Media Archives — Page 113 of 121 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Memo to the city desks of the Chronicle/Hearst and Media News Group/Singleton papers and the Associated Press: the Hearst/Reilly antitrust suit is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow (Wednesday) morning before Federal Judge Susan Illston. Will you cover it?

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November 21, 2006

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Eureka! As you will remember from my earlier blogs, I coined the term Eurekaism to replace the old term Afghanistanism for the bad habit of many daily papers, notably the Hearst and Singleton chains, for reporting on stories in Eureka instead of reporting on the big local scandal or embarrassing story in their own communities. (Hearst did a rollicking Sunday story awhile back on the competition way way up in Eureka between a Singleton daily and a locally owned daily.)

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at ll a.m., in the courtroom of Federal Judge Susan Ilston, there will be a major story that will once again raise the issue of Eurekaism: the major antitrust case of Reilly vs. Hearst and the request for a temporary restraining order sought by Clint Reilly and his attorney Joe Alioto to halt the accelerating moves by Hearst and Singleton to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area.

Illston earlier tossed Reilly’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Hearst/Singleton transaction, but she did state in her last order that she would “seriously consider” forcing Sington to gve up some assets if the court finds the company’s transactions to be anti-competitive.

Meanwhile, on other fronts, the Guardian has learned that the U.S. Justice Department has interviewed a wide variety of local people, including former Chronicle executives and local antitrust attorneys and professors, to further its investigation into the Hearst/Singleton part of the deal (See previous Guardian stories and Bruce blogs). “It seems to be a very vigorous and aggressive investigation,” one interviewee told the Guardian.

The unanswered questions: Where is the current Attorney General Bill Lockyer and the incoming
Attorney General Jerry Brown (nowhere, it seems)? Will Hearst and Singleton papers provide the coverage that a major regional story of this magnitude deserves: an advance in tomorrow’s papers and then followed with a thorough story on the outcome of the hearing and the impacts of the moves to regional monopoly? Will they continue to try to black out the story keeping the court documents under seal? Or will there be more Eurekaism? Stay tuned, B3

Introducing: the Telling Quote (the TQ):”Ross, you never learned to be a prisoner”

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November 21, 2006

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I have always had a weakness for one-liners and telling quotes, which I call the Telling Quote (the QD).

For example, Tim Redmond gave me a good one just a few minutes ago. He said that in the movie on Elliot Ness of fighitng gangsters in Prohibiition Chicago, Ness was asked what he would do once Prohibiton was over.
“I’d have a drink,” Ness said.

I spotted two quotes I liked in the tomorrow’s Guardian. The first is from the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and his prescient penguin, who is asked to answer the favorite conservative question to the liberal on the disaster of Iraq: “What’s your solulion?” Responds the penguin: “We take the two hundred million dollars a day we’re currently pouring into Iraq and we funnel it all into an intensive top-secret project to deliver the world’s first working machine…and then we go back to 200l and pay some goddamned attention to everyone who opposed this idotic war of choice from the start. THAT’S MY SOLUTION.”

Memo to the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York
Times who have been censoring Project Censored: Take note (see other blogs).

John Ross writes in an op ed column about the jailed Josh Wolf and the murdered Brad Will (see link below) as examples of the “pogrom against independent journalists who refuse to conform to corporate media definitions of what a reporter should be.” He says that in the case of Will, murdered on the barricades in Oazaca, Mexico, by gunmen employed by the provincial governor, “the New York Times and its accomplices–including the New Times version of the Village Voice–intimate that Will was less than a journalist…a troublemaker rather than a young man who reported on trouble.” Ross points out he himself was once a trouble-making jailed journalist, for being the first U.S. citizen to be jailed for refusing induction into the Vietnam War military, and that he formed convict committee against U.S. intervention and wrote about it. When he was finally kicked out of jail, the parole officer who made his life hell for a year walked him to the gate and gave him a goodbye snarl:

“Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”

Ross’s point to the New York Times: the Times’ Judith Miller, with “ll mendacious
front-page New York Times stories on Saddam Hussein’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction (that) helped justify the Bush invasion” was just as much an “activist” as Wolf, Will, and Ross himself. B3

Guilty of independent journalism by John Ross

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why it once again censored and mangled Project Censored and its stories on Bush and Iraq et al

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November 20, 2006

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On Sept. 10, 2003, while the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and affiliated papers were running Judith Miller’s stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored stories.

Our front page had a caricature of Bush, standing astride the globe holding a U.S. flag with a dollar sign, and a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and other nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.”

The number one story was “The neoconservative plan for global domination.” Our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, to solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been in place for a decade.”

In many cases, we noted, the neocon story and the other censored stories laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and its drumbeat to war got little or no play–or else were presented piecemeal without any attempt to put the information in context. (The number two story was “Homeland security threatens civil liberties.” Number three: “U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report.” Number four: “Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists.” Number seven: “Treaty busting by the United States.” Number eight: “U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects.” Number nine: “In Afghanistan poverty, women’s rights, and civil disruption worse than ever.”)

Project Director Peter Phillips told us at that time, “The stories this year reflect a clear danger to democracy and governmental transparency in the U.S.–and the corporate media’s failure to alert the public to these important issues. The magnitude of total global domination has to be the most important important story we’ve covered in a quarter century.” In our summary of the neocon plan, we wrote that “it called for the United States to diversify its military presence throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption, argued for the expansion of U.S. nuclear programs while discouraging those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the United States to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of its allies.”

And we then asked the critical and timely question. “Sound familiar?”

In that critical year of 2003, only months after the ill-fated Bush invasion of Iraq, the timely and relevant Censored project and stories were not published in the New York Times and the Press Democrat and affiliated papers either censored or mangled the coverage. This year, as Iraq slid into civil war, U.S. war dead rose toward 3,000, and the U.S. public was well ahead of the media in turning against the war, the New York Times should have finally recognized its annual mistake and published the Project Censored story. It didn’t (and it never has). The Santa Rosa Press Democrat should have been all over the story, since it was a local and national story out of nearby Sonoma State University, it was reseached by local professors and students, and it was the project’s 30th anniversary highlighted with a special conference at the school. Instead, the PD did a front page hatchet job on the story and then refused to run a decent number of complaining letters, according to Phillips.

