Author: Norman Solomon

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Opinion Viewpoint

The Bernie Sanders Shift

For a long time, a wide spectrum of establishment media insisted that Bernie Sanders couldn’t win. Now they’re sounding the alarm that he might. And, just in case you haven’t gotten the media message yet — Sanders is “angry,” kind of like Donald Trump. 

Elite media often blur distinctions between right-wing populism and progressive populism, as though there’s not much difference between appealing to xenophobia and racism and appealing to those wanting social justice and humanistic solidarity. In the real world, the differences are vast.

Donald Trump is to Bernie Sanders as Archie Bunker is to Jon Stewart. Among regular New York Times columnists, aversion to Bernie Sanders has become more pronounced at both ends of the newspaper’s ideological spectrum. Republican Party aficionado David Brooks (whose idea of a good political time is Marco Rubio) warned that his current nightmare for the nation is in triplicate: President Trump, President Cruz, or President Sanders. For Brooks, all three contenders appear equally awful; Trump is “one of the most loathed men in American public life,” while “America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are.”

That “political center” of power sustains huge income inequality, perpetual war, scant action on climate change, and reflexive support for the latest escalation of the nuclear arms race.

Meanwhile, liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman (whose idea of a good political time is Hillary Clinton) keeps propounding a kind of trickle-down theory of political power, in which “happy dreams” must yield to “hard thinking.”

An excellent rejoinder has come from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Krugman doesn’t get it,” Reich wrote. “I’ve been in and around Washington for almost 50 years, and I’ve learned that real change happens only when a substantial share of the American public is mobilized, organized, energized, and determined to make it happen.”

Reich added: “Political ‘pragmatism’ may require accepting ‘half loaves’ — but the full loaf has to be large and bold enough in the first place to make the half loaf meaningful. That’s why the movement must aim high — toward a single-payer universal health, free public higher education, and busting up the biggest banks, for example.”

But for mainline media, exploring such substance is lower in priority than facile labeling and horseracing and riffing on how Bernie Sanders sounds angry.

On “Morning Edition,” NPR political reporter Mara Liasson told listeners that “Bernie Sanders’ angry tirades against Wall Street have found a receptive audience.” Meanwhile, without anger or tirades, “Hillary Clinton often talks about the fears and insecurities of ordinary voters.”

The momentum of the Sanders campaign will soon provoke a lot more corporate media attacks along the lines of a Chicago Tribune editorial that stated that the nomination of Trump, Cruz, or Sanders “could be politically disastrous,” adding that “wise heads in both parties are verging on panic.”

The Tribune editorial warned that “as a self-declared democratic socialist,” Sanders “brandishes a label that, a Gallup poll found, would make him unacceptable to nearly half the public.”

A strong critique of such commentaries has come from the media watch group FAIR, where Jim Naureckas pointed out that “voters would not be asked to vote for ‘a socialist’ — they’d be asked to vote for Bernie Sanders. And while pollsters don’t include Sanders in general election matchups as often as they do Clinton, they have asked how the Vermont senator would do against various Republicans, and he generally does pretty well.”

In mass media, the conventional sensibilities of pundits like Brooks and Krugman, reporters like Liasson, and outlets like the Chicago Tribune routinely get the first and last words. In this column, the last ones are from Naureckas: “When pollsters match Sanders against the four top-polling Republican hopefuls, on average he does better than Clinton does against each of them.

“Actually,” Naureckas, concluded, “the elements of Sanders’ platform that elite media are most likely to associate with ‘socialism’ — things like universal, publicly funded healthcare and eliminating tuition at public colleges — are quite popular with the public, and go a long way to explain his favorable poll numbers.”

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

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“Pay Any Price”

No single review or interview can do justice to Pay Any Price, the new book by James Risen that is the antithesis of what routinely passes for journalism about the “war on terror.” Instead of evasive tunnel vision, the book offers big-picture acuity, focusing on realities that are pervasive and vastly destructive.

