Was a one word answer-- "yes" -- simply too painful, or honest, or "complicated?"

[mojowork_n]

The Journal Sentinel's "Ask the Journal" column yesterday featured this question:

Q.I am shocked that the front page has featured breathless updates on Brett Favre, plus stuff that belongs on the Metro page, while burying coverage of major stories like arguments against the government’s circumstantial case against Bruce Ivins (experts say he couldn’t have weaponized liquid anthrax alone). Or how about the forged letter that linked Saddam to Atta? Or how about the completely bogus trial of bin Laden’s driver? You’re petrified of being painted as a liberal paper. If the facts are too “liberal,” do you shy away?

Full text here:

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=784091

The reply from George Stanley, the Journal's managing editor, opened with a sort of 'mission statement' definition:

A. We’ve received several questions like this one from readers asking why Brett Favre’s return from retirement and departure from the Packers were front-page news. When issues arise that most everyone in the state is talking about, such as the trade of Favre, we cover them in great detail and depth, as most of our readers expect us to. The Favre stories were by far the best-read in the paper and online during the saga, according to every measure we have. A huge number of readers wanted that news.

At the Journal Sentinel, we cover the world as if southeastern Wisconsin were at its center. It is for us. Our staff is focused on providing local, state and regional coverage that is more trustworthy, useful and comprehensive than our readers can get from other sources. This means, for example, that our Washington bureau covers what Wisconsin’s political representatives are up to, congressional hearings on issues of particular importance to people living here, the state’s role in the presidential election, what Wisconsin folks are lobbying for in D.C. and so on.

When we send reporters overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan, they report on the action of soldiers and Marines from Wisconsin...

The reply continues in that vein, detailing several of the most wonderful/delightful/praiseworthy accomplishments of Journal Sentinel reporters, in covering local news, including:

• "...Meg Kissinger’s outstanding series 'Abandoning Our Mentally Ill'."
  
  
• "...Dave Umhoefer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of extravagant 'buybacks'."
  
  
• "...Our Olympics writer, Gary D’Amato, reports on events in which state athletes are participating (which is why he was able to break the national story of how gymnast Chellsie Memmel of West Allis helped her team win a silver medal on a broken ankle)."
  

{A Confession -- I especially liked that last one, so I added bold emphasis to "broken ankle." A distracting play for the heartstrings of female readers, perhaps; many of whom may be, themselves, sick and tired of all the sports talk, hand-wringing and mostly male public mass hysteria/man-crush-o-rama in the Favre soap opera.}

But did you notice, there's ... no ... actual ... response to any of the other questions posed...

This is as close as George Stanley gets:

...We continue to publish a more comprehensive report of national and international news than any other media outlet in Wisconsin. Every day, we get hundreds of stories from a variety of wire services, but we have space to print only a small fraction of them. We try to choose stories our readers will consider the most important, most relevant and most interesting.

It’s hard to know what the interest of any individual reader might be in a particular topic, such as the FBI investigation of the anthrax suspect who committed suicide, which is mentioned in the question above. More and more, we’re linking readers to sources on the Internet and elsewhere where they can dig deeper into a subject of special interest to them....

Only one of the other (non-Favre-related) questions is even referred to, directly, but it's just a weasel-off-the-hook paraphrase of the question, with a strong tone of doubt back-at-ya, implying that True Wisconsinites (or are we all Wisconsinners?) don't care about all those messy goings-on in far-off places.

It's just my attempt to read between the lines, but I'd say that response qualifies as a strikeout. After fouling off the first pitch with the weaselly non-reply, there are two whiff's:

• Did your really just have the balls to ASK THE JOURNAL about the "FBI investigation of the anthrax suspect" who 'committed suicide!?!