However, The PD did run an op ed piece in this morning’s paper by Phillips (see link below). Which is to the good.
But the paper never answered any of the questions and complaints submitted by Phillips, the project founder Carl Jensen (retired and living in nearby Cotati), or the Guardian (see previous blogs and links). Why? No explanation.
The key point is that the Times and the PD have once again demonstrated in 96 point Tempo Bold the point of Project Censored and the value of alternative voices.

Postscript: More impertinent advice: TheTimes papers that marched us into war, with their flawed front page reporting and backup editorials, ought at minimum to start covering the project and the stories and the voices who had it right before, during, and after Bush committed us to the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. Repeating: the PD ought to invite Jensen, Phillips,and the Project in for a chat and discuss why they have so much trouble handling a local story. B3

Why the public deserves to hear alternative views on 9/11

SFBG Project Censored

What you can do

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November 17, 2006

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What: Free Josh Wolf!
When: Thursday, December 7th 2006, 7:30pm
Where: Balazo, 2183 Mission Street @18th, 415-255-7227

On December 7th, journalists, activists, and local leaders will come
together to call upon the United States Government to free independent
videographer and freelance journalist Josh Wolf. He is currently in
“coercive custody” at the Federal Detention Facility in Dublin, California.
He is not charged with any crime. Please join us for a night of music,
inspiring speakers, and action in support of Josh Wolf and to demand that
Congress pass a Federal Shield Law protecting journalists and freedom of the

press. $10 Suggested Donation. No one turned away for lack of funds. For
more information about Josh Wolf go to www.joshwolf.net. Contact:
andy.blue@yahoo.com.

To read Josh’s prison blog, click here

Free Josh Wolf Support Update
11/14/06

http://joshwolf.net/blog/
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com

*****************************
In this email:
1) Legal Update
2) Josh Wins Society of Professional Journalists’ Journalist of the Year
Award
3) Josh Wins 2 Vloggy Awards
4) New Flyers!
5) Josh Can Receive More Books
6) How Can I Support Josh?
*****************************

1)Legal Update

See story

*****************************

2) Josh Wins Society of Professional Journalists’ Journalist of the Year
Award http://www.spj.org/norcal/
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/11/10/18328773.php

“On Thursday, November 9th, Northern California Chapter of the Society
of Professional Journalists held their annual banquet. Of the many
honors that were bestowed on people, arguably the most prestigious,
Journalist of the Year, went to imprisoned video documentarian, Josh
Wolf, along with other grand jury subpoena resisters, San Francisco
Chronicle sports writers, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada.

Wolf’s mother, teacher Liz Wolf-Spada, accepted the award on behalf of
her son. Wolf, who had been imprisoned, released and then
re-imprisoned, has served a total of 82 days in a federal penitentiary
for refusing to turn over his unedited video footage of a July 2005
San Francisco protest. From: Indybay.org

Read Josh’s Acceptance Speech: http://www.joshwolf.net/blog/?p=277

*****************************

3) Josh Wins 2 Vloggy Awards

Josh’s video, All Empires Must Fall, received the Judge’s Choice Award
for Most Controversial Video and the People’s Choice Award for Best
Male Vlogger.

Read Josh’s Acceptance Speech: http://www.joshwolf.net/blog/?p=273

*****************************

4) New Flyers!

Thanks to Njeri for making these awesome flyers!

You can download them here:
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/f/joshwolf_flyer.pdf
And view them here: http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Flyers%20and%20Graphics

*****************************

5) Josh Can Receive More Books

Josh is ready for more books! THANKS!
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Send%20Josh%20Books

Please consider sending a book to Josh while he is being held in
prison. It’s a great way to show your support for him!

Josh’s Book Wish List:
Days of War, Nights of Love – The Crimething Ex-Workers Collective Logic
and Contemporary Rhetoric – Howard Kahane

*****************************

5) How Can I Support Josh?

10 WAYS TO SUPPORT JOSH http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Help%20Support%20Josh

There are lots of things we can all be doing to help Josh.

Here are the top 10 ways

1) SEND LETTERS and maintain correspondence with Josh while he is
incarcerated. We need to let Josh know that we are thinking of him and
supporting his courageous and important stand. Visit:
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Write%20Josh%20Letters for info on how to
send a letter to Josh. Please remember that all of Josh?s letters are
read by the prison authorities and it may take a while for your letter
to reach him.

2) SEND A BOOK to Josh. Find Josh’s book wish list and info on how to
get him a book visit: http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Send%20Josh%20Books

3) READ HIS BLOG from prison. Josh’s blog is still being updated by
his family and friends. Letters from Josh will be posted as they are
received. http://joshwolf.net/blog/

4) DISTRIBUTE FLYERS about his case:
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Flyers%20and%20Graphics

5) DONATE to Josh’s support fund via Paypal:
http://joshwolf.net/grandjury/donate.html

6) PLAN BENEFIT CONCERTS AND EVENTS to raise money. There have been
several concerts and fundraisers thrown recently to support Josh. If
you are interested in hosting a concert or other type of fundraiser
please contact Josh’s support team at: freejosh(at)joshwolf.net so we
can assist you with publicizing your event.

7) JOIN AND PARTICIPATE in the Support Josh Wolf Email List:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/supportjoshwolf

8) PROMOTE JOSH’S CASE. Write letters and articles of support for Josh
to your local media. Blog about his case. Link to his blog and wiki.
Post “support Josh” banners on your blogs and webpages:
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Flyers%20and%20Graphics

9) SEND LETTERS to the other inmates who are being incarcerated along
with Josh at FCI Dublin. You can get their contact information at:
http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/Write%20Josh%20Letters

10) BECOME INVOLVED WITH THE SUPPORT TEAM. Email:
freejosh(at)joshwolf.net or the Email List if you are interested in
getting more involved. We still need people willing to help with tech
support, organizing, fundraising, graphic design, publicity, media and
legal support. Send an email to the support team indicating how you
would like to help and we will plug you in!