Published this week, Pay Any Price throws down an urgent gauntlet. We should pick it up. After 13 years of militarized zealotry and fear-mongering in the name of fighting terrorism, the book — subtitled Greed, Power, and Endless War — zeros in on immense horrors being perpetrated in the name of national security.

As an investigative reporter for The New York Times, Risen has been battling dominant power structures for a long time. His new book is an instant landmark in the best of post-9/11 journalism. It’s also a wise response to repressive moves against him by the Bush and Obama administrations.

For more than six years — under threat of jail — Risen has refused to comply with subpoenas demanding that he identify sources for his reporting on a stupid and dangerous CIA operation.

A brief afterword in his new book summarizes Risen’s struggles with the Bush and Obama Justice Departments. He also provides a blunt account of his long-running conflicts with the Times hierarchy, which delayed some of his reporting for years — or spiked it outright — under intense White House pressure.

Self-censorship and internalization of official worldviews continue to plague the Washington press corps. In sharp contrast, Risen’s stubborn independence enables Pay Any Price to combine rigorous reporting with rare candor.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

• “Obama performed a neat political trick: He took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own. In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama’s great achievement — or great sin — was to make the national security state permanent.”

• “In fact, as trillions of dollars have poured into the nation’s new homeland security-industrial complex, the corporate leaders at its vanguard can rightly be considered the true winners of the war on terror.”

• “There is an entire class of wealthy company owners, corporate executives, and investors who have gotten rich by enabling the American government to turn to the dark side. But they have done so quietly… The new quiet oligarchs just keep making money… They are the beneficiaries of one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history.”

• “The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.”

• “Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in its endless war on terror, possibly the worst has been the war on truth. On the one hand, the executive branch has vastly expanded what it wants to know: something of a vast gathering of previously private truths. On the other hand, it has ruined lives to stop the public from gaining any insight into its dark arts, waging a war on truth. It all began at the NSA.”

Fittingly, the book closes with a powerful chapter about the government’s extreme actions against whistleblowers. After all, whistleblowing and independent journalism are dire threats to the secrecy and deception that fuel the “war on terror.”

Now, Risen is in the national spotlight at a time when the U.S. government is launching yet another spiral of carnage for perpetual war. As a profound book, Pay Any Price has arrived with enormous potential to serve as a catalyst for deeper understanding and stronger opposition to abhorrent government policies.

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Afghan Quagmire

I read in The New York Times that “the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan” within the next 18 months, “raising American force levels to about 58,000” in that country. Then I scraped ice off a windshield and drove to the CSPAN studios, where a picture window showed a serene daybreak over the Capitol dome.

While I was on CSPAN’s Washington Journal for a live interview, the program aired some rarely seen footage with the voices of two courageous politicians who challenged the warfare state.

So, on Sunday morning, viewers across the country saw Barbara Lee speaking on the House floor three days after 9/11 — just before she became the only member of Congress to vote against the president’s green-light resolution to begin the U.S. military attack on Afghanistan.

“However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” Lee continued. “Some of us must say, Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

The footage of Lee was an excerpt from the War Made Easy documentary film (based on my book of the same name). As she appeared on a TV monitor, I glanced out the picture window. The glowing blue sky and streaky clouds above the Hill looked postcard-serene.

But the silence now enveloping the political non-response to plans for the Afghanistan war is a message of acquiescence that echoes what happened when the escalation of the Vietnam War gathered momentum.

During the mid-1960s, the conventional wisdom was what everyone with a modicum of smarts kept saying: Higher U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were absolutely necessary. Today, the conventional wisdom is that higher U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are absolutely necessary.

Many people who think otherwise — including, I’d guess, quite a few members of Congress — are keeping their thoughts to themselves for roughly the same reasons that so many remained quiet as the deployment numbers rolled upward on the road to death in Vietnam.

