BUSH BLOG - Perfidy

"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitols and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship. ... Bipartisanship is just another name for date rape."

"Like Ronald Reagan (and unlike Bill Clinton) the media refusal to pursue damaging (and felonious) presidential misdeeds guarantees Bush a free ride. Bush’s litany of lies grows daily. In the short term, they demoralize the opposition. The mainstream media does its part by dismissing those abundant, articulate critics who don’t, like Paul Wellstone, conveniently wind up dead." Read this spectacular piece - a laundry-list of the abominations perpetrated by the Bush White House. It's written by Harvey Wasserman and published in the Columbus Free Press, where he's a senior editor. Also available here.

Over the protests of hundreds of thousands of Americans, a range of public interest advocacy groups and two dissenting Democratic commissioners, the FCC on June 2 voted to repeal or weaken some of the few remaining checks on the dominance of big media companies. Attention now moves to Congress, as a number of lawmakers attempt to roll back at least some of the changes, some of which now appear to be more drastic than previously reported.

For instance, most media outlets have reported that under the FCC's new rules, a single company can now own TV stations that reach 45 percent of U.S. households, up from 35 percent. Because of a little-reported loophole, however, a single company could actually reach far more people-- in theory, as much as 90 percent of U.S. viewers (New York Times, 5/13/03).

The loophole, known as the "UHF discount," exists because of a 1980s regulation that requires the FCC to count every two viewers of a UHF station (TV channels 14 and above) as one viewer As explained by the New York Times' Stephen Labaton (5/13/03), one of the few journalists to report on the "discount," the provision was passed at a time when people relied on broadcast TV "and had to use special equipment like antennas that resembled rabbit ears to pick up UHF stations. Today, about 85 percent of viewers use paid services from cable and satellite providers, rendering the distinction between VHF and UHF largely a relic."

The commission also eliminated, in all but the smallest markets, the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets, meaning that communities that are already "one-paper towns" (and that's most communities in the country) could now see one company own that paper plus the top TV station, too. Local TV ownership rules were weakened as well, so that one company may own as many as three stations in the largest markets, and two in many smaller markets.

Critics-- including FAIR-- contended that the changes will decrease diversity and localism in media, but the FCC's Republican majority made little effort to address such concerns. FCC chair Michael Powell dismissed as "garbage" the idea that the public was insufficiently informed about the decisions, despite the fact that a February poll showed that some 70 percent of the public knew "nothing at all" about them.

The FCC received an estimated 750,000 comments from the public, which, according to Commissioner Michael Copps, ran "99.9 percent" opposed. Yet Powell claims that a "silent majority" of Americans support the deregulation that, in the words of Sen. Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), "rings the dinner bell for conglomerates to make a meal out of media outlets."

The FCC's actions also met criticism from both parties in Congress. Senators Ernest Hollings (D.-S.C.) and Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska) are cosponsoring a bill (S.1046) to return the TV ownership cap to 35 percent, and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.-N.D.) hopes to add an amendment that would undo the new rules on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets. The Commerce Committee, chaired by John McCain, will decide whether to support the Hollings-Stevens bill on June 19.

In the House, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gone further, proposing the "Protect Diversity in Media Act" (H.R. 2462), which would rescind all of the new rules made by the FCC, and prohibit the Commission from conducting any more of the biennial reviews of broadcast media ownership rules that were mandated under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Corporate broadcast media outlets lobbied hard for the recent deregulation, but did a poor job of informing the public about it. Research by FAIR showed only a tiny handful of TV stories, most of them in the week preceding the FCC's vote (Media Advisory, 5/30/03). As the battle moves to Congress, media will have another chance to cover these issues so vital to democracy.

There is an interesting essay by Lewis Lapham in the April 2003 issue of HARPERS. In "Cause for Dissent," Lapham asks ten questions of the Bush Administration. He cites Rumsfeld's doubletalk comment to European journalists about Iraq's WMD, "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as an example of "agitprop." He wonders why Bush's "moral clarity" doesn't extend to the one country that poses a threat to the US that has WMD and has threatened to use them. He questions Bush's statement in Cincinnati on 7 October, "We refuse to live in fear." Yet, "Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington," says Lapham, "no week has passed in which the government has failed to issue warnings of a sequel." When too many people ask "impertinent questions about the shambles of the federal budget or the disappearance of a forest in Montana, the government sends another law-enforcement officer to a microphone with a story about a missing tube of aluminum or a newly discovered nerve gas."

Lapham also quotes Bush in the recent, best-selling book, Bush at War, by Bob Woodward. "That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something. but I don't feel like a I owe anybody an explanation."

The HARPERS editor then comments on the negligence of Bush in squandering the sympathy of almost everyone on earth in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. This is an issue that has been picked up for comment by everyone it seems, except for the "liberal" media in the US and the punditocracy. Lapham says the cost of a "regime change" in Afghanistan and the cost of democracy in action is, "The horse drawn and all but helpless Taliban put to rout at a cost of more than $15 billion, Kabul remanded to the custody of a freedom-loving warlord, and tranquility along the border of Pakistan achieved with a $1 billion bribe paid to the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf."

And what of the dismal showing last February at the UN when Picasso's Guernica was covered up to preserve Colin Powell from embarrassment of having to pose for photographs in front of a work of art depicting the horrors of war, Lapham asks. "The Bush Administration owes its existence to our apathy and sloth," he concludes. Lapham reminds us at the end of his essay that, "The energy of our democracy springs from the willingness of its citizens to speak and think in their own voices."

Check out the McCarthyism Watch at The Progressive.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] is a holdover from the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era when Congress was concerned about the FBI and its habit of making illegal wiretaps or breaking into people's homes and offices to obtain information. FISA, and the super-secret court it created has become a cause for concern over the years because it lacks any accountability - either to Congress OR voters.

That is why FISA's recent declaration is so startling. It chided not only itself but the government for over-reaching while approving wiretaps. The government [i.e. OUR government] took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where, predictably, the Court sided with the Bush Administration and, under a "procedural rule," refused to hear the case. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead on those "national security" wiretaps!

FISA has become little more than an organization, without limits or oversight, that can spy, with impunity, on American citizens. The Department of Justice continues to refuse to release any information about the FISA court. This includes information about who is being watched, how many people are being watched, why they are being watched and whether any of this gathered data has been used by law enforcement and for what purpose.

Senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Patrick Leahy of Vermont [a nice mix of republicans and democrats] believe this must change. They have introduced legislation that would keep an eye on FISA without compromising law enforcement. Amazingly, the ACLU thinks this is a good idea. FISA will continue to do its job but without the danger of overstepping its bounds because it would be monitored by responsible people. Read about it here. Without this legislation, we will be denied the proper public accounting of this secret court's activities.

"Loyalty to my country; always.

Loyalty to my government; only when it deserves it."

- Mark Twain