[NYTr] More on the MoveOn Sideshow

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Yesterday's (Sep 24, 2007) reactionary Murdoch-owned NY Post displayed
a screaming headline about the Iranian President's arrived in New York
for the UN sessions.  "EVIL! Comes to New York" it said ("Evil"
underlined in red.) Maybe this yesar Venezuela will get a break
and they won't stop and search Venezuelan diplomats and force them
to miss their planes.-NYTr]

Says Parry: 

"The New York Times has joined in pummeling MoveOn.org, with a top
editor faulting his newspaper for violating a ban on negative
personal attack ads. The editor says, too, MoveOn should have paid
more than double for the "General Betray Us" ad.

In response, MoveOn is writing a check for another $77,000 to the
Times in a perverse case of negative bang for the buck. Plus, in a
show of double standards, the Times runs a right-wing ad entitled
'Amadinejad Is a Terrorist.'"]


Consortium News - Sep 24, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/092407.html

MoveOn & Media Double Standards

By Robert Parry
September 24, 2007

MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad may have gotten more attention than
it deserved, but it also has underscored several important points: the
foolishness of MoveOn’s ad-buying strategy, the cringing hypocrisy of
the mainstream U.S. news media when attacked by the Right, and the
pressing need to build independent news outlets.

Ironically, MoveOn has long resisted using its fund-raising capability
on the Internet to support an independent news infrastructure, favoring
instead the idea of making expensive ad buys in the New York Times and
other Big Media outlets.

So, MoveOn initially spent $64,575 for its Sept. 10 full-page ad
questioning Gen. David Petraeus’s honesty. Then, because of MoveOn’s
juvenile pun played on Petraeus’s name, the Bush administration and its
right-wing allies exploited the ad to divert the debate on the Iraq War
into an argument over the propriety of the ad's language.

The right-wing media – making full use of its extraordinary reach
through newspapers, TV, talk radio and the Internet – also spread the
word that the Times showed its "liberal bias" by giving MoveOn a
favorable “discount” ad rate. More than 4,000 furious e-mails poured in
to the Times.

Not only were congressional Democrats soon in full retreat but so were
Times’ editors. On Sept. 23, the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt,
concluded that the Times had violated its policies both on ad rates and
on rejecting ads that are “outside the bounds of acceptable political
discourse.”

In an article critical of the Times' actions, entitled “Betraying Its
Own Best Interests,” Hoyt wrote, “the ad appears to fly in the face of
an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, ‘We do not
accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.’”

Hoyt also reported that the Times should have charged MoveOn $142,083
for a full-page ad when a client is guaranteed that an ad will run on a
specific day. (The discount rate should apply if the ad were treated as
a stand-by that could be bumped.)

As it turned out, the Times also had agreed to run an ad from
Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani on Sept. 14,
attacking both the MoveOn ad and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.
Giuliani was given the $64,575 discount rate, although that also would
appear to have violated the Times’ ad-rate policies.

For its part, MoveOn now has volunteered to pay the Times the full ad
rate, sending a check for an additional $77,000, a sum that presumably
comes from donations that anti-war activists made to MoveOn, partly in
defense of its Petraeus ad.

In other words, MoveOn has taken $142,083 from American donors and
given it to the New York Times for the privilege of running an ad that
served to undermine the goal of reining in President Bush’s Iraq War.
Talk about getting a reverse bang for your buck.

(By contrast, for many independent media outlets, the cost of that one
ad would cover all their expenses for a year or more. In 2006, the
entire budget of our Web site, Consortiumnews.com, was $109,000.)

Double Standard

Another negative lesson that the Times appears to have learned is that
it must apply a double standard when accepting ads.

If you are a Bush favorite, such as Gen. Petraeus, public editor Hoyt
thinks you should be granted immunity from harsh criticism. However, if
you’re a Bush enemy, the Times is still happy to run ads condemning you
in the nastiest possible terms.

Just one day after Hoyt objected to “attacks of a personal nature,” the
Time ran a full-page ad from a pro-Bush advocacy group,
Freedomswatch.org, with the headline “Ahmandinejad Is a Terrorist.” The
ad also denounced Columbia University for allowing the Iranian
president to give a speech.

“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our nation and the
freedoms we value,” the ad reads. “He has supported attacks on our
soldiers and our allies. He should be treated as the terrorist that he
is.” [NYT, Sept. 24, 2007]

Presumably, in green-lighting this ad, the Times editors feared a
hostile right-wing reaction if they had said no or demanded softer
language.

