| Number 209 | June 13, 2003 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, No room for a meaningful editor’s note this week. That’s alright; I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say. See you next week, Nygaard |
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The New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) of June 11th reported some remarks made in Portugal by U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld. The article, headlined “Rumsfeld Sees Progress in Bringing Order to Iraq but No Quick End to Violence,” reminded readers that “More than 40 members of the American military have been killed [in Iraq] since May 1, the day that President Bush declared as the end of hostilities.” (The Times did not mention any Iraqi deaths, most likely because Mr. Rumsfeld did not mention them.) The Times reported Mr. Rumsfeld’s apparent attempt to put into perspective these deaths, plus the endless looting and plundering that continues in Iraq. The Secretary characterized the killing and looting as “some crime and wrongdoing” and added that “this also occurs in metropolitan areas of America, Europe and Asia as well.” |
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Every Tuesday the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) has a special section called “Science Times,” in which they publish stories about scientific advances in a wide variety of areas. On May 13th Science Times included a story called “Navajo Miners Battle a Deadly Legacy of Yellow Dust.” The Navajo nation has the distinction of sitting upon what one mining executive has called “the Saudi Arabia of uranium,” and the Times article told the story of the struggles that Navajo people are having as they try to get compensated for the decades of radiation poisoning that was visited upon their populations during the uranium mining boom from 1950 to 1990. The Public Health Service has estimated that many hundreds of Navajos who used to work in the area’s uranium mines will die of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases in coming years, joining the more than 500 who have already died. The article tells of a law called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, under which people exposed to radiation from uranium mining and milling (or through weapons testing) are eligible for government compensation. The article—presented by the Times as a commentary, or a sort of opinion piece, and labeled “A Doctor’s Journal”—was written by a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, and does not mention that the existence of this law is due to decades of organizing work by unionized mine workers and their families. It does describe how difficult it is for Navajo miners to “prove” that they are deserving of compensation for their risky work in the mines, despite rates of lung cancer among former miners that are 28 times as high as non-exposed Navajos. The wife of one of the former miners featured in the article points out that her husband has to stop walking every 10 feet in order to catch his breath. This is a man who had been able to walk 30 miles in elk hunting season. As if this bureaucratic stonewalling weren’t bad enough, the doctor’s article reports that a Dallas company, Hydro Resources, wants to re-start the mining business in the area, this time using a leaching process that would contaminate the Westwater Canyon Aquifer, “the sole source of drinking water” for 15,000 people living in the area. Does it strike anyone as a little odd that the Times decided to relegate this story—which is about racial justice and public health—to the Science Times section, and present it as essentially a human interest story rather than the political scandal that it is? Maybe “odd” isn’t the word. Despite the placement and labeling of the article, which made it seem like it would be solely about concerned with the scientific, medical aspects of the story, the author points out that there is a local group called the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining, or ENDAUM, which has been organized to stop the continued assaults on the Navajo people. Learn more by visiting their website at http://www.endaum.org/. |
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“Prison Rates Among Blacks Reach A Peak, Report Finds.” So read the headline in the NY Times of April 7th. This report appeared right in the middle of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, so many people might have missed this important news. The news was that one in eight black men aged 20 to 34 were in jail or prison in the United States in the middle of 2002, the period referenced in a just-released report by the Justice Department. That’s 12 percent. In comparison, 1.6 percent of white males in that age group were in jail or prison at that time. Consider South Africa under apartheid, an international symbol of institutionalized racism if ever there was one. In the last year of official apartheid, South Africa incarcerated adult black men at a rate of 851 per 100,000. In the middle of the year 2002, the U.S.A. incarcerated black adult men at a rate of 4,810 per 100,000. If one does the arithmetic, one can see that black men are incarcerated now, in my country, at a rate more than five times higher than in apartheid South Africa. Allen J. Beck, the chief prison demographer for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, pointed out, according to the Times, that the 12 percent figure was “a very dramatic number, very significant.” It’s actually somewhat worse than that, apparently. As Mr. Beck also pointed out, the 12 percent figure is just the rate on any given day; the rate is much higher over the course of a lifetime. The Bureau has calculated that a staggering 28 percent of black men will be sent to jail or prison in their lifetime. The Justice Department also reports that the nation’s prison and jail population exceeded 2 million inmates for the first time in 2002. In a related story, the April 30th Times reported that “The number of black Americans under 18 years old who live in extreme poverty has risen sharply since 2000 and is now at its highest level since the government began collecting such figures in 1980, according to a study by the Children’s Defense Fund...” As the Fund reported, but the Times did not, “The Bush administration plans to dismantle Head Start, block-grant Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, and slash and freeze crucial services designed to help these poorest children.” In yet another related story, as reported in every news outlet in the land, the “President” on May 28th signed into law a tax-cut bill that will likely reduce federal revenues by something like $800 billion to $1 trillion (not $350 billion, as widely reported). These tax cuts are going to be paid for, in part, by the service cuts mentioned above. Despite the cynical name of the tax-cut bill—“The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003"—the real point of reducing taxes has little to do with creating jobs and much to do with weakening the federal government’s capacity to make even token attempts to address the extreme inequality visited upon us by our so-called “Free Market” system. |
