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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Willful Suspension of Disbelief
By John
Maxwell
I have been excoriated by some for blasting
most of the American Press for its supine kowtowing to the
imperatives of George Bush and his claque. This week, the
American Press began to admit that what people like me said
about their performance was true.
I believe that the US and to some extent the
British Press, were missing in action when the time came to
fulfill their public duty. In the War on Terror, they were
willing, if not eager, to give credence to any lie, exaggeration
or misrepresentation of the truth as long as it seemed to serve
the interest of the ruling elites.
For me, this was a long-running struggle,
because I believe that the US Press was the Judas Goat which led
millions of innocent investors down the garden path to the
dot.com bust and the huge stock market bubble which
exploded a couple of years ago.
Now, this week, the New York Times
says, in re its Iraq pre-war coverage:
“Some critics of our coverage during that
time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our
examination, however, indicates that the problem was more
complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been
challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were
perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of
Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong
desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire
claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while
follow-up articles that called the original ones into question
were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at
all.”
The New York Times is too easy on
itself and its compatriots. By speaking the truth, some
others of us courted opprobrium, hate mail, disruption of
our internet service to mention only the most minor
annoyances and prosecutions.
The Story has changed
Paul Krugman, an economics professor, not a
journalist, has consistently outperformed his journalistic
colleagues on the NYT – with the exception
of Maureen Dowd, In his latest, Krugman lays out the real
criticism of the Press’ unquestioning obeisance to and
almost hagiographic representations of George Bush:
“People who get their news by skimming the
front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the
sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years
after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and
righteousness.
“But now those people hear about a
president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us
to war in Iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and
learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else
accountable. What happened?
“The answer, of course, is that the
straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character
that the press, for various reasons, presented as reality.”
Krugman believes that there were many factors
responsible for the failure of the journalists’ responsibility
to tell the truth. Among them:
• misplaced patriotism;
• the tyranny of
evenhandedness – attempting to balance the unbalanceable –
“some reporters could not bring themselves to believe that
"the president of the US was being dishonest about such
grave matters”
• Intimidation, by
the President’s court and by other news media and
right-wing groups.
Writing as I do in Jamaica, a small and
vulnerable country, subject to instant blackmail from such as
the IMF and World Bank, I find it impressive that my publishers
have given me no sign that they have been intimidated and
pressed to stop me writing critically about the world crisis,
although it is clear that the US Embassy, the State Department
and various other actors, are monumentally displeased that the
people who control such vulnerable entities as Air
Jamaica and Sandals have not caved in to the more or less
high-minded intimidation that is par for the course in these
parts.
The Prime Minister and CARICOM have felt the
pressure over their principled stand on Haiti, and much as I
deplore their relative weakness of position, they must be
saluted for the fact that alone in the world, with the exception
of South Africa, they have stood for principle and defended the
charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights.
When I reported that an American general had
said, months before the war, that Iraq had so few targets
worth bombing that the air force was “ reduced to
bombing outhouses” I was not speaking from privileged
information. Whatever I knew (and more ) was available to the
panjandra of the New York Times, CNN and the rest.
Some people were surprised when a few weeks
ago I said the Bush administration was coming apart. The signs
are now obvious. On CNN’s (unscientific) instant polls
the evidence is clear. On Wolf Blitzer’s programme 86%
of his respondents (about 30,000) said they were more
disturbed by the fuel price crisis than by the Administrations
latest ‘Terror Alert”. One respondent said what
was really necessary a system for grading the
credibility of Mr Ashcroft’s announcements.
Asked whether they were likely to watch the
president’s latest speech, 60% said no. Did they feel more
secure against terrorism than two years ago? Eight (8%)
percent said yes, 92 percent said NO. The responses were
similarly negative when asked whether Bush’s speech had made
them clearer about what his policies in Iraq.
Wilful errors of judgment
The scientific polls take a little longer to
reflect change, because their respondents are likely to be less
volatile than the thousands who email their responses to
Lou Dobbs, Blitzer and Co. But it is now clear that Bush’s
credibility has almost evaporated and it will take a miracle, or
some serious criminality, to elect him president in November.
Watching Bush, the decay of confidence is patent –the swagger
is less pronounced, the strut is almost gone, and the smirk
vanishes as mysteriously as the Cheshire Cat.
In the theatre, the willing suspension of
disbelief is an essential component of really enjoying and
participating in what is happening on stage. One knows that it
is not real, but one decides that, for the next 90 minutes or
so, it is real.
The US press has been trapped by the facility
with which modern communications devices and software can
produce virtual reality and they have conned themselves
into believing that these instruments can abolish Mark
Twain’s aphorism “ You can fool SOME of the people ALL of
the time, you can fool ALL of the people SOME of the time;
but you can’t fool ALL of the People ALL of the time.” Their
suspension of disbelief has not been just willing, but wilful.