While few Americans would defend Ahmadinejad or even note that many of
these harsh statements have not been proven, it is this double standard
– one set of rules for Bush’s enemies and another for Bush’s friends –
that guided the U.S. march to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in
2002-03.

Yet, the only real hope against a repeat stampede – this time into an
attack on Iran – is a principled stand by the American news media for a
single standard of fairness. But that isn’t going to happen as long as
editors and ad executives see their careers threatened when they allow
something like the MoveOn ad.

Mainstream journalists and news executive know they will get pounded if
they act in a way offensive to the Right, but they realize that the
Left in America lacks anything close to a comparable ability to inflict
pain.

To change that dynamic would require America’s Left to build a media
infrastructure that can begin to match up with what the Right has
created over the past three decades.

MoveOn’s Mistake

MoveOn has been one of the “progressive” organizations that has
rejected the need for building a media infrastructure that can restore
some balance to the U.S. political process.

In spring 2005, near the start of Bush’s second term, media activist
Carolyn Kay presented a comprehensive media reform strategy to MoveOn
founder Wes Boyd.

Boyd responded with an e-mail on April 24, 2005, saying, “Just to be
direct and frank, we have no immediate plans to pursue funding for
media … Our efforts are focused on a few big fights right now, because
this is the key legislative season. Later in the year and next year I
expect there will [be] more time to look further afield.”

Kay e-mailed Boyd back, saying, “For five years people have been
telling me that in just a couple of months, we’ll start addressing the
long-term problems. But the day never comes. … Today it’s Social
Security and the filibuster. Tomorrow it will be something else. And in
a couple of months it will be something else again. There’s never a
right time to address the media issue. That’s why the right time is
now.”

Boyd’s April 24 e-mail – calling the idea of addressing the nation’s
media crisis as wandering “afield” – is typical of the views held by
many leaders in the “progressive establishment.” There is no sense of
urgency about media. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Left’s Media Miscalculation.”]

Instead, MoveOn continues to rely on ad buys in mainstream news outlets
to get out its message, a strategy that now has proved both expensive
and counter-productive.

                            ***

Consortium News - Sep 25, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/092507a.html

The Left's Media Miscalculation (Redux)

By Robert Parry
(Originally published April 29, 2005)

[Editor’s Note: Two-and-a-half years ago, we published a special report
on America’s dangerous media imbalance. At the time, there was the
Right’s loud and intimidating media machine, a complicit or intimidated
mainstream media, and a skimpy messaging apparatus on the Left.

Since then, there have been a few grains of hope sprinkled on the Left
side of the scale – Keith Olbermann’s successful MSNBC “Countdown”
show, the combination of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy
Central, the growth of Internet blogs, and a struggling Air America
Radio – but overall the imbalance remains substantially the same.

As MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad debacle revealed, the Right can
still make small mistakes by their opponents big and big mistakes by
their allies small.

To defend Gen. David Petraeus’s honor, the Senate rushed through a
bipartisan condemnation of MoveOn, while a serious debate over George
W. Bush’s Iraq War was derailed. Then, the New York Times public editor
chastised both MoveOn and his own newspaper for running the ad and not
charging MoveOn a higher ad rate.

To add injury to insult, MoveOn agreed to send the Times an additional
$77,000 on top of the $65,000 that the activist group had already paid,
meaning that the anti-Iraq War movement spent $142,000 on a largely
counterproductive ad.

In view of the MoveOn fiasco, we are republishing our April 29, 2005,
report, entitled “The Left’s Media Miscalculation,” which explains how
this media asymmetry developed:

To understand how the United States got into today’s political
predicament – where even fundamental principles like the separation of
church and state are under attack – one has to look back at strategic
choices made by the Right and the Left three decades ago.] 

In the mid-1970s, after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and President
Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, American
progressives held the upper-hand on media. Not only had the mainstream
press exposed Nixon’s dirty tricks and published the Pentagon Papers
secrets of the Vietnam War, but a vibrant leftist “underground” press
informed and inspired a new generation of citizens.

Besides well-known anti-war magazines, such as Ramparts, and
investigative outlets, like Seymour Hersh’s Dispatch News, hundreds of
smaller publications had emerged across the country in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Though some quickly disappeared, their influence
shocked conservatives who saw the publications as a grave political
threat. [For details, see Angus Mackenzie’s Secrets: The CIA’s War at
Home.]