Right now, the basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place — including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate over Washington’s options. In an atmosphere reminiscent of 1965, when almost all of the esteemed public voices concurred with the decision by newly elected President Lyndon Johnson to deploy more troops to Vietnam, the tenet that the United States must send additional troops to Afghanistan is axiomatic in U.S. news media, on Capitol Hill, and, as far as can be discerned, at the top of the incoming administration.

But the problem with such a foreign-policy “no-brainer” is that the parameters of thinking already have been put in the rough equivalent of a lockbox. Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Lyndon Johnson approached Vietnam policy options no more rigidly than Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and Barack Obama appear poised to pursue Afghanistan policy options.

USA Today reported this week that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan “has asked the Pentagon for more than 20,000 soldiers, Marines, and airmen” to raise the U.S. troop level in Afghanistan to 55,000 or 60,000. General David McKiernan says that is “needed until we get to this tipping point where the Afghan army and the Afghan police have both the capacity and capability to provide security for their people.” Such a tipping point “is at least three or four more years away,” the general explained. So, “if we put these additional forces in here, it’s going to be for the next few years. It’s not a temporary increase of combat strength.”

Is Afghanistan the same as Vietnam? Of course, competent geographers would say no. But the United States is the United States — with domestic continuity between two eras of military intervention, spanning five decades, much more significant than we might think.

Bedrock faith in the Pentagon’s massive capacity for inflicting violence is implicit in the nostrums from anointed foreign-policy experts. The echo chamber is echoing: The Afghanistan war is worth the cost that others will pay.

Norman Solomon writes for the Huffington Post and other publications and websites.

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What Are the Issues?

In recent decades, the news media have shown increasing attraction to style over substance. Under the cover of journalism, endless discussions have pumped up the public discourse with evaluations of candidates as theatrical performers rather than policy advocates.

But the current presidential race has brought us to a new journalistic low. The media fascination with story angles seems to be inversely proportional to story substance.

For instance, the attentive news consumer knows far more about Hillary Clinton’s quest to seem likable than about her position on nuclear weapons. We hear far more astute punditry about whether she projects an image of caring than about her eagerness to keep the profit-driven insurance industry at the center of the country’s health care.

The welling of tears in Clinton’s eyes that occurred on the eve of the New Hampshire primary was the subject of relentless election-night discussion on national television. Unspoken and unsung, there was a tacit theme of her purported breakthrough moment that tracked with a well-known oldie: “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.”

A key dynamic is circular: Major news outlets fixate on particular images and repeat them endlessly. Then — when those recurring media images have impacts on Election Day — follow-up news accounts cite the images as very important to voters.

The morning before the New Hampshire election, media outlets swooned when Clinton showed some emotion in response to a voter’s question. Again and again, during the day and into the night, video of those moments saturated the TV airwaves. It’s plausible that the saturation had a significant effect on ballot totals.

After the polls closed and returns came in, pundits swiftly gravitated to the incident as pivotal. Lost in the media discussion was the choice made by media outlets to obsess about those seconds of video in the first place.

Style has become a fixation of political journalists. If there are important policy differences between Clinton and her remaining opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, you’d hardly know it from the vast bulk of the news coverage.

Between the media critiques of style and the incessant “horseracing” analysis from journalists, you might think the candidates were ballet dancers or thoroughbreds in a stretch drive rather than people in the running to become president of the United States.

Behaving so much like drama critics who must keep evaluating onstage performances, most political journalists have become accustomed to looking for — and, in fact, largely concocting — simplistic storylines. Along the way, there is often a remarkable eagerness for the media to winnow the field well before voters have actually done so.

Early this month, a lot of journalists in the national media were declaring the imminent arrival of cinched nominations. Some — after the Iowa caucuses and before the New Hampshire primary — even made it sound like Barack Obama had already gained a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination.

