Where Mainstream Media Fails the Public
Maybe it's just me, but I am getting impatient with what CNN considers all the news that's fit to broadcast, particularly under the heading "Keeping them honest." The stories they pick for that segment are dragged out, redundant, and inconsequential in the greater scheme of things, compared to what they should be covering, like war profiteering in present-day Iraq.
The latest seriously hot-sounding segment presented by CNN is going to be called "Special Investigative Unit," premiered with Christiane Amanpour as the reporter--that's the real reporter, not anchor. The opening anchors will be Anderson Cooper and Soledad O'Brien. I can't help but wonder where they will go with a gutsy title like that. Will it ever touch on the politics of war profiteering and the billions in our tax dollars paid to family and friends of the administration? Frankly, I doubt it. You have to go to the Internet to find the real stuff: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1025-21.htm And therein lies the great failing of mainstream news.
Why am I picking on CNN again? Because it's the only mainstream news broadcast I consider adequate enough to watch. The others aren't worth the time…in my opinion. As for CNN, maybe I'm still disturbed by the disappearance of Aaron Brown and Peter Arnett from their stable of numerous young and pretty anchors and their real reporters in the field. And CNN does have some of the best reporters around, which once included Peter Arnett who brought the world the first Gulf War single-handedly and a great boon to cable TV (I like many others, never had cable until that broadcast straight from Baghdad). He also won a Pulitzer Prize reporting from Vietnam where he originated the expression "We had to destroy the village to save it," quoting a general. Ironically he was eventually fired by all of his American employers because he interviewed the Iraqi News Service, which is, no doubt, the sort of move that keep him in country in the first place.
Today I have no doubt that Christiane Amanpour, John King, Candy Crowley, Nic Robertson and a good number of other real, experienced investigative reporters are quite capable of finding and reported the real facts on any story at all. And when it comes to real trivia, no one is as entertaining as Jeanne Moos. I look forward to her reports.
With the exception of Lou Dobbs (granted, he does bill himself as a commentator), anchors are simply young, pretty with nice hair, are trained to speak well and are probably necessary, but otherwise a dime a dozen. I do suspect they have some say in content, however. If so , that would be my major complaint with anchors. At the top of the list is Anderson Cooper (maybe Wolf Blitzer). For some reason he just seems bent on making it all about himself, not that CNN doesn't hype his image as well. Little comments about getting out and not just sitting behind a desk are the sort of thing that makes it about him, not the news. That's hype too, not to mention ego. If he does pursue stories on his own, as he implies, then he can be rightly faulted for not pursuing the bold stuff, like war profiteering and the necessary political corruption behind it. And his "blog" is an insult to those who are pursuing and reporting the heavy stuff, like who's really getting rich off our invasion of Iraq and why they'd want to "stay the course" or escalate. That's how they make their billions--and it is billions…our tax dollars too.
Wolf (who deserves a mention in the context of anchors who don't cut it) is a different sort of story, however. I gave up on him election night, November, 2006. I spent the night listening to CNN "preject" the winners. That's the verb "preject." Ever hear of it? I can't believe even his producer, the guy who feeds interesting information into his ear, which in turn sounds like it came straight from Blitzer's brain, didn't tell him it is "project the winners." Next election I'm going back to Comedy Central and Al Franken. But that's another matter.
It's true that a kind of cult does develop around popular anchors (even Aaron Brown, which makes me a cultist too, I guess), but what we have here seems to be someone working overtime at it. Cooper seems to be the idol of the younger set, which is okay in itself, but if so my question is: Where is he taking them? Is he not the new young person's guide to world events? If that is what he or CNN wants him to be, then they need to live up to the responsibility. They need to send their real reporter out to check out the real and significant happenings, the ones you only hear about online. But what do we get instead? Here's a good view, online, of the matter: http://www.counterpunch.org/landau12062003.html
Cooper, of course, is a very popular anchor, sometimes called "journalist." I do take a great chance of stirring up a lot of disagreement by not sharing the enthusiasm of his admirers. He even has a best-selling book, Dispatches from the Edge (sounds like a rip-off of Carrie Fisher's screen play Postcards from the Edge), billed as "A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival," which I figure would be better billed as "Memoirs of a Kid," kind of like anyone under seventy signing Sinatra's song, "I Did It My Way.". But that's just my rather mature viewpoint…or just plain old, maybe.
