This Week:

Quote of the Week

Budget News and Budget Non-News

Haiti in the News: The Power of an Editor

“Progress” and “Problems” With the Imperial Occupation

Greetings,

In my last issue I announced that Nygaard Notes would not, for the time being, be put out on a weekly basis.  That was on February 18th.  I don't really intend to go to a monthly, but I have to admit to being a little disoriented by the lack of a strict deadline.  The reason for the change was to allow myself time to earn more money, and I have been.  But I have also spent some time being ill, caring for my partner who was involved in a bicycle accident, and catching up on long-overdue tasks and errands.  And I'm not even caught up yet!

I haven't been publishing this newsletter, but I still do my weekly radio commentary, and this week's Notes is a collection of a few of them, expanded and edited for print.  The next couple of issues will be about so-called “morality politics” and Social Security.  It won't be three weeks before the next one.  I promise.

Thank you to all the readers who wrote to say that they miss the weekly Nygaard Notes delivery.  I miss it, too.  And I'm still going to call the featured quotation the “Quote” of the Week.  So there.

Until next time,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

A front-page article in the Business Section of the March 8th Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) reported that the giant retailer Sam's Club is teaming up with locally-based health care mega-giant UnitedHealth Group to “offer discounts of up to 50 percent on health services not traditionally covered by insurance, such as hearing aids and eyeglasses.”

Leave aside for the moment that UnitedHealth chief executive William McGuire was the highest-paid corporate executive in Minnesota last year (and 2nd-highest in the nation!) at $94.2 million.  Focus, instead, on this remarkable comment from UnitedHealth spokesperson Mark Lindsay, explaining why his company was entering into this “unique, if not unprecedented, pact between a retailer and a health services company:”

“It isn't so much because there's money to be made but because there are needs to be satisfied.”

Budget News and Budget Non-News

In his State of the Union speech of February 2nd, President Bush said, “My budget substantially reduces or eliminates more than 150 government programs that are not getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities.”  This was presented as the first point in support of his promise to “cut the deficit in half by 2009.”

Many of us assumed that the list of these 150 programs would be presented to the press as part of the follow-up to the speech, giving citizens the information to judge for themselves the effectiveness of the President's plan.  “How much money would be saved?” many of us wondered.  And which programs would have to go in order to save that money?

Oddly, the administration refused to supply the list until Friday afternoon, February 11th – nine days after the President's speech.  Media-watchers know that Friday afternoon is the time chosen to release news that you don't want too widely known.  Newspaper circulation on Saturdays – when Friday's news is published – is the lowest of any day of the week, and is generally the low point of the weekly news cycle.  As Joshua Bolten, White House budget director, told the Christian Science Monitor in explaining the secrecy of the list, it was all part of the plan: ‘As we put our budget out, what we wanted folks to focus on was the overall budget, not this item or that item.”

As expected, the list went largely unreported in the nation's newspapers.  I was only able to find two articles on the list when it came out – in the Washington Post and the LA Times, and neither was on the front page.  And nowhere was the actual list itself published, despite being released to all the media by the Associated Press.

That's too bad, since examination of the list revealed that the elimination or severe reductions to the 154 programs would save roughly 17 billion dollars.  The praiseworthy cuts, in other words, would reduce the projected deficit by about 4 percent, an inconveniently small number that no doubt has something to do with the list being withheld until the budget had largely passed out of the news.

The savings of that 17 billion dollars takes on even more meaning when you consider the submission on February 15th of the White House's “emergency” request for funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  This money was not included in the official budget request, although it totaled $82 billion, or more than four times the “savings” gained by cutting the 154 federal programs.  This enormous “emergency” request failed to make the front pages, appearing on page 3 of the local paper, and page 10 in the national newspaper of record, the New York Times.

And thus is another budget proposal reported in the Mainstream Press: The devil is in the details, and the details go largely unreported.

Haiti in the News: The Power of an Editor

For someone wishing to learn about goings-on in other countries, one of the first rules is simple: Don't read the newspapers.  Or, I should say, don't read the newspapers until you have learned some history and background on the country in question from a source that is more reliable than the mass media.  The following story illustrates how the subtle work of an editor can change a  news report into something a little less objective.

On February 28th there was a demonstration held in the Haitian capital of Port-Au-Prince to mark the one-year anniversary of the fall from power of elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.  That much is not in dispute.  But readers of an account of the incident in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of March 1st might end up with a seriously distorted idea of what happened in Haiti that week.

I say “the Star Tribune's account” because, although the story was attributed to the AP, what was in the paper was quite different from the report that came over the wire.

The headline in the AP story was: “A Year after Aristide's Fall, Haiti Remains in Grip of Poverty, Fear and Political Paralysis.”  The headline in the Star Trib was “Pro-Aristide Demonstration Turns Violent in Haiti.”  Now, it's not uncommon for a headline to be altered, but check out the first sentence of the story.

Here's that lead sentence as it came over the wire: “Supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide marked the anniversary of his fall with a protest Monday that was aborted after police opened fire and two people were killed – another bleak reminder of a year filled with disaster and disappointment.”

Here's the sentence that ran in the Star Tribune: “Supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide marked the anniversary of his ouster with a protest Monday that quickly turned violent.”  So, did the protest “turn violent?”  Well, imagine that you and a friend are having a conversation on the corner, and the police come by and shoot you.  Would that be reported as “Conversation Turns Violent?”  Apparently.