The new Iraq-war media offensive

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November 16, 2006

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The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA — the front page of The New York Times.

The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.

Under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say,” the Nov. 15 front page of the Times prominently featured a “Military Analysis” by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that — while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops “should begin within four to six months” — “this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.”

Reporter Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is “simply not realistic.” Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon went on to state in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout.

If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his Nov. 15 appearance on
CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded — and probably would be taken off the beat — by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.

That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.

At this point, categories like “vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies” are virtually meaningless. The bulk of the media’s favorite “vehement critics” are opposed to reduction of U.S. involvement in the Iraq carnage, and some of them are now openly urging an increase in U.S. troop levels for the occupation.

These days, media coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq often seems to be little more than a remake of how mainstream news outlets portrayed Washington’s options during the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the U.S. war effort must go on.

During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq to the
Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the U.S. media coverage of both wars.

Whether in 1968 or 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray withdrawal of U.S. troops as impractical and unrealistic.

Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the
American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemputf8g a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years — and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps 1 million more Vietnamese people.

A survey by the Boston Globe, conducted in February 1968, found that out of 39 major daily newspapers in the United States, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today — despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election — advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among modern-day media elites.

The standard media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. Careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government (as with the Saigon government) are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate.

Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running
Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.

Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war policymaking rests with the president, not the Congress. When I ponder that assumption, I think about 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed
journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole
responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”

“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”

Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”

Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back — and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”

The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”

Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? … I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”

Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, he spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”

And, prophetically, Morse added: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world.
It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.”

_____________________________

Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is out in paperback. For information, go to:www.warmadeeasy.com

Josh Wolf, petition denied, to remain in jail until July

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November 16, 2006

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By Sarah Phelan
It looks like Josh Wolf, the jailed freelance videographer and blogger, will be stuck inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute until July 2007.
That at least is the word from Wolf’s lead attorney Martin Garbus today, following news that the 9th Circuit has denied Wolf’s petition for a rehearing in USA v Josh Wolf.
Wolf’s legal team asked for a rehearing on the basis that the 9th Circuit court, which previously ruled that Wolf does not the right to withhold video outtakes of a July 8, 2005 anarchist protest turned violent, had however granted that privilege in the Jaffee case, when a police officer didn’t want the family of a fatal shooting victim to access notes from a series of counseling sessions that the officer in question underwent following the shooting.
Evidently, the 9th Circuit didn’t agree. Not only did it deny the petition and rule that the motion to reinstate bail is moot, it also wrote that “no further filings shall be accepted in this case.”
Sounds like Wolf will be playing lots of Scrabble and reading lots of books until next summer.
Meanwhile, Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wade have yet to serve any jail time for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury that’s investigating who leaked them secret testimony of Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and others in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative scandal.
What’s ironic about this discrepancy between how the BALCO reporters and Wolf are being treated is that the feds could at least argue a connection to the BALCO case, whereas the protest that Wolf covered and which subsequently sparked their interest took place in San Francisco and should, by all rights, have been investigated locally.
Could it be that these differences are purely a case of the corporate media getting preferential treatment over freelancers? Perhaps. But questions as to whether reporters are shielded from revealing their sources date back to 1972, when US Supreme Court Justice Byron White ruled, in Branzburg v. Hayes, that reporters must answer relevant questions that are asked in a valid grand jury investigation.
Since then, judges largely ignored Branzburg, believing that it’s important to balance the First Amendment rights of journalists against the public right’s to know. But then came Bush, 9/11 and the “war on terror,” at which point First Amendment freedoms began to take a back seat.
Consider that in 2003, a federal appeals court, citing Branzburg, ordered Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune reporters to divulge recordings of interviews of a witness in a terrorism case. The same case was made in the federal investigation as to who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame, and New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for refusing to testify in that case, which resulted perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby. And this year, the US Justice Department has been investigating whether classified information was illegally leaked to the Washington Post about the secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, as well as who told the New York Times about President Bush’s secret plan to eavesdrop on Americans. All of which could be seen as an effort to suppress leaks to journalists.
To add to the confusion, accusations have been made in the BALCO case that it was the federal government which leaked the testimony to the Chronicle reporters. While those accusations have not been proven to date, the truth is that the feds certainly have benefited from the Chron’s revelations, given that Major League Baseball have subsequently adopted stricter steroid rules and the feds have been able to push through harsher penalties for steroid dealers.
What’s striking about the path to Josh Wolf’s incarceration is how he became the target of a federal investigation although his case had no obvious connection to the feds. So far, the feds have trotted out disturbingly vague arguments about how they should be involved because of alleged arson to a squad car that may or may not have been purchased with federal funds. But the truth is that arson was never proven and all the SFPD reports mention is a broken rear taillight, which Wolf’s mother has repeatedly offered to pay for, if that would get her son out of jail.
In fact, court filings show that the police’s real interest is finding out who attacked and seriously hurt an SFPD officer in the course of the protest—a valid concern and one that SF District Attorney Kamala Harris’ office should be handling. Instead, the feds were called in, triggering justifiable fears in Josh Wolf, who the FBI has questioned about his anarchist tendencies, that the real reason that he’s sitting in jail, is that the feds want him to release his video outtakes and identify the anarchists, who lifted up their ski masks and spoke directly into Josh’s camera, before the violence went down. And then there’s the fact that the portion of Wolf’s tape that he posted online at his blog and got picked up by several TV stations does not paint a flattering portrait of the police.
Interestingly, while Wolf has argued that journalists should not be forced into becoming investigative tools of the government, both the SFPD and the US Attorney General’s Office have voiced doubts to the Guardian as to whether Wolf is a “real” journalist, citing his direct involvement with the anarchist cause as well as the fact that he is not employed by a media outlet. These arguments should sound the alarm bells of freelancers nationwide.
Meanwhile, Wolf sits in jail, where he is only allowed 15-minute phone interviews with the media, thereby preventing live visual images and recordings of his voice to be aired across the nation, effectively blacking him out of the consciousness of all those who don’t get their news from the print media. And when the federal grand jury expires in July, there’s a chance that a new grand jury might demand that Wolf release his outtakes and testify or rot in jail for another year.
It’s a sad day for journalists, corporate and freelance, and the First Amendment.