Looking ahead, with much of the country scheduled to cast ballots in early February, we would be well advised to ignore the media prognostications as much as possible. The tones of certainty from big-name journalists have been appreciable, but they’ve been dwarfed by the magnitude of inaccurate predictions.

Often, political journalism seems locked into a mode almost indistinguishable from cliché-ridden sports reporting. Descriptions of previous games bleed into predictions about the next ones.

And the so-called quality media are apt to be just as inclined toward “horseracing” as less pretentious outlets. Mark Shields and David Brooks, the in-house commentators on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, frequently seem more like racetrack handicappers than journalists concerned with policy substance.

Yes, the rhetorical flourishes and sound-bite moments can be exciting and captivating. But we’ve seen what happens to a government when it’s run by people with stirring rhetoric that is often disconnected from human realities.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.

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“Making Progress”

The media spectacle that Arizona senator John McCain made of himself in Baghdad on April 1st was simply another reprise of an old and ghastly ritual. McCain expressed “very cautious optimism” and told reporters that the latest version of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is “making progress.”

Three years ago, in early April 2004, when an insurrection exploded in numerous Iraqi cities, U.S. occupation spokesman Dan Senor informed journalists: “We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems.” Nine days later, President George W. Bush declared: “It’s not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable.”

For government officials committed to a war based on lies, such claims are in the wiring.

When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time in May 1962, he came back saying that he’d seen “nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future.”

In October 1966, when McNamara held a press conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from another trip to Vietnam, he spoke of the progress he’d seen there. Then-military analyst Daniel Ellsberg recalls that McNamara made that presentation “minutes after telling me that everything was much worse than the year before.”

Despite the recent “surge” in the kind of media hype that McCain was trying to boost in Baghdad, this spring has begun with most news coverage still indicating that the war is going badly for American forces in Iraq. Some pundits say that U.S. military fortunes there during the next few months will determine the war’s political future in Washington. And opponents of the war often focus their arguments on evidence that an American victory is not possible.

But shifts in the U.S. military role on the ground in Iraq, coupled with the Pentagon’s air war escalating largely out of media sight, could enable the war’s promoters to claim a notable reduction of “violence.” And the American death toll could fall due to reconfiguration or reduction of U.S. troop levels inside Iraq.

Such a combination of developments would appeal to the fervent nationalism of U.S. news media. But the antiwar movement shouldn’t pander to jingo-narcissism. If we argue that the war is bad mainly because of what it is doing to Americans, then what happens when the Pentagon finds ways to cut American losses — while continuing to inflict massive destruction on Iraqi people?

American news outlets will be inclined to depict the Iraq war as winding down when fewer Americans are dying in it. That happened during the last several years of the Vietnam War, while massive U.S. bombing — and Vietnamese deaths — continued unabated.

The vast bulk of the U.S. media is in the habit of defining events around the world largely in terms of what’s good for the U.S. government — through the eyes of top officials in Washington. Routinely, the real lives of people are noted only as shorthand for American agendas. The political spin of the moment keeps obscuring the human element.

Awakening from a 40-year nap, an observer might wonder how much has changed since the last war that the United States stumbled over because it could not win. The Congressional Record is filled with insistence that the lessons of Vietnam must not be forgotten. But they cannot be truly remembered if they were never learned in the first place.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

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Clarifying Iraq

Like a lot of people, I’ve had trouble following the twists and turns of logic in media coverage of the war in Iraq. But maybe it’s starting to make sense. Sort of.

Of course, four years ago, during the last phase of agenda-building for the invasion, a key message was clear: Iraq, under the despotic Saddam Hussein, menaced the region and the world. Most of all, the tyrant was said to be brandishing weapons of mass destruction.

Now, with the fifth year of the war set to begin in a matter of weeks, we might wonder why the U.S. war effort continues at full throttle. The polls show that most Americans are finding the pro-war claims to be unpersuasive. Those claims rely on a multitude of buzzwords and rhetorical flourishes.

