circumstances in which, virtually everyone agrees, anonymity is warranted -- when genuinely secret information is being revealed or someone is risking something in order to disclose matters of public interest. But far more often than not, that isn't how anonymity is used. Instead, it's typically a weapon wielded by government officials and other politically influential people to use the journalist to disseminate information -- often dubious or outright false information -- to the public while cowardly hiding behind the accountability-free protective shield erected for them by the journalist.

And more:

Justified anonymity is a vital tool for exposing government secrets and other forms of wrongdoing, but baseless grants of anonymity by journalists -- as the Bush era conclusively proved -- is the bond that keeps reporters and the politically powerful working in sync rather than adversarially, often with highly misleading and deceitful effects. That sort of anonymity is just another instrument used to shield the operations of the Beltway from scrutiny and public disclosure, and is the fuel that drives the incestuous, cooperative government-media monster.

on ethics

Three quick questions:

Where do you draw the line between private and public figures? How do you define rights to privacy? And how do anonymous sources muck things up?

Three linx for your consideration. The New York Times did a feature on Cindy McCain this past weekend. Read it here.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald questions whether that piece was relevant or just dredging up gossip.

Finally, last week the University of Texas El Paso campus newspaper ran a story about the forced resignation of the homecoming queen. (Be sure to look at the sourcing.)

And check out the aftermath.

I guess that was four. bk