The new media offensive for the Iraq War. Why the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times ought to stop “censoring” and mangling Project Censored and its annual list of censored stories on Iraq and Bush et al

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November 16, 2006

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Norman Solomon, a syndicated columnist who appears on the Guardian website, wrote a chilling column this week
on how the “American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.”

He noted that the “heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA–the front page of the New York Times. The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterms elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.”

Solomon cited a Nov. l5 front page piece by Michael Gordon under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say.” Gordon then appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, “fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is ‘simply not realistic,'” Solomon said.

“If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated any such withdrawal during his Nov. l5 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded–and probably would be taken off the beat by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic world views of the country’s national security state.”

Solomon’s key point: “That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.”

And so it is not surprising that the New York Times and its Santa Rosa daily have been so inhospitable through the years to Project Censored, housed nearby at Sonoma State University. (See my previous blog and the scathing criticism by founder Carl Jensen and current director Peter Phillips of PD/NYT coverage of the 30th anniversary project and conference.)

I asked Jensen about the PD and Times record of covering what ought to be a top annual local and national press story. “At first,” Jensen said, “the PD merely ignored the Project. Then, after Newsweek ran a column about it, the PD was embarrassed into covering it. Which they did, using the annual results as an excuse to criticize me for being a liberal, left-wing agitator. Finally, they just started to run one story a year, or sometimes none, announcing the results. This year they didn’t even bother to announce the results for the 30th anniversary of the project. Instead, they did Paul Payne’s hit piece about Steve Jones. To my knowledge, and a Lexis-Nexis search, the New York Times has never run an article about the project.”

The PD has also not answered my impertinent questions about their censor-or-mangle coverage, which I emailed to the reporter, editors, and publisher.

Let us remember that IF Stone, in his famous IF Stone’s Weekly, exposed in l964 the Gulf of Tonkin scam only days after President Johnson used it as the excuse to expand U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And ever after he led the journalistic charge brilliantly against the war. It took years and tens of thousands of dead American soldiers for the New York Times (and the other big “liberal” papers, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post) to figure out that Stone was right and change their “we can’t get out now” news and editorial policies in support of the war. If Project Censored had been going at that time, Stone and his powerful little four page publication would have had major stories on the Censored list every year.

My impertinent advice to the Post Democrat and the New York Times: if you are are going to run Jayson Blair and Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and Paul Payne, then you sure as hell ought to be giving serious regular coverage to Project Censored at Sonoma State University and its annual roster of major “censored” stories the New York Times, PD, and the mainstream press don’t cover properly. Why not start by running Phillips’ op ed piece and inviting Jensen, Phillips, and their Project Censored crew into the PD for a full editorial conference and a podcast question and answer session? B3

The new Iraq-war media offensive
How powerful institutions like The New York Times are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops
BY NORMAN SOLOMON

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story. Why? Some impertinent questions for the Press Democrat by Bruce B. Brugmann

Board overrides Mayor’s foot patrol veto

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November 14, 2006

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By Sarah Phelan
It hasn’t exactly been a good couple of weeks for Mayor Gavin Newsom.
His picks for Board of Supervisors got thumped.
The 49ers said they’re running away with Santa Clara but keeping San Francisco’s name.
Newsom nix sayed the city’s Olympic bid
And then the Board of Supervisors overrode Newsom’s veto of police foot patrol legislation in a 9-2 vote that means the city will go ahead with a one-year citywide pilot project.
Worse, the nine sups that defied his veto got to explain their reasons, which included slamming the mayor and the police chief for lack of leadership..
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi talked about giving the mayor and Chief of Police plenty to time to take action. When they didn’t, and the Board took the lead, Mirkarimi says he was surprised by the mayor’s veto.
As for SFPD Chief Heather Fong’s hastily announced counter plan, which was made public on Monday, Mirkarimi said, “An acute difference between the two plans is that ours calls for accountability.”
Sup. Bevan Dufty, citing increased incidences of violent crime and inadequate response in the Castro, said “the visible presence of foot patrols is helpful.”
“No one is higher than the chief of police but the chief needs to speak up and to speak clearly without regard for where the chips may fall,” said Dufty, alluding to a lack of morale in the SFPD. “This vote is not offered as a criticism of the Mayor or the Chief. This is the best we can do as a Board right now. Let us rise above that and recognize that we need leadership.”
Sup. Chris Daly couldn’t resist asking how the increased number of officers under the Chief’s plan (44 isntead of the 33 specified in the Board’s plan) “isn’t playing politics.”
Sup. Tom Ammiano wondered what kind of cooperation will be forthcoming, and Sup. Fiona Ma noted that if there was a garbage problem or a flu epidemic, this board would propose a plan, which is why the board reacted to crime wave with foot patrols.
Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, who along with Sup. Sean Elsbernd voted to uphold the mayor’s veto, said one of the problems was the way the ordinance was written.”
Elsbernd argued that the mayor and police chief should make policing decisions, not the Board of Supervisors.
But Sup. Gerardo Sandoval was upset that SFPD Chief Heather Fong had said that if the Board overrode the mayor’s veto, she didn’t want to disobey the Board’s legislation, but her captains might ignore it.
“We need to be very protective of our roles in this city,” Sandoval told his colleagues.
“To have a Chief of Police say something like that should not go unnoticed.”
Sup. Sophie Maxwell, noting that she probably has the highest incidence of gun violence in her district, recalled walking the precincts this fall and people telling her that they wanted to see the police,
“I have no choice. I have to do this,” said Maxwell of supporting the legislation.
Board Chair Aaron Peskin, who previously voted against the Board’s legislation, but ultimately voted to support it found it ironic that the legislation embraced by the police and the mayor “supports the Board’s idea.”
Sup. Jake McGoldrick found the SFPD’s counter proposal, “a day late, a dollar short.”
“For 5 months, 7 months, 18 months , we were looking for tools, all we got was reaction, not action. But there’s something hopeful about this dialogue.”
After the historic vote, SFPD Chief Heather Fong told the assembled media that she would disagree about their being a morale problem in the department.
Acknowledging that the SFPD is currently 300 officers under its mandated staffing levels, Fong said, “ I believe the captains have to have flexibility.”
Noting that the SFPD’s plan would kick in Nov. 24 and involve 44 officers, Fong added,” I believe the deployment plan will be incompliance with the legislation.”
As for the mayor, it would have been interesting to be a fly on the proverbial wall of his office.