In the 48th month of war, the media lines that sustain it are quite notable. Beyond the standard methods of spin, eminent war promoters seem to realize that they would be ill-advised to state the essence of their position with clarity. But I think I get the picture of the underlying case for more war:

The U.S. government gave Saddam’s regime appreciable support during most of his worst crimes, but he crossed Washington with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and was really bad ever since.

The American invasion was necessary due to weapons of mass destruction that the Iraqi government didn’t have. The presence of WMD in Iraq was crucial to rationales for going to war, but the actual absence of WMD is irrelevant to the legitimacy of that war and to the necessity of continuing it in 2007.

During the last few years, we’ve been told U.S. troops must remain in Iraq or that country will descend into civil war. Now, Iraq is in the midst of a terrible civil war, and U.S. troops must remain to prevent a civil war.

The president refuses to abandon his administration’s purported effort to promote democracy in Iraq. All independent polls show that a strong majority of the Iraqi people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, pronto. But, as a force for democracy, the U.S. troops must not leave.

The longer the occupation continues, the worse the situation in Iraq gets. And the occupation must continue.

Virtually every major claim and prediction that President Bush has made during the past five years about Iraq has turned out to be false or disproved by subsequent events. Today, his assertions are still being reported with great credulity and scant journalistic skepticism.

We live in a democracy, and the polls show most Americans want withdrawal of U.S. troops to begin now rather than at some indefinite time in the future. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq is actually increasing.

The United States is using its military to further inflict violence upon Iraq, and there is more violence in the society as a whole. Meanwhile, top U.S. officials say that the “surge” of American troops into Baghdad is an effort to quell violence.

Many of the same politicians in Washington who avidly supported the invasion of Iraq are the ones now being accorded the most media prominence and credibility. Meanwhile, the politicians who were strongly opposed to the invasion before it began are still accorded little media prominence and are often tacitly dismissed as the usual anti-war suspects.

While the realms of politics and media offer profuse accolades to U.S. troops, the veterans who return from Iraq are getting grievously short shrift. The health care and other services available to returning vets are scandalously inadequate. The news coverage of Iraq-war-scarred veterans is routinely an evasive exercise in cherry-picking that dodges the horrific consequences in the aftermath of combat.

The war was wrong. The war is wrong. The war must continue.

Got it? Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is now available in paperback.

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Crisis of Faith

So far, most American media outlets seem to be walking on eggshells to avoid tough coverage of the new pope. Caution is in the air, and some of it is valid. Anti-Catholic bigotry has a long and ugly history in the United States. News organizations should stay away from disparaging the Catholic faith, which certainly deserves as much respect as any other religion.

At the same time, the Vatican is a massive global power. Though it has no army, it is more powerful than many governments. And these days, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church is the capital of political reaction garbed in religiosity. Many dividing lines between theology and ideology have virtually disappeared.

After more than two decades as a Vatican power broker, Joseph Ratzinger is now in charge as Pope Benedict XVI. He is extremely well-positioned to push a long-standing agenda that includes hostility toward AIDS prevention measures, women’s rights, gay rights, and movements for social justice. No one in the hierarchy was more vehemently opposed to condoms, this, while millions of people contracted cases of AIDS that could have been prevented.

During the 1980s, it was Ratzinger who led the charge from Rome against the wondrous spirit and vibrant activism that galvanized Catholics and others across Latin America. While many priests, nuns, and laity bravely joined together to challenge U.S.-backed regimes inflicting economic exploitation, intimidation, torture, and murder with impunity, Ratzinger used the Vatican’s authority to undermine such community-based resistance. He silenced outspoken church officials and installed orthodox clergy who would go along with the deadly status quo.