Conservatives felt out-muscled on a wide range of public-policy fronts,
blaming the media not only for the twin debacles of Watergate and
Vietnam but also for contributing to the Right’s defeat on issues such
as civil rights and the environment.

Fateful Choices

At this key juncture, leaders of the Right and the Left made fateful
choices that have shaped today’s political world. Though both sides had
access to similar amounts of money from wealthy individuals and
like-minded foundations, the two sides chose to invest that money in
very different ways.

The Right concentrated on gaining control of the information flows in
Washington and on building a media infrastructure that would put out a
consistent conservative message across the country. As part of this
strategy, the Right also funded attack groups to target mainstream
journalists who got in the way of the conservative agenda.

The Left largely forsook media in favor of “grassroots organizing.” As
many of the Left’s flagship media outlets foundered, the “progressive
community” reorganized under the slogan – “think globally, act locally”
– and increasingly put its available money into well-intentioned
projects, such as buying endangered wetlands or feeding the poor.

So, while the Right waged what it called “the war of ideas” and
expanded the reach of conservative media to every corner of the nation,
the Left trusted that local political action would reenergize American
democracy.

Some wealthy progressives also apparently bought into the conservative
notion of a “liberal bias” in the media and thus saw no real need to
invest significantly in information or to defend embattled journalists
under conservative attack. After all, over the years, many mainstream
journalists did appear allied with liberal priorities.

In the 1950s, for instance, northern reporters wrote sympathetically
about the plight of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. The anger
of white segregationists toward that press coverage was the grievance
that sparked the first complaints about media “liberal bias.”

In one 1955 case, negative national coverage followed the acquittal of
two white men for murdering black teenager Emmett Till, who supposedly
had whistled at a white woman. Reacting to the critical reporting on
the Till case, angry whites plastered their cars with bumper stickers
reading, “Mississippi: The Most Lied About State in the Union.”

War Over Journalism

The conservative refrain about “liberal bias” grew in volume as
mainstream journalists reported critically about the U.S. military
strategy in Vietnam and then exposed President Nixon’s spying on his
political enemies. The fact that reporters essentially got those
stories right didn’t spare them from conservative ire.

Progressives apparently trusted that professional journalists would
continue standing up to conservative pressure, even in the 1980s as
well-funded right-wing groups targeted individual reporters and
Reagan-Bush “public diplomacy” teams went into news bureaus to lobby
against troublesome journalists. [For details on this strategy, see
Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq.]

As those conservative pressures began to take a toll on reporters at
the national level, the progressives still emphasized “grassroots
organizing” and focused on more immediate priorities, such as filling
gaps in the social safety net opened by Reagan-Bush policies.

With the numbers of homeless swelling and the AIDS epidemic spreading,
the idea of diverting money to an information infrastructure seemed
coldhearted. After all, the social problems were visible; the
significance of the information battle was more theoretical.

In the early 1990s, when I first began approaching major liberal
foundations about the need to counter right-wing pressure on journalism
(which I had seen first-hand at the Associated Press and Newsweek), I
received dismissive or bemused responses. One foundation executive
smiled and said, “we don’t do media.” Another foundation simply barred
media proposals outright.

On occasion, when a few center-left foundations did approve
media-related grants, they generally went for non-controversial
projects, such as polling public attitudes or tracking money in
politics, which condemned Democrats and Republicans about equally.

Brock/Coulter

Meanwhile, through the 1990s, the conservatives poured billions of
dollars into their media apparatus, which rose like a vertically
integrated machine incorporating newspapers, magazines, book
publishing, radio stations, TV networks and Internet sites.

Young conservative writers – such as David Brock and Ann Coulter – soon
found they could make fortunes working within this structure. Magazine
articles by star conservatives earned top dollar. Their books –
promoted on conservative talk radio and favorably reviewed in
right-wing publications – jumped to the top of the best-seller lists.

While progressives starved freelancers who wrote for left-of-center
publications like The Nation or In These Times, conservatives made sure
that writers for the American Spectator or the Wall Street Journal’s
editorial page had plenty of money to dine at Washington’s finest
restaurants.

(Brock broke away from this right-wing apparatus in the late 1990s and
described its inner workings in his book, Blinded by the Right. By
then, however, Brock had gotten rich writing hit pieces against people
who interfered with the conservative agenda, from law professor Anita
Hill, who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual
harassment, to President Bill Clinton, whose impeachment troubles were
touched off by one of Brock’s articles in 1993.)