Eau joy

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November 14, 2006

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Massive wood phalli. Steaming pits of gooey geothermal activity paired with shameful cages of sulky, muttonchopped Japanese monkeys. (No wonder their bottoms are red.) Fingers going pleasantly numb after noshing on fugu innards sashimi. That’s the salty floating world of old-school onsen (hot springs) life in Japan — as experienced by yours truly earlier this month.
The GOP got a well-deserved scrubbing while I was gently simmering in soupy milk-blue water at Myoban Onsen in the hills above Beppu, down south on hard-drinking Kyushu island in Japan. My kindred lady bathers sneak discreet glances at each other’s invariably saggy, soggy, well-brined flesh — appearances by the blinged-out, booted fashion-damaged dolls more common to Gwen Stefani vids and Tokyo and Osaka streets are almost nil at these OG public soakathons, though you do get the occasional yakuza, singing soulfully postbath. “Drunk!” okasan, a.k.a. my mother, hisses with disapproval. Signs of those bad boys’ continuing patronage abound: even our Osaka Hyatt’s fitness center and spa boasts a sign forbidding the excessively drunk or abundantly tattooed. We tell the attendant that we probably won’t be making the cut.
The art of onsen bathing goes a little like this: Scuttle out of the changing room starkers — locker key secured with a rubber bracelet around the wrist. Hustle to a free station — equipped with stool, wash tub, faucet, and handheld showerhead — to soap and rinse off offending personal filth. Then waddle over to the big, boiling communal tub — either mineral salted au naturel, Jacuzzi driven, or hotter than hell, as it was at the Meiji-era Takegawara Onsen in Beppu. Sink down to your neck. Sigh deeply. Sweat. Cook until just past al dente so that your muscles begin to resemble the hot noodles you suck down at the standing-room-only ramen stands on most train station platforms. Chase with a cold Sapporo.
Few Kansai and Kyushu wanderers are searching for pop culture kicks in Beppu — there’s a dank air of slightly seedy sadness lapping round the edges of the onsen town’s arcades of shuttered shops and windowless hostess bars. We suck down eggs, coffee, and custards cooked in or with the mineral water at the unbathable geothermal hot spots, otherwise known as jigokus, or hells. These tourist traps have been given a halfhearted theme-park treatment: bright red demonic statues overlook belching pits of steam, crocodiles pile in too-crowded concrete pens, and a miserable-looking crane parades psychotically in a barely big enough cage. It’s best to head into the bamboo thickets and green wilderness, toward smaller towns like Usuki, a few train stops away. The small town is graced by 10th-century stone Buddha images, delectable bird tempura at Kokoro Club, and Furen Limestone Cave, a less-traveled national monument fanged with gorgeous, eerie massive white stalactites that shame those in The Descent.
The clubs in Fukuoka are said to be just as surreally scary — eating live critters (odorigui, or “dancing-eating”) is apparently quite the height of nightlife derring-do. But instead, I ended up at the promenades of Hiroshima, near the extremely moving Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. Teenagers in spiky mullets, trailing goth getups, and trendy ethno-hippie rags commune for grub like superspicy eggplant, enoki mushroom, and sausage curry. If it gets overwhelming, duck into a virtual escape hatch like Media Center Popeye, where you can rent a cubicle and gorge on games, DVDs, Web surfing, manga, and junk food till the morning. Those nostalgic for Tower Records can stop into one of the chain’s Japanese holdouts — on the top floor of the Parco department store next to an ass-kicking musical instrument emporium. Your one-stop shop for starting your own mind-blowing Japanese band?
I’d find my inspiration in OOIOO, Boredoms drummer Yoshimi P-we’s all-XX-chromosomal foursome. The Osaka-area faux-turned-real group’s latest Thrill Jockey full-length, Taiga, is a stunner, a major flutter forward from last year’s Gold and Green (no surprise, since the latter was actually recorded in, oh my, ’00). Bookended by the primal drum chants of “UMA” and “UMO,” Taiga (Japanese for “big river”) mixes the pervasive percussion of Ai and guests Yo2ro Tatekawa and Thiam Misato — so reminiscent of the taiko beat of Japanese folk festivals — with P-we’s animal yowls and womanly harmonies. Out folkies might take note of the stinging guitar lines of Kayan, the steel-pan dementia of guest Tonchi, and the skillfully applied electronic gloss and mechanistic punctuation — at times miming the blistering peal coming from pachinko parlors, at others rhyming with the drone of train bells. Like a swift current, the mix powers past poppier releases like Feather Float (Birdman, 2001) and creates a specific aural space just as so many J-psych combos do, according to Paul Collett in Japanese Independent Music (Sonore). Theirs is a streaming, sexy binary realm that’s both drastically organic and wholly synthetic. You’re soaking in it. SFBG
IRASSHAI! OTHER RECENT JAPANESE RELEASES
ENVY, INSOMNIAC DOZE (TEMPORARY RESIDENCE)
An early ’90s hardcore act goes the moody, slow-boil route of Mogwai and Isis, with vague invocations of Jade Tree combos — and screaming vocals in Nipponese.
SOLAR ANUS, SKULL ALCOHOLIC: THE COMPLETE SOLAR (TUMULT)
One of the best band names — no buts about it. Released by Aquarius Records’ Andee Connor, this twofer retrospective clobbers with slabs of metallic Mudhoney-raving-on-rat-poison groovitude.
SUISHOU NO FUNE, WHERE THE SPIRITS ARE (HOLY MOUNTAIN)
If you missed the Tokyo group’s Oct. 19 Bottom of the Hill date, you can catch this recording by femme guitarist Pirako Kurenai and masculine ax-swinger Kageo, which had us wracked by Keiji Haino flashbacks.
SUNN O))) AND BORIS, ALTAR (SOUTHERN LORD)
Tokyo’s heavies bump throbbing uglies with Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, along with the Melvins’ Joe Preston and other guests, and slow things way, way, way down.