For right-wing religious activists, Ratzinger has been a godsend. And now that he’s running a church with 1.1 billion members, the odds are excellent that he will proceed to gladden the hearts of misogynists, homophobes, and right-wing crusaders around the world. Contrary to the predictable media spin about the uncertainty of his papal course, everything we know about Ratzinger’s extensive record during the last quarter-century tells us that he is a reactionary zealot who is determined to shove much of the history of progressive social change into reverse. He is a true believer.

The new papacy is a huge gift to the minority of conservatives in the United States who are trying to impose their version of morality on the country and the world.

Soon after the 2000 presidential election, an astute analyst of far-right religious movements, Frederick Clarkson, wrote that “both the evangelical and Catholic Right are developing and promoting a long-term, fundamental approach to the practice of faith that links political involvement with faith itself. ” Clarkson added that “a shift in the political culture suggests that personal and unedited expressions of religious belief for political purposes are no longer considered unseemly. Indeed, the suggestion is that they are beyond reproach.”

And that’s much of the problem. When debatable positions are “beyond reproach” — when religiosity provides cover for all manner of manipulations and repression — it’s easier for demagogic power-mongers to get away with murder.

Journalists should not let pious proclamations intimidate them. When the policies of a president or prime minister result in suppression of human rights or fuel public-health disasters, the news media should not hesitate to expose the consequences. And the policies of a pope should be no less scrutinized. •

Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, will be published this summer.

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[VIEWPOINT] Straight Talk?

Political myth-making goes into overdrive every four years. With presidential campaigns fixated mostly on media, an array of nonstop spin takes its toll: When heroes are absent, they’re invented. When convenient claims are untrue, they’re defended.

Many supporters come to function as enablers — staying silent or mimicking their candidate’s contorted explanations to try to finesse gaping contradictions. Fast talk substitutes for straight talk.

President Bush, for example, keeps repeating statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or supposed links between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein that were explicitly refuted on June 16th by the 9/11 Commission — a mendacious propaganda exercise. The president’s supporters can’t possibly be honest about those lies while speaking to journalists or appearing on radio and television.

Meanwhile, the presumed Democratic nominee is criticizing the war in Iraq following an invasion based on distortions that he helped to propagate before the war began. In a speech on Oct. 9, 2002, for instance, John Kerry let fly with this rhetorical question: “Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don’t even try?” Kerry also sought to justify his decision to vote for the congressional pro-war resolution with the statement that “according to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.” Yet you can bet that countless Democrats who oppose the current war and never bought the WMD “evidence” will keep pretending — in public, anyway — that there’s nothing much wrong with Kerry’s Iraq stance and general hawkishness.

Partisans are frightened off from engaging in candor because they’re afraid of being accused of simply settling for the lesser of two evils. Yet such foggy evasions degrade political discourse. In the case of the 2004 presidential race, all military hawks are not alike.

The gang in control of Bush’s presidency is beyond even the sort of militarism implemented during the 1980s by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bush the First. In a new documentary film, Hijacking Catastrophe, Noam Chomsky comments: “They happen to be an extremely arrogant, dangerous group of reactionary statists. They’re not conservatives.”

Usually the media game is to choose your presidential candidate and then sing that candidate’s praises. But for progressive advocates, the most telling — and honest — way to support Kerry would be to openly acknowledge his pro-corporate and militaristic positions while pointing out that, overall, Bush is significantly worse.

The crying need to defeat the incumbent president is so clear that presidential candidate Ralph Nader says his campaign this year will aid in ousting him. In March, he said: “I’m going to take more votes away from Bush than from Kerry.”

But the Progressive Unity Voter Fund’s “Don’t Vote Ralph” site provides a chart and backup data from independent polls (a total of 37) gauging Nader’s impact on the race. Titled “How Much Nader Is Helping Bush” (the chart is posted at www.dontvoteralph.net/pollwatch.htm), it demolishes Nader’s assertion, while graphically showing why Karl Rove must be thrilled that Nader is in the race. Nader is trying to get on the ballot in every state — a big gift to the Bush-Cheney ticket in more than a dozen swing states.