I watched Edward R. Murrow when I was a kid myself. Murrow, who had a good team of reporters working for him, like Cooper, brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy. Then there were Bernstein and Woodward, who were investigative reporters themselves, who brought down Nixon. When Cooper and his crew bring down George W Bush and his whole crooked administration, I'll be impressed…maybe even read his "memoirs." Maybe it just disturbs me that someone is trying to be another Murrow or Woodward by hype alone, without doing what it takes to earn it. The one big question ought to be: What big-time crooked bastard, jeopardizing the whole country, have you brought down recently? We do need an established criteria, I do believe.
It is great that someone is "keepin' 'em honest" regarding rebuilding New Orleans, but you have to go online to find people who are reporting to the public at large whose friends and family are getting all that money spent on the still ongoing war on Iraq. There's some good data here, for instance: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/40962/
Here's the big question being asked by bloggers on the Web, if we are to keep 'em honest and do some special investigations: Why isn't the money Bush wants to give to his corporate buddies and family to rebuild Iraq not going to rebuild New Orleans? The fact is that the money for New Orleans was redirected to "the war on terror." The administration blamed it on the governor of New Orleans in an incredibly distorted story kept alive by their supportive radio talk shows, but that was a lie or, nicely put, disinformation. http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09122005.html : an online source of the real news and why New Orleans lost out to Iraq.
The war on terror turned out to mean an invasion of Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the tragic events of 9.11. It was, however, the "Pearl Harbor" that the Project for a New American Century, an ultraconservative think tank, said we needed to increase our defenses, which are also offensive, and become a world power, meaning imperial. http://www.antiwar.com/orig/stockbauer1.html They had long advocated an invasion of Iraq. One of its founding members, Donald Rumsfeld, started planning that invasion on day one after 9/11, before anyone even know who had perpetrated the act.
When any one of us is confronted with outright and threatening criminal behavior, we report it to the proper authorities. But to whom do we report obvious and threatening criminal behavior when the crimes are being committed by an elected (but questionable election it was) administration who is literally channeling our tax dollars directly into yet another undeclared war?
Speaking of undeclared wars, does not the voting public, who should be obliged to stay on top of this stuff--given the proper information by the news media--pay attention to the wording of the Constitution anymore? Or maybe it's just their elected representatives who haven't read the Constitution. Wars don’t happen without Congress. At least that's the way it was meant to happen. Congress also holds the purse strings. In Article One, Section 8, paragraph 11 of our constitution it quite clearly states: "To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." But maybe Congress never found out what "Letters of Marque" means. Probably. It means taxpayers paying mercenaries to take part in our declared war. That should mean Congress should be the entity granting contracts and paying billions of dollars to big business, not the executive branch. But who cares? Who even knows? Or is it a matter of these same profiteering corporations financing congressional candidates as well as the president? And why isn't the deliberate and ongoing usurpation of power from the legislative to the executive branch questioned? Or is the media controlled by these same multinational and wildly diversified corporations as well as congress and the president? If so, where does that leave the citizenry who pays the cost of it all? The whole system, the mechanism that keeps us from becoming a dictatorship, is the balance of powers. When I was kid, every student learned that no later than the seventh grade, and the relearned it redundantly throughout their years in school.
Historically FDR, Truman and Eisenhower all warned us about war profiteering and the military/industrial complex, Eisenhower stating it all most succinctly:
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Military-industrial_complex
What I've attempted to do, if the links are followed, is point out the obvious difference between mainstream reporting of relevant current events, things the voting public--or just outraged public--should know, and what can be found online. I'm not a reporter, I'm a commentator; I quote the facts or lead a reader to them after a real research reporter has uncovered them and posted them online--the only place to look…unfortunately. The facts presented in the few links included here are, to my satisfaction, demonstrable. To the best of my knowledge they go undisputed. If they are indeed demonstrable and knowable facts, why isn't CNN, "the most trusted name in news," reporting them to the public? Nothing is going to happen to fix the crap and corruption in government and its partner big business until someone alerts the public to the point they stand up and demand the final say on these matters in the name of we the people.