Now, in Iraq, the Bush misadventure is having
harsh consequences for the United States. Within the past two
weeks the US has surrendered power to the Ba'athists of
Fallujah and the Shiites of Abu Sadr, and they have surrendered
their nation-building to a Sunni Moslem, Lakhmar Brahimi of the
United Nations.
Whatever will come out of the Iraq debacle is
nothing like what Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith and company intended
or expected.
In addition to all of which, the Abu Ghraib
scandals have brought the United States reputation into what the
Defamation Act describes as “Hatred, Ridicule and Contempt.”
Remember the arrogant dismissal of General
Shinseki, because he disagreed with Rumsfeld about the number of
troops needed to control Iraq after the war? Shinseki did what
so many generals and journalists failed to do. He told the
truth, defending the public interest.
All of us under Threat
But the war itself was based on false
premises. Within the past few weeks we have seen the disgracing
of the war party’s guru, Ahmed Chalabi; worse, Chalabi
is now suspected of having conned the United States into
carrying out – at American expense in blood and treasure –
the Ayatollahs' agenda. . They have unseated Saddam,
unleashed the Shiites in Iraq and left the country open to the
Ayatollahs. If this is not a coup of transcendental proportions,
I don’t know what is.
In addition, the British Institute of
Strategic Studies has confirmed my prognosis of 2001, that the
war on terror would end up unleashing Bin Laden’s bees, rather
than exterminating them.
The result is that all of us, all over the
world, are now under threat and none of us has the slightest
idea of how to deal with that.
Of course, one could start with Palestine,
which people like me realised from Day 1, was the spark that
lights the terrorists’ bomb. Yet an under-educated and easily
led President has handed over to Ariel Sharon the power to
decide whether Peace and Justice can come to the Middle East and
the world.
For one president in three years the
devastation wreaked in US foreign policy and influence has been
stupendous. But there is more.
The threats against Cuba and the decapitation
of Haitian democracy spring from the same roots as the war on
Iraq, and they are equally flawed.
In Haiti, with probably more than 2,000
people swept away by floods, there is no government, no social
services, no organised assistance for the thousands left
homeless or otherwise suffering. Under the protection of the
United States, killers and racketeers have taken charge of what
was left of Haiti, killing off the grassroots
leadership of the popular organisations because they resisted
the fascist takeover. The corollary of course, is that there is
no one to take leadership in a time of disaster.
Further, the urban elite in whose
interest President Aristide was deposed, have neither the vision
nor the will to work for the redevelopment of Haitian
infrastructure,to prevent future catastrophes: the
battle against soil erosion, the encouragement of peasant
food production. The new model ‘Democracy’ heralded by Colin
Powell, Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, was never about popular
empowerment, but about” free zones’ and sweated labour.
Outside the Box
As I said in November 2000, the United States
needs to take greater care in selecting its leaders because in a
very real sense, their leaders are willynilly, the leaders of
the rest of us, whether we agree with them or not. In
confronting this power we understand that the imperatives of the
United States are not the imperatives of the rest of us. But we
do demand to be treated fairly and equitably. If the United
States preaches Freedom and Liberty, it must uphold Freedom and
Liberty.
Robert Morris is a diplomat who
resigned 34 years ago from Richard Nixon’s National
Security Council in protest against the disastrous policy in
South East Asia. In an open letter this last week, Morris made a
passionate appeal to diplomats in the US Foreign Service – the
trustees of the American conscience abroad. In urging them to
resign in protest against the present situation, Morris said:
“The America that you sought to represent
in choosing your career, the America that once led the community
of nations not by brazen power but by the strength of its
universal principles, has never needed you more. Those of us who
know you best, who have shared your work and world, know you
will not let us down. You are, after all, the trustees" (Common
Dreams).
Morris says that “My friends and I used to
remark that the Nixon administration was so unprincipled it took
nothing special to resign. It is a mark of the current tragedy
that by comparison with the Bush regime, Nixon and Kissinger
seem to many model statesmen. “
And Robert Reich, like Morris, no
fire-breathing Liberal, believes that a second term for Bush
will effectively mean the end of American democratic government. “Nothing is more dangerous to a republic
than fanatics unconstrained by democratic politics. Yet in a
second term of this administration, that's exactly what we'll
have"
(CommonDreams).
A year ago, people like Reich, Krugman and
those of us in the darker corners of the earth were regarded as
incendiary troublemakers, anti-American zealots who were pretty
close to aiding and abetting terrorism.
Perhaps it may be time to start listening to
them and us. Copyright ©2004 John Maxwell / COMMON SENSE 419
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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