Microsoft Linux

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November 14, 2006

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I’m living in a bizarro business deal universe. Microsoft and Novell, which distributes a version of Suse Linux, have formed a partnership. When Microsoft’s notoriously anti-Linux CEO Steve Ballmer announced the deal, he claimed it was because customers demanded it. But the open-source community is worried something else may be afoot.
PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak speculated last week that Microsoft was trying to do an end run around free software licensing, essentially breaking the GNU General Public License (GPL) via legal loopholes. Then Linux Journal’s Nicholas Petreley, speaking for a lot of disgruntled open sourcers, urged Linux users to migrate away from all Novell Suse products over the next five years.
It’s easy to understand why open-source and free-software advocates are up in arms. Members of these communities have worked for decades to build robust, free alternatives to proprietary, big-business software products. And Linux, one of the most successful free operating systems available, has openly challenged Microsoft’s hegemony in countless ways.
Linux isn’t just a good technological alternative to Windows. It’s a symbol. This upstart, community-built operating system creates choice in a market where big players dominate. Plus, everything about Linux is transparent, open, and customizable. You can do whatever you want to your Linux operating system — rewrite the code, turn it into another piece of software, copy it a zillion times for your family and friends.
There’s only one rule: don’t break the GPL. So if you turn Linux into something else, that something else must also be licensed under the GPL.
Now that Microsoft and Novell are shacking up together at a joint research center, it feels like we’re only a few months away from a Microsoft Linux distribution. In fact, Microsoft has said it will officially recommend Novell Suse Linux. Could Microsoft actually undermine the legal foundation of the GPL and create a form of Linux that cannot be modified or copied freely?
The answer is yes and no.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Jason Schultz says the deal doesn’t threaten the legal status of the GPL. But he speculates that the products Microsoft and Novell have discussed creating — such as a software package containing interoperable versions of Windows and Novell Suse Linux — could make it very difficult for consumers to modify Novell Linux without also running into problems with Windows.
“This hybrid product could intermingle its Linux and Microsoft parts so that it could be hard to copy the open portions,” he says.
Schultz also points out something crucial about this deal: it’s less a legal threat to Linux than it is a publicity threat. Microsoft’s move is savvy marketing. The more it can confuse customers about what Linux is by attaching Windows products to it, the less name recognition Linux will have on its own. And the less people will understand what free software and open source really mean.
Ballmer has been blabbing to anyone who will listen that he’d love to cut similar deals with other Linux distributors, like Red Hat. No matter what the legal implications of this deal turn out to be, it’s definitely a weird new stage in Microsoft’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt war with Linux.
I think Microsoft is trying to muddy the waters just enough that consumers will stop recognizing the fundamental divide between Windows and Linux.
We’ve seen this problem in the free-software community before, though in a far less insidious form. When the phrase “open source” began gaining currency in the late 1990s, people often confused it with “free software” because many open-source projects are literally free (like free beer). But there are dozens of open-source licenses, many of which permit people to create proprietary software out of the open software.
As more people used open-source software, the popular media and public began to conflate free software and open source — much to free-software inventor Richard Stallman’s dismay. I worry that this Microsoft-Novell deal has the potential to do the same thing to open-source software.
The more Microsoft can absorb Linux, the fewer people will recognize the challenge Linux represents. Linux isn’t just an alternative set of software tools. It’s another mode of production — one that’s more transparent and more sensitive to the public good. That’s something we can’t afford to lose. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks that if Microsoft makes a software shim, Linux developers should make a software shiv and stick those bastards right in the gut.

Journalists need to fight back

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November 14, 2006

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EDITORIAL At the annual awards dinner Nov. 9 of the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists, the mood was somber. One of the winners of the Journalist of the Year award, Josh Wolf, was behind bars for refusing to give unpublished material to the authorities. Two others, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, were only free pending appeal of a judge’s order that they go to jail unless they reveal the names of confidential sources.
On the eve of the dinner, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet, had been fired for refusing to go along with drastic newsroom job cuts ordered by an out-of-town corporate headquarters. The event’s keynote speaker, Jerry Roberts, had been forced to leave his job as editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press after the multimillionaire publisher demanded that basic news reporting be squelched.
The buzz around the room was that more layoffs were coming at the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News, papers just recently purchased by Dean Singleton, who now owns every major daily in the Bay Area except for the San Francisco Chronicle (which is owned by Hearst, one of his business partners). And indeed, the CoCo Times announced the day after the dinner that it had cut jobs across the board and was outsourcing some production work to a firm with facilities in India.
Linda Jue, the president of the SPJ chapter, made a point in her opening remarks about the need for journalists to take a more active stance, to fight against the assault on freedom of the press and journalistic standards that’s happening across the country. She had exactly the right point — and local and national journalism groups need to wake up and start paying attention.
These are particularly ugly times — the amount of government secrecy, particularly at the federal level, is almost unprecedented. But there’s something else just as bad going on: consolidation of media ownership is destroying the profession of journalism. And that’s something that groups made of working journalists have to start addressing.
There are all sorts of ways to get started. The SPJ, both local and national, ought to formally request the federal Justice Department to overturn the deal that gave Singleton hegemony over the Bay Area market and should press for a full investigation into Hearst’s role in the deal. These organizations (including the big unions that represent newspaper workers) ought to be working with the likes of Media Alliance in demanding that the Federal Communications Commission tighten the rules on ownership of broadcast media. Publicly traded companies that own newspapers should face organized shareholder-resolution campaigns opposing debilitating newsroom cuts. They should look at ways to support San Francisco investor Clint Reilly in his lawsuit against the Singleton deal and should at the very least issue statements on it. They should send regular delegations to see Wolf in jail and should press Rep. Nancy Pelosi to demand a federal shield law — an end to the federalizaton of law enforcement investigations (which can land people like Wolf in jail).
Sure, the Internet is changing the face of the media industry, and there are all kinds of other challenges — but in the end, no matter what the publishing platform, there will always be a need in a democratic society for qualified professional reporters and editors. And those of us in that line of work need to stand up to make sure that big media chains demanding obscene corporate profits don’t suck the life out of American journalism. SFBG