As the 1990s wore on, mainstream journalists adapted to the new media
environment by trying not to offend the conservatives. Working
journalists knew that the Right could damage or destroy their careers
by attaching the “liberal” label. There was no comparable danger from
the Left.

So, many Americans journalists – whether consciously or not – protected
themselves by being harder on Democrats in the Clinton administration
than they were on Republicans during the Reagan-Bush years. Indeed,
through much of the 1990s, there was little to distinguish the hostile
scandal coverage of Clinton in the Washington Post and the New York
Times from what was appearing in the New York Post and the Washington
Times.

Slamming Gore

The animus toward Clinton then spilled over into Campaign 2000 when the
major media – both mainstream and right-wing – jumped all over Al Gore,
freely misquoting him and subjecting him to almost unparalleled
political ridicule. By contrast, George W. Bush – while viewed as
slightly dimwitted – got the benefit of nearly every doubt. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting
Bush-Cheney.”]

During the Florida recount battle, liberals watched as even the
Washington Post’s center-left columnist Richard Cohen sided with Bush.
There was only muted coverage when conservative activists from
Washington staged a riot outside the Miami-Dade canvassing board, and
scant mention was made of Bush’s phone call to joke with and
congratulate the rioters. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush's Conspiracy
to Riot.”]

Then, once five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a
state-court-ordered recount and handed Bush the White House, both
mainstream and conservative news outlets acted as if it were their
patriotic duty to rally around the legitimacy of the new President.
[For more on this phenomenon, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

The protect-Bush consensus deepened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks as the national news media – almost across the board –
transformed itself into a conveyor belt for White House propaganda.
When the Bush administration put out dubious claims about Iraq’s
supposed weapons of mass destruction, the major newspapers rushed the
information into print.

Many of the most egregious WMD stories appeared in the most prestigious
establishment newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The New York Times fronted bogus assertions about the nuclear-weapons
capabilities of aluminum tubes that were really for conventional
weapons. Washington Post editorials reported Bush’s allegations about
Iraqi WMD as fact, not a point in dispute.

Anti-war protests involving millions of American citizens received
largely dismissive coverage. Critics of the administration’s WMD
claims, such as former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and
actor/activist Sean Penn, were ignored or derided. When Al Gore offered
thoughtful critiques of Bush’s preemptive-war strategy at rallies
organized by MoveOn.org, he got savaged in the national media. [See
Consortiumnews.com “Politics of Preemption.”]

Smart Investment

Over those three decades, by investing smartly in media infrastructure,
the Right had succeeded in reversing the media dynamic of the
Watergate-Vietnam era. Instead of a tough skeptical press corps
challenging war claims on Iraq and exposing political dirty tricks in
Florida, most national journalists knew better than to risk losing
their careers.

Many on the Left began acknowledging the danger caused by this media
imbalance. But even as the Iraq War disaster worsened, the “progressive
establishment” continued spurning proposals for building a media
counter-infrastructure that could challenge the “group think” of
Washington journalism.

One of the new excuses became that the task was too daunting. When
proposals were on the table in 2003 for a progressive AM talk radio
network, for example, many wealthy liberals shunned the plan as certain
to fail, an attitude that nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy as
an under-funded Air America Radio almost crashed and burned on take-off
in March 2004.

Later, the argument was that a media infrastructure would take too long
to build and that all available resources should go to oust Bush in
Election 2004. To that end, hundreds of millions of dollars were poured
into voter registration drives and into campaign commercials. But the
consequences of the Left’s longtime media disarmament continued to
plague its preferred policies and candidates.

When the pro-Bush Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sandbagged Kerry over
his Vietnam War record, the conservative media infrastructure made the
anti-Kerry attacks big news, joined by mainstream outlets such as CNN.
But liberals lacked the media capacity to counter the charges.

By the time the major newspapers got around to examining the Swift Boat
allegations and judged many to be spurious, Kerry’s campaign was in
freefall. Similarly, there was no significant independent media
capability to quickly investigate and publicize voting irregularities
on Election Day 2004. Ad hoc citizens groups and Internet bloggers
tried to fill the void but lacked the necessary resources.

Post-Mortem

Once Election 2004 was over, many progressive funders found a new
reason to put off action on a media infrastructure. They said they were
financially strapped from the campaign.

Though media issues were part of the post-election post-mortem, actual
media plans made little progress. The main activities on the Left
centered around arranging more conferences on media and holding more
discussions, not implementing concrete proposals to actually do
journalism and build new outlets.