Supporters of Bush, Kerry, and Nader differ on many issues. But all too often they’re similar in this unfortunate respect: They are willing to go along with absurd pretenses rather than publicly acknowledge that their candidate is blowing smoke.

Norman Solomon writes for Alternet, where this column first appeared.

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News News Feature

School For Scandal

With huge financial scandals causing turmoil in the United States, this year has seen some vigorous reporting about high-level misdeeds and corporate manipulation. But many news stories just take the lead from top officials. In the months ahead, we’ll find out how deep American media outlets are willing to go.

Big scandals always generate plenty of headlines and lots of excitement. Important information can emerge. But, frequently, key facts remain buried and crucial questions go unasked. If it’s true that reporters produce a first draft of history, they often serve as conformist “jiffy historians” who do little more than recycle the day’s conventional wisdom.

A dozen years ago, when journalist Martin A. Lee and I were writing a book about media bias (Unreliable Sources), we tried to assess what had gone wrong with news coverage of the Iran-Contra scandal. Along the way under the heading of “Signs Of an Official Scandal” we listed some general characteristics of coverage routinely providing much more heat than light.

Today, it may be useful to consider how some of these signs apply to media treatment of the current uproar shaking Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue:

* “The scandal comes to light much later than it could have to prevent serious harm.”

Yup.

* “The focus is on scapegoats and fall guys, as though remedial action amounts to handing the public a few heads on a platter.”

Hours after USA Today reported on its front page last week that “the search for big-time fall guys in the recent corporate debacles could be a long one,” former Adelphia Communications CEO John Rigas, his two sons, and a pair of other execs at the firm were under arrest. Delighted White House spinner Ari Fleischer called the action “a clear sign of this administration’s commitment to enforce the laws so justice can be done.”

* “Damage control keeps the media barking but at bay. The press is so busy chewing on scraps near the outer perimeter that it stays away from the chicken house.”

Too soon to tell. Some reporters and pundits have been gnawing on Wall Street scamster-turned-regulator Harvey Pitt, and the SEC chairman may soon find himself ceremoniously tossed over the White House fence onto the sidewalk. We’ll see whether such scraps will satisfy the hungers of the Washington press corps.

* “Sources on the inside supply tidbits of information to steer reporters in certain directions and away from others. With the media dashing through the woods, these sources keep pointing: ‘The scandal went that-a-way!'”

Beyond all the partisan salvos, basic conflicts exist between corporate power and potential democracy. The news media have not yet clearly defined the scope of the current scandal or its implications.

* “The spotlight is on outraged officials … asking tough questions. (But not too tough.) As time passes, politicians and/or the judicial system take the lead in guiding media coverage.”

But this scandal is unusually volatile because many millions of employees and retirees-to-be are furious that corporations have methodically ripped them off. News media are spotlighting their predicaments and justifiable anger. Officialdom may find that the usual media-manipulation techniques are inadequate to co-opt the growing rage at the grassroots.

* “Despite all the hand-wringing, the press avoids basic questions that challenge institutional power and not just a few powerful individuals.”

Yes, some former private-sector heroes are becoming prime-time villains. And in Washington, after flak-catching functionary Pitt gets tossed overboard or decides that he must spend more time with his family, the ex-captain of (the U$$) Halliburton is likely to face increased pressure as more becomes known about Dick Cheney’s former lucrative role as head of that particular books-cooking firm.

But the nonstop flood of corporate money into the coffers of the two major parties has not slowed. And while the latest “official scandal” shows no indication of abating anytime soon, there’s still a shortage of high-profile reporting on the nation’s extreme disparities of power.

In this scandalous era, savvy operatives like Pitt are expendable. So are any politicians including Machiavellian string-pullers like Cheney and princely marionettes like George W. Bush. While journalists may feel empowered to focus on greedy individuals who excel at deception, now is also a good time to explore options for fundamentally changing an entrenched system that remains hostile to economic justice.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is The Habits Of Highly Deceptive Media. His syndicated AlterNet column focuses on media and politics.

