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Friday, April 18, 2003 |
2 QUOTE FRIDAY
"To retain all the means of life in the hands of the few - & compel the many to do service to support these few - requires the machinery of the state. It is for this reason that penal laws are made."
- - Clarence Darrow (Born April 18th, 1857)
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/Ftrials/darrow.htm
"Human society is passing through a crisis ... The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil... The result of...[the concentration of private capital in a few hands] is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be checked even by a democratically organized political society."
- - Albert Einstein (Died April 18th, 1955)
http://www.albert-einstein.org/
APRIL 18th IN HISTORY:
1977 - - American Indian activist Leonard Peltier found guilty of murdering two FBI agents, despite government testimony he was not present at the scene of the killings.
http://www.freepeltier.org
RHINO HERE:
SPJ PressNotes is a daily e-mail newsletter created by the Society of Professional Journalists. It's covers a range of journalism issues & topics with one paragraph summaries of articles & their links. Yesterday's PressNotes is a great example of the work of the editor Terry Wimmer Shott, professor of journalism at West Virginia University. (twimmer@wvu.edu) Here's a sampling:
WAR
Rioters stab L.A. Times reporter
Paul Watson: In the middle of a riot Tuesday, a group helping a man with a long, deep gash on his forehead asked whether I would photograph them. When I did, about 300 people rushed me, shouting, "American! American!" As the mob approached, I saw that I had no escape. The only thing that kept them at bay - for several minutes anyway - was a group of about 20 people who tried to fend off my attackers. "He's innocent! He's innocent!" shouted one man. "Leave him alone!" But the mob wanted blood, and I could see two men who had pulled out knives. "Let me through - I want to kill him!" screamed one. After several minutes of struggling and stone-throwing, the mob knocked me to the ground and kicked me repeatedly in the head and back before stabbing me in the buttocks. My defenders managed to drag me into a restaurant and the mob smashed the windows and door before the owner was able to pull down the metal security shutter. Just then, U.S. troops opened fire and the mob gave up the chase. Two of my defenders, who were Arabs, brought me and my Kurdish translator to the Mosul governor's building, where the Americans had taken up positions.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Rioters
In black press, war skepticism runs high
On BlackAmericaWeb.com, Deborah Mathis, a syndicated columnist, cast a critical eye on the US administration's motives for going to war. She voiced distrust of a ''corporate cavalry, handpicked by the Bush innermost circle, to take control of Iraq's affairs, when the shooting stops.'' Tonyaa Weathersbee, a columnist for The Florida Times-Union, wrote that the war in which many African-Americans are fighting is ''about serving a political agenda that's fueled by deception and spin.'' BlackAmericaWeb.com, a forum for black writers, promises: ''We will give you a view of the `truth' behind the facts of this war that others may well miss.'' Many black journalists and commentators - reflecting a black America that, polls said, was overwhelmingly opposed to going to war - have been considerably more outspoken and skeptical about the decision that put US troops onto a Middle East battlefield.
Source: Boston Globe
War Skepticism
ONLINE MEDIA
Sites are blogged down in controversy
It was a shock to the tight-knit blogging community when two respected blogs written by frontline reporters for CNN and Time magazine were shut down by the journalists' employers, and when another hugely popular war blog was found to have lifted several postings from another source. Trouble is, some mainstream media organizations don't really know what to do about blogs. The television reportage of CNN's Kevin Sites, whose bosses halted his blogging, is "good, but his blog [www.kevinsites.net] is great -- his audio posts had an Edward R. Murrow quality," says Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor whose 2-year-old Web site, www.instapundit.com, often gets more than 200,000 hits a day. "I just find blog writing more intimate and more compelling -- it's like newspaper writing used to be. Somehow in an evil conspiracy between [grammarians] Strunk and White and corporate management, all the blood and personality has been drained out of newspaper writing.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Blogged Down In Controversy
MARKETPLACE
Copps: Media should cover FCC reform
As Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps barnstorms around the country holding unofficial public hearings in advance of a scheduled June 2 vote on proposals to eliminate the FCC cross-ownership ban and ease other media-ownership restrictions, he repeats the same message everywhere: News outlets have failed to inform the public about these important issues. "The media have not done a very good job of teeing up this debate for the American people. ... Whatever your side, someone's got to tell them what's up for grabs," he said during a recent stop at the "Midwest Public Forum on Media Ownership," held at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. More than seven of 10 Americans, 72 percent, say they have heard "nothing at all" about the FCC media-ownership debate, according to a late-February survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Only 4 percent of respondents said they had heard "a lot" about the debate.
Source: Editor & Publisher
FCC Reform
Powell to Congress: No delay in ownership review
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell in correspondence released Wednesday told Congress he would not delay his planned June 2 vote on major media ownership rules, saying it is "time to make judgments." Powell's statement came in correspondence replying to eight recent letters from federal lawmakers split on whether the agency should proceed quickly, or propose rule changes and submit them to more public comment. Powell said the FCC has received "significant input from the American public,"compiling a record of more than 18,000 comments.
Source: Mediaweek
No Delay
RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE is also from PressNotes. The Windy City Trib on the CNN scandal.
6:44:38 AM 
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MEDIA COMMENTARY
Sitting on scoops at CNN
Clarence Page: CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, shocked and awed a lot of people when he confessed that his network suppressed stories of Iraqi brutality. I say this: Journalists make judgment calls every day, especially when they work in places where government thugs routinely terrorize the populace. CNN made the wrong call in Baghdad, in my opinion. Jordan acknowledged that he sat on some stories about some truly horrendous atrocities by the Hussein regime out of concern, he said, for people's safety, especially Iraqis working for the network. Among other disclosures, Jordan revealed that Hussein's people beat and used electroshock torture on an Iraqi CNN cameraman in the mid-1990s for refusing to say that Jordan worked for the CIA. CNN could have refused to work under such tight government restrictions. Or it could have reported with some sort of visible or spoken disclaimer like "This report is filed under the watchful eye of government censors." Such a move might have gotten CNN kicked out, but its credibility would have stayed intact.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Sitting On Scoops
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6:19:14 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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