Media Watch

The media giant Clear Channel has been busy backing legislation to allow it to extend its reach lately, but it has paused just long enough to support the war. Clear Channel has been promoting Glen Beck’s “Rallies for America,” on its corporate website and through Clear Channel stations.

Beck claims the rallies are not a pro-war but merely “intended as a venue for reasonable, thoughtful, and prayerful people who want the opportunity to express their support for our troops.” However, with signs stating “Support Bush, Not Saddam” and “We Love Tony Blair,” the pro-war message is all but transparent.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Clear Channel, which owns 1,225 radio stations and has coverage in every state, including Washington, D.C., claims that it has not sent directives to its stations to support the rallies; rather, they have acted on their own.

Regardless of the central headquarters’ level of involvement in the planning of each rally, when the country’s largest radio company starts blatantly manufacturing the news, heightened awareness is required.

Do you know what you are not seeing on television? Last month a peace organization purchased national commercial airtime from Comcast cable to run an anti-war ad on the night of the State of the Union Address. The ad was pulled at the last minute and the chance to edit the ad, as is customary, was not granted. Comcast was concerned about content it could not "substantiate:" an assertion that the war "violates international law" (an issue debated before the UN) and a description of Bush and his cabinet as "self-appointed mercenaries" (at worst an insult and a form of protected speech).

Censorship? Comcast cable recently won approval of a major merger with AT&T Broadband Cable Company, a move that gives 70% of the audience in the top 20 markets. The merger passed without a peep from the FTC or FCC about anti-trust or public interest risks. Comcast and other cable giants are now also trying to head off congressional proposals that would rein in skyrocketing subscriber fees. Did Comcast withhold the ad to curry favor with politicians?

Yesterday, I emailed Taft's office commemorating the date when John Byrd and Wilfred Berry died. I requested instate a moratorium on the death penalty. Today my computer service alerted me that Taft's email will no longer accept my messeges.

Has anybody else been banished by Bob?? Just curious, I thought we had a right to petition our so called leaders.

[Editor's note: If your email address has also been banned by the Ohio State Government, please let us know at truth@freepress.org.]

Events here in Athens are not always accurately reported in the international press. With that in mind, I sent a report to stateside friends Sunday, following the worldwide peace marches. The report, slightly edited below, was based on watching 5.5 hours of live coverage on the second state channel, NET. I also taped the second 'disruption' noted below.

Although not as exciting as being in the actual march, watching the raw TV coverage gave an overview of the event, its proportions and the immediate journalists' reaction to events as they occurred. I did not attempt to be colourful in this report, merely to set down events as I saw them.

Athens
15 February, 03

By police and media estimates, about 150,000 people gathered about noon, on a very chilly day, for just over two hours of speeches and music. The program was followed by another 3 hours of march.

Connie Hammond, a principal organizer for the Columbus march against war in Iraq last Saturday, estimated that 800 people attended the rally.

Perhaps like me, you watched the evening TV news to see what kind of coverage the protest got. It was dismal. Channels 4, 6 and 10 ran five to ten minutes of stories about snow, followed by about two minutes on the international protests. The local march got about 10 seconds max. Aside from the brevity of the coverage, the message of the protesters was trivialized by focussing on arrests at demos. Perhaps it was just me, but the anchors seemed to editorialize on "what the protesters believe" in such a way as to indicate that the viewer was expected to believe otherwise.

The Dispatch was not much better. Okay, so the Sunday edition had a front page piece "Millions make Case for Peace", which included a whole column-inch telling us where the three central Ohio demos were, but they also ran two pieces to incite war: one on the Iraqi war plan, and one on US proposals to "prove" Iraq is in violation of UNSCR 1441.

Recent decisions by the Federal Communications Commission and a federal appeals court are likely to unleash another round of media consolidation that will put even more constraints on journalists and threaten media access and diversity.

The art of the deal is a media dream: Savvy achievers get to the top. Guile and artifice -- even outright deception -- may well be part of the game, but there's nothing like success. One way or another, money and centralized power end up calling the tunes. Or so the media script often goes.

From its beginnings a half-century ago, the Pacifica radio network set out to be quite different. Listeners tuned in for something else -- a much more inclusive embrace of human creativity and political dissent. Like most endeavors, there were failures and crises along the way. But even with Pacifica's tumultuous history, the last three years have been times of extraordinary upheaval.

Two words -- "censorship" and "democracy" -- summarize much of what has been at stake in the national battle over Pacifica.

Now, some very good news: Democracy is winning.

A.N.S.W.E.R. FACT SHEET ? The Media and the Government

ALL PROPAGANDA, ALL THE TIME!

In the past weeks, images have been seen around the world of bombings of villages, hospitals, mosques, Red Cross facilities and more. What has been the response of those dropping the bombs? The U.S. and England are opening what they call ?Coalition Information Centers? ? a plan for 24-hour-a-day domination of the news to manipulate and refute these images.

In the last weeks, the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the CIA have been battening down all of the hatches to deprive the people of the United States of any independent source of information. Why is the government so afraid that people in the United States will have the opportunity to receive uncensored news and information? It is because the Bush administration, having learned a crucial lesson in Vietnam, knows that if the people actually learn the truth about the war, they may become its most vocal and effective opponents.

You may have read in the Columbus Alive that the Free Press/Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism (CICJ) was the only nonprofit member of Greater Columbus Community Shares excluded from this year’s charitable giving campaign at the Ohio State University. Twenty-one organizations were let in – only one left out.

And let me stress, left. OSU administrators insist that the Freep’s editorial content has nothing to do with their bizarre and misinformed decision. After all, they were totally unaware that the Freep’s summer issue cover story attacked the OSU administration for its handling of the spring CWA strike and its indefensible invitation to U.S. Representative J.C. Watts to serve a commencement speaker.

OSU Human Resource administrator Ned Cullom told the Alive that he and Human Resource Director S. John Taflan excluded the CICJ because the organization doesn’t “directly address the health and human services in Central Ohio.” I guess we’re not the League of Women Voters or the American Civil Liberties Union that clearly serve such a function, according to Cullom and Taflan. Both groups were let in the OSU campaign.