For the record, an eyewitness who was at the demonstration, interviewed on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! radio program, reported it this way: “It was a horrifying and totally unprovoked massacre.  People didn't have -- they had no guns, no bats, no pipes, no rocks, no anything.  They were holding up political signs and dancing.  There was a band.  It was just a shocking display of an attempt to repress human rights and democracy.”  A U.N. report on the incident came to essentially the same conclusion.

People who have been paying attention to Haiti over the past decade or so will know that the past year, beyond being simply “a year filled with disaster and disappointment,” has also been a year of political intrigue for yet another poor country with the bad luck of being located in the “back yard” of The World's Only Superpower.  On the issue of his ouster from office, Aristide himself maintains that he was kidnaped by U.S. forces, in the equivalent of a coup d'etat, and “delivered” to the Central African Republic.

The only mention in the Star Tribune's so-called “AP” report was the statement that “[T]he U.S.-backed interim government says the country is better off today than under Aristide, accused of corruption and mismanagement during 20 years in power.”  I have two comments about this sentence: 1.  Aristide has been in office for a total of 6 years, and 2. The 20 year figure was apparently made up by someone at the Star Tribune, since it appears nowhere in the AP reports.

Finally, in this saga about the power of an editor, the AP reported an important sequence of events that was completely left out of the Star Tribune version of the event: “Before police opened fire, demonstrators shouted slogans against President Bush, whom Aristide and his supporters blame for his Feb. 29 ouster.  U.S. officials say Aristide left voluntarily.  He is now in exile in South Africa.  ‘George Bush is the biggest terrorist!' the crowd yelled before shots rang out.”

Four days later, another demonstration was held in Haiti, again calling for the return of their elected president, but this time also “praising U.N. troops who secured the [earlier] demonstration,” according to a Reuters report.  The Star Trib ran no story on this peaceful demonstration.  But they did run a photo of a woman dancing and singing (I guess), with the caption, “Aristide's supporters in Haiti protest killings.”  The caption said simply that the demonstrators “accus[ed] police of killing two men five days ago during a protest marking the one-year anniversary of his ouster.  Police denied involvement.”  No mention of the eyewitnesses, or the U.N. report on the incident.

So, what happened in Haiti the first week of March?  Was there a violent mob out of control in a country that's of little concern to the United States beyond sympathy for their bad luck?  Or was there a pro-democracy protest stifled by fascist thugs backed by the United States?

That's the power of an editor.

“Progress” and “Problems” With the Imperial Occupation

Many newspapers have what they call an “ombudsperson” whose job it is to field complaints or comments lodged by readers and respond to them.  The local paper the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) calls their ombudsperson a “Reader's Representative.”  For many years the position was held by Howard Gelfand.  Since his recent retirement, Kate Parry has been hired.  Does it strike you as odd that someone who is paid by the publisher can somehow function as a “representative” of the readers?  I always marvel at the idea.  But let's leave that aside for the moment, and look at the contents of the “The Reader's Rep” column that ran in the Star Trib of Sunday, February 27th.

The headline read “Challenges Spur Review of War Coverage,” and it dealt with the ongoing flak that the paper gets for its supposed bias in covering the U.S. occupation of Iraq (which Parry refers to as the “war” in Iraq).  The flak has been significant enough that Parry “decided to examine the Star Tribune's coverage to see if the newspaper is missing or seriously underplaying important parts of the story from Iraq.”  How she went about this illustrates how ideology can shape the response to legitimate complaints.

“Based on conversations with readers,” Parry wrote, “I labeled the kinds of coverage different readers told me they are seeking as ‘progress' or ‘problems,' plus a ‘neutral' category.”

Parry closely examined seven weeks of coverage of Iraq in her paper and concluded that “clearly there is no organized effort of the sort that [some readers] suggest to prevent news about Iraq from getting to Star Tribune readers –  whether it's about problems or progress.”  But Parry's framing of supposed “problems” and “progress” in Iraq reveals a unconscious ideology, one that accepts some very controversial ideas as agreed-upon.

Under “progress,” Parry listed stories that covered “Iraq's infrastructure reviving, election successes, American soldiers' heroism and the sacrifice of their families, public opinion supporting the war and President Bush's agenda in Iraq, and stock market improvement linked to Iraq.”

Under “problems,” she listed “Coverage of violence by insurgents, deaths of soldiers and Iraqi civilians, fears of violence before the election, allegations of torture by troops, public opinion opposing the war and President Bush's agenda in Iraq, tragedies for soldiers and their families, and stock market declines linked to Iraq.”

What sort of ideology says that “public opinion supporting the war” indicates  “progress” in Iraq?  Or that opposition to the “war” (she presumably means “occupation”) is a “problem?”  Parry says that “American soldiers' heroism and the sacrifice of their families” indicates “progress.”  I don't see any relationship – there are heroes and suffering in any military action.  If our stock market goes up because of the nature of our occupation of that country, Parry once again sees “progress.”  How bizarre.  Some might see this as evidence of war profiteering.

Completely missing from Parry's list of “problems” is the issue of the basic legitimacy of the attack on and occupation of a country that posed no threat to our own.  Although Parry refers to the “war” in Iraq, the official “war” has long since ended, and for many months the U.S. has been the occupying power.  There are laws governing occupations, namely the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Regulations.  Has the U.S. been in compliance with these laws?  Parry's – and the newspaper's – silence on such things reveals an acceptance of the idea that might makes right, and its logical corollary: that the mightiest nation in the world is above the law.

Parry sees no “organized effort” to deceive readers, and she's right.  The real problem here is the ideology of empire that permeates our media, so deeply that no ombudsperson is likely to see it.