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News News Feature

Hot-air Bubble

With the “New Economy” now in shambles, it’s easy for media outlets to disparage the illusions of the late 1990s — years crammed with high-tech mania, fat stock options, and euphoria on Wall Street. But we hear very little about the fact that much of the bubble was filled with hot air from hyperventilating journalists.

Traveling back in a time machine, we would see mainstream reporters and pundits routinely extolling the digitally enhanced nirvana of huge profits and much more to come. The new-economy media juggernaut was not to be denied.

Sure, journalists occasionally offered the common-sense observation that the boom would go bust someday. But it was a minor note in the media’s orchestral tributes to the new economy. And the bullish pronouncements included an awful lot of hyped bull.

Five years ago, Business Week‘s July 28th edition was scorning “economic dogma” for its failure to embrace the glorious future at hand. “The fact is that major changes in the dynamics of growth are detonating many conventional wisdoms,” the magazine declared in an editorial that concluded, “It is the Dow, the S&P 500, and NASDAQ that are telling us old assumptions should be challenged in the New Economy.”

A column published on July 24, 1997, in the very conservative Washington Times, by economist Lawrence Kudlow, rang the same bell: “Actually, information age high-tech breakthroughs have undreamed of spillovers that impact every nook and cranny of the new economy.” Kudlow was upbeat about “even higher stock prices and even more economic growth as far as the eye can see.”

In 1998, the July 20th issue of Time was one of many touting the economic miracles of the Internet. “The real economy exists in the thousands — even tens of thousands — of sites that together with Yahoo are remaking the face of global commerce,” Time reported. The magazine could not contain its enthusiasm: “The real promise of all this change is that it will enrich all of us, not just a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley.”

When the last July of the 20th century got underway, Newsweek was featuring several pages about the national quest for riches: “The bull market, powered by the cyberboom, is a pre-millennium party that’s blowing the roof off the American Dream. It’s just that some of us can’t seem to find our invitations. And all this new wealth is creating a sense of unease and bewilderment among those of us who don’t know how to get in touch with our inner moguls.”

Meanwhile, insightful analysis of the new economy received scant mass-media exposure, but it certainly existed. While Newsweek was fretting about “inner moguls,” for instance, the progressive magazine Dollars & Sense published an article by economist Dean Baker warning that the country was in the midst of “a classic speculative bubble.” A crash was on the way, Baker pointed out, and it would financially clobber many working people.

Writing three years ago, with the stock market near its peak, Baker anticipated grim financial realities: “Many moderate-income workers do have a direct stake in the market now that the vast majority of their pensions take the form of tax-sheltered retirement accounts such as a 401(k). These plans provide no guaranteed benefit to workers. At her retirement, a worker gets exactly what she has managed to accumulate in these accounts. Right now, a large percentage of the assets in these retirement accounts is in stock funds.”

Overall, Baker contended, “the post-crash world is not likely to be a pretty one. The people who take the biggest losses will undoubtedly be wealthy speculators who should have understood the risks. The yuppie apostles of the new economy will also be humbled by a plunging stock market. But these people can afford large losses on their stock holdings and still maintain a comfortable living standard.”

Baker concluded his in-depth article by predicting a foreseeable tragedy that major media outlets rarely dwelled on ahead of time: “The real losers from a stock market crash will be the workers who lose most of their pensions, and the workers who must struggle to find jobs in the ensuing recession. Once again, those at the bottom will pay for the foolishness of those at the top.”

Now that the bubble has burst, most of the hot air about the new economy has dissipated. This summer, the media atmosphere is cool to scenarios for getting rich with shrewd investments.

Too late.

Norman Solomon’s most recent book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. His syndicated column is published by AlterNet.