EDITOR’S NOTES

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November 14, 2006

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
I started getting all the usual calls last week, from all of the usual national media outlets, with all the usual questions that a local political reporter gets when a local politician makes good. “Who is Nancy Pelosi, really? What do her constituents think of her? Is she going to bring Burning Man and gay marriage to Washington?”
My answer to everyone, from the liberals to the conservatives, was exactly the same:
Relax. There’s nothing to get excited about. Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She’s a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology.
I’m glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she’s not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid antigovernment conservatives can love.
Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations.
And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is “not an issue that we’re fighting about here.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say she’s never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi, who is backing antiwar but also anti-abortion Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It’s nice moderate stuff — raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it’s brilliant: there won’t be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She’s whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.
Along the way, though, she’s pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn’t even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington.
There are a lot of people who think that’s fine. Now that she’s speaker, she’ll be able to do a lot for this city, particularly when it comes to bringing in federal money. I appreciate the fact that her work on the national level, which often involved running away from San Francisco, will allow more-progressive Democrats like Los Angeles’s Maxine Waters to chair powerful committees that can go after White House cronyism and corruption.
But if the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us. SFBG

Yes, the news is grim, but that is why journalists need to fight back

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November 14, 2006

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

SOS: The news in the media is grim and getting grimmer by the day. Journalists and journalism schools and journalism organizations have been much too passive in this time of great peril and need to start fighting back, particularly through their journalism organizations. The Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists struck the right note at its splendid annual Excellence in Journalism awards dinner last Thursday night. Below, in our editorial for Wednesday’s Guardian, are some of our ideas for action. We will be presenting more on a regular basis. Check our previous ideas in the Guardian and on the Bruce blog. Meanwhile, join SPJ, Media Alliance and FAIR, and follow the media news on the Romenesko media column at Poynter.org and ChainLinks.org, the newspaper union website of news alerts and stories in the land of ChainLinks.

And support the independent voices. And support the independent- minded journalists on the chain papers who risk their jobs to fight the forces of consolidation and chains-are-us journalism, mainstream and alternative.

Much more to come, send along your ideas, B3

SFBG: Journalists need to fight back

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story. Why? Some impertinent questions for the Press Democrat

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November 13, 2006

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To the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

This morning I got an email from Carl Jensen, the founder of Project Censored at your nearby Sonoma State University, complaining that the Press Democrat published an “irresponsible page one article” about Project Censored and its annual Sonoma State Conference. He and Peter Phillips, the current director of the project, have asked for answers to the questions they have raised about your coverage.

As the editor and publisher of the alternative paper that has for years proudly run the Project Censored story, and then sent it out for publication in alternative papers throughout the country, I would appreciate your response to their charges of omission and commission as noted below. And I also have some questions. I am sending them via the Bruce blog at our website sfbg.com to the reporter, and the editors and publsher of the Post Democrat.

I have been astounded through the years that the Press Democrat has never to my knowledge written up this annual story. And then, this year, instead of running a fair story on a major local story by a major local university on its 30th anniversary, I was further astounded to find that you go on the attack mode and pick out one story and use it to lambaste the project on the front page of the Press Democrat. I find it particularly galling that, after censoring the story for three decades or so, you finally do the story on the project’s 30th anniversary, a major journalistic and academic milestone. Bush. Real bush.

Some questions:

+Will you answer the questions raised by Jensen and Phillips in their notes to you? (Please send them also to me for publication in the Guardian and the Bruce blog.) Will you run the Phillips’ answer in an op ed?

+Why have you never run this story through the years? (If you have, I would appreciate knowing about it and would love to see copies.)

+Why this year, instead of running a fair account of a nationally recognized project in journalism, did you center on just one story, which was number l8 on the list, and left out a flood of stories on important issues. (See the Guardian Censored package link below). In fact, in our coverage, we did not even go down this far on the list and concentrated on the top l0 stories, which ranged from number one (“The Feds and the media muddy the debate over internet freedom” to number ten (“Expanded air war in Iraq kills more civilians”). We did synopses and comments on the other stories and cited the source. Why didn’t you at least do this and run a list of the stories, so people had a chance to judge the project for themselves, if you were going to do a hit attack and not a fair story? (We ran the entire list in our online package.) Why didn’t you at least say this was the project’s 30th anniversary and provide some history and context?

+Why didn’t you get comments from any of the distinguished Censored judges through the years or from any of its many supporters, including Ben Bagdikian, author of “The Media Monopoly” and former dean of the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, a prominent media critic and author, and many many others. Or from any of the alternative press that regularly runs the Censored story as one of its most widely read and highly respected issues of the year?

+Each year, Censored runs l0 stories that it considers Junk Food News. Doesn’t this story qualify as a top entry this year?

I would also appreciate it you would address the larger issue of “censorship” that this project, and many of us, try to address. As the only daily paper in the Bay Area not aligned with the emerging Singleton/Hearst regional monopoly, you have a special responsbility to report the news, not censor it and mangle as you do annually with this story.

This is particularly the case with the paper of Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and the uncritical news stories and editorials that helped march us into Iraq and a deadly occupation. The “censored” Iraq stories, let me emphasize, were a major staple of Project Censored and the Guardian, and other alternative papers that ran Censored stories and took the anti-war side and condemned the preemptive invasion before and during the war and up to the present day.