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Isn’t it too early to be talking about the 2004 U.S. presidential election? Yes, of course it is. But it’s not too early to look at the news coverage of the already-declared candidates to get a hint of how the media will be covering political campaigns in the 21st century. Campaign-related events at this early stage tend to get only superficial and brief media coverage (or none at all), but if you look at whatever coverage they do receive you can get an idea of the “story lines” that are being constructed for the coming coverage. The political importance of this is profound. The decisions being made right now by the editors of these huge media corporations in regard to the 2004 presidential election, for example, will have a huge impact on the ideas that we all will get to talk about for the next 17 months. You know how it goes: some of the candidates get painted as “serious” candidates, while others are “long shots,” and still others are consigned to the lunatic fringe. Let’s look at a real-life example from last month. On May 3rd ABC News hosted a debate in Columbia, South Carolina between nine candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Why only nine? I wondered about this, since there are actually more than 30 candidates for that nomination at the moment. The South Carolina Dems say that these are the people “who have formally established campaigns,” but that’s not true. Lyndon LaRouche, for example, has a well-developed campaign, and has raised more money than several of the candidates who were invited to South Carolina on May 3rd. (Not to be construed as any sort of endorsement for this guy—Please!) Anyhow, somebody decided to include only nine people in this debate—either ABC News, or the South Carolina Democratic Party, or somebody—and those nine were Carol Moseley Braun, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, Bob Graham, John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, Joseph Lieberman and Al Sharpton. The debate happened on a Saturday night, and it was apparently carried live on C-SPAN, although I don’t have cable, so I didn’t see it. Probably relatively few people did, so the political importance of the actual debate is likely less important than the subsequent coverage of the event in the media that most people do see, which remains the major newspapers and broadcast media. So, what did most people see? The Saturday debate occurred rather late, and it was on the East Coast, so many newspapers covered it in their Monday editions. Sort of. Except for the invisible candidates. The late city edition of the Times had a brief report on the debate, but nobody outside of New York City saw it. The Times coverage of the debate that most of the nation saw appeared on Monday’s front page under the headline “Pragmatism Meets Ideology: Democrats Draw Battle Lines.” In my local paper, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) the coverage appeared on page A13, dwarfed by a huge Motorola ad. As is often the case with provincial papers, this coverage of a national political event was a condensed reprint of the Times report. The debate, the Times said, “served to divide the field into two distinct camps.” One side, says the Times, “is more pragmatic than ideological.” On the other side “are the candidates trying to tap into...deep anger flowing from a presidential election in 2000 whose legitimacy many Democrats dispute, and stoked by the conservative policies Mr. Bush has embraced.” So, according to the nation’s most influential newspaper, it is “pragmatic” to be conservative, and anything else is “ideological.” That’s worth remembering as you read the Times, or as you read any of the innumerable articles in your own local paper that will be reprinted from the Times, or based on reporting in the Times. Beyond the crude framing of the debate, the article was tremendously interesting, and mostly because of what was not there. You will recall that there were nine participants in the debate. Reading the Times report, however, one would think that there were only six participants in the debate, since three of the candidates present were literally never mentioned. And the three invisible candidates were Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun, and Dennis Kucinich. It is impossible to determine what criteria were used to decide to disappear these three candidates, since they were literally not mentioned. It’s true that these three campaigns have the least money among the nine (according to the internet research service “FECInfoPro”) but beyond that, not being a mind reader, I can only speculate. I can predict with some confidence at least one of the consequences of media decisions like these. For example, if one of the “top six” candidates comes to your city or state in the next few months, you will likely hear about it without hardly trying, and will likely get at least some information from the media about their ideas and the general direction of their campaigns. If, on the other hand, one of the disappeared candidates comes to your town, it’s very possible you won’t even know it, and consequently will not be exposed to their ideas. Ideas like a universal, single-payer health care system as proposed by Kucinich. I’m aware that now, with the internet, highly-motivated people will likely know about any candidates, and any candidates’ visits, that they want to know about. Still, when you go in to work the next day and try to talk to your co-workers about Al Sharpton’s ideas, for example, or Carol Moseley Braun’s, you are likely to be met with either blank stares or ridicule. That’s the power of the agenda-setting media. So, the media decides whose campaign is worth covering, and then decides on future coverage by looking at how much “attention” the candidate is receiving among potential voters. That “attention,” of course, is in large part a function of the earlier media coverage, the nature of which was decided by media executives who are almost entirely unaccountable to the public—indeed, usually entirely unknown to the public. And so the circle completes itself, and democracy be damned. Addendum: Remember, there are only 507 days until the election! So, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, you can learn about all three dozen candidates by visiting the website of VoteSmart, the best source for the real basic, nuts-and-bolts information about who the candidates are, how different interest groups rate them, how to contact them, and so forth. Find VoteSmart at http://www.vote-smart.org/index.htm.) |