There also was a new variation on the Left’s three-decade-old emphasis
on “grassroots organizing.” MoveOn.org postponed action on media
infrastructure in favor of rallying political activists in support of
Democratic legislative goals. When media activist Carolyn Kay presented
a comprehensive media reform strategy, MoveOn.org’s founder Wes Boyd
responded with an e-mail on April 24, 2005, saying, “Just to be direct
and frank, we have no immediate plans to pursue funding for media …

“Our efforts are focused on a few big fights right now, because this is
the key legislative season. Later in the year and next year I expect
there will [be] more time to look further afield.”

Kay e-mailed Boyd back, saying, “For five years people have been
telling me that in just a couple of months, we’ll start addressing the
long-term problems. But the day never comes. … Today it’s Social
Security and the filibuster. Tomorrow it will be something else. And in
a couple of months it will be something else again. There’s never a
right time to address the media issue. That’s why the right time is
now.”

Boyd’s April 24 e-mail – calling the idea of addressing the nation’s
media crisis as wandering “afield” – is typical of the views held by
many leaders in the “progressive establishment.” There is no sense of
urgency about media.

Still, MoveOn’s blasé attitude may be even more surprising since the
organization emerged as a political force during the media-driven
impeachment of President Clinton. It also watched as Gore’s
MoveOn-sponsored, pre-Iraq-War speeches were trashed by the national
news media, reinforcing his decision to forego a second race against
Bush.

Indeed, one point many on the Left still fail to appreciate is how much
easier it would be to convince a politician to take a courageous stand
– as Gore did in those speeches – if the politician didn’t have to face
such a hostile media reaction. Already the growth of “progressive talk
radio” – on the AM dial in more than 50 cities – appears to have
boosted the fighting spirit of some congressional Democrats. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Mystery of the Democrats’ New Spine.”]

Investigative Journalism

At Consortiumnews.com over the past year [2004-05], we have approached
more than 100 potential funders about supporting an investigative
journalism project modeled after the Vietnam-era Dispatch News, where
Sy Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre story. Our idea was to hire a team
of experienced investigative journalists who would dig into important
stories that are receiving little or no attention from the mainstream
news media.

While nearly everyone we have approached agrees on the need for this
kind of journalism and most praised the plan, no one has yet stepped
forward with financial support. Indeed, the expenses of contacting
these potential funders – though relatively modest – have put the
survival of our decade-old Web site at risk.

Which leads to another myth among some on the Left: that the media
problem will somehow solve itself, that the pendulum will swing back
when the national crisis gets worse and the conservatives finally go
too far.

But there is really no reason to think that some imaginary mechanism
will reverse the trends. Indeed, the opposite seems more likely. The
gravitational pull of the Right’s expanding media galaxy keeps dragging
the mainstream press in that direction. Look what’s happening at major
news outlets from CBS to PBS, all are drifting to the right.

As the Right keeps plugging away at its media infrastructure, the
pervasiveness of the conservative message also continues to recruit
more Americans to the fold.

Ironically, the conservative media clout has had the secondary effect
of helping the Right’s grassroots organizing, especially among
Christian fundamentalists. Simultaneously, the progressives’ weakness
in media has undercut the Left’s grassroots organizing because few
Americans regularly hear explanations of liberal goals. But they do
hear – endlessly – the Right’s political storyline.

Many progressives miss this media point when they cite the rise of
Christian Right churches as validation of a grassroots organizing
strategy. What that analysis leaves out is the fact that the Christian
Right originally built its strength through media, particularly the
work of televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. What the Right
has demonstrated is that media is not the enemy of grassroots
organizing but its ally.

Bright Spots & Dangers

Though there have been some recent bright spots for the Left's media –
the fledgling progressive talk radio, new techniques for distributing
documentaries on DVD, and hard-hitting Internet blogs –  there are also
more danger signs. As the Left postpones media investments, some
struggling progressive news outlets – which could provide the framework
for a counter-infrastructure – may be headed toward extinction.

Just as the echo chamber of the Right’s infrastructure makes
conservative media increasingly profitable, the lack of a Left
infrastructure dooms many promising media endeavors to failure.

The hard truth for the Left is that the media imbalance in the United
States could very easily get much worse. The difficult answer for the
progressive community is to come to grips with this major strategic
weakness, apply the Left’s organizing talents, and finally make a
balanced national media a top priority.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com