Last impertinent question: has the Press Democrat/NY Times done a major local story on the impact of the Hearst/Singleton moves to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the
Bay Area (and the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto suit to break up the unholy alliance)? If not, why not? If not, when will you start doing this kind of major local story and stop doing attack stories on major local projects such as Project Censored? Have you run the major Hearst scandal story on prescription drug pricing (from the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and previous Bruce blogs). This is a story, let me emphasize, that Singleton papers are also censoring as yet another example of the Hearst/Singleton mutual benefit society. Until you do this Hearst/Singleton story and pursue it properly, until you run the major Hearst scandal story, until you start doing fair and balanced stories on major local projects such as Project Censored, you have no business criticizing anybody on much of anything involving media criticism. Thanks very much.

Dear Colleague:

On October 4, the Press Democrat published an irresponsible page one article about Project Censored and a conference it held at SSU. The article, written by Paul Payne, appeared to be set up to attack Project Censored. He interviewed two well-known critics of the project before the conference took place. They didn’t even attend the conference to know what the speaker said.

In all my years in journalism, as a journalism professor, and as an advisor to the SSU STAR, Payne’s hit-piece definitely was one of the least objective articles I have ever read.

In the weeks following, the Press Democrat published just two letters concerning the ethics of Payne’s article leading readers to believe there was little public reaction. However, there were well over 100 comments submitted to the Press Democrat on line with the great majority castigating the PD.

Following is a letter Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, wrote to Payne questioning his article Further, Phillips is submitting an op ed article to the PD this week, in hopes of letting the public know the truth about the conference and the speaker.

I thought you, as a journalist, should be aware of this unethical behavior by Payne and the Press Democrat.

Carl Jensen

Dear Paul Payne,

Staff Writer for the Press Democrat

October 6, 2007

Subject: There’s that other theory on 9/11: SSU hosts discredited academic who says U.S. could have planned attack.? Page 1 October 4, 2006 Press Democrat

Were we at the same lecture last? Friday night?? Somehow you missed reporting? Dr. Jones’? first 45 minutes on the?collapse speeds of building 7 and the Twin towers, which where the principle physics questions? presented that evening.??

Did you? tape the lecture, because nowhere can we find Dr. Jones making a statement that the US Government did it? He was quite clear in saying he doesn’t know who placed the thermite in the building,? if indeed that is what was used.

When you write that Jones’ theories have been discredited/condemned by other scholars and critics as groundless,? it would be nice to actually cite who is making these charges.? If you look on the 9/11 Scholars for Truth website you will find the names of over 2 dozen structural engineers, physicists, chemists, and other scientists who support his work . That sounds to us like a valid scientific dispute not a total or even partial discrediting.?

When we discuss journalism at the University we clearly talk about objectivity and balance as the hallmark of solid reporting. So we are wondering how the effort by you to present both sides of the issues was missed? Obviously, the quotes from the two well-known enemies of Project Censored were obtained before you came to the lecture, but why weren’t the numerous other professors present at the event or Project Censored people, or even Jones himself given the opportunity to respond to the critics???

The article was so one-sided and biased that we will be formally requesting to Pete Golis to provide space for a 700 word response sometime within the next two weeks.??

Disagreeing on scientific issues is one thing, slandering a visiting scholar is quite another.? I saw Dr. Jones’ face when he read your article.? He didn’t deserve such a mean-spirited slight. What a terrible thing to do to him personally.??

Dr. Jones spoke at the University of Colorado the? weekend before last and I have attached the Denver Post story for your review.? Perhaps this will assist you in understanding what balanced objectivity in news is about.

Peter Phillips

THERE’S THAT OTHER THEORY ON 9/11: SSU HOSTS DISCREDITED ACADEMIC WHO SAYS U.S. COULD HAVE PLANNED ATTACK

SFBG Project Censored

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November 9, 2006

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Josh Wolf at 81 days

By Sarah Phelan

Spoke to jailed freelance videographer/blogger Josh Wolf by phone on his 81st day at Dublin Federal Correctional Institute. (Wolf clocked 31 days during his first stint, was released on bail, only to get sent back inside when the 9th Court rejected his appeal.)
“This is like the world’s worst summer camp,” joked Wolf, who keeps busy with lots of reading, writing and Scrabble-playing. “Though the people I play Scrabble with keep leaving.”

Wolf hopes to be free when the Democrats take over Congress in January 2007, in part because Martin Garbus, a big shot First Amendment lawyer, is now his lead attorney.

“I’m lucky to have such illustrious counsel. Garbus had been referred to me before I went to jail the first time, but I wanted to meet him face-to-face. Then, while I was inside, an inmate had a copy of Garbus’ 300-page long book, Heroes and Traitors. I read it in four hours straight.”

Another reason for hope: On October 11, Wolf’s legal team filed paperwork with the 9th Circuit in the hope of a rehearing, given that the panel’s decision in his case appears to conflict with a prior decision of the court, in which sessions in which a police officer sought counseling following a contentious and fatal shooting were given protection from investigators’ prying eyes.

In Wolf’s case, he’s being asked to produce video-out takes of a July 2005 anarchist protest turned violent–something he fears the police want to access so they can profile members of the anarchist community.

“The alleged arson of a police car is serious, but so is the chilling effect of trying to get a reporter to work as an arm of the government,” says Wolf, who has only 14 days to go before he tops former New York Times’ reporter Judith Miller’s 95-day stint inside.

“I’m looking forward to being out in the fresh air, walking around –and meeting you face to face,” says Wolf, who believes TV coverage of his case has been adversely affected by Dublin’s ruling that he can only give interviews by phone and that they can’t be taped.

“TV news doesn’t want to report what Josh Wolf says if there’s no voice and no face to go with it,” he observes. As for the fact that the two Chronicle reporters who printed leaked grand jury testimony in the BALCO steroids scandal remain outside, while Wolf remains inside playing Scrabble, is that evidence of preferential treatment of the corporate media, or evidence that the feds had something to gain in their “war on drugs’ by the leaked testimony getting out in print? Stay tuned.

Josh Wolf: 81 days inside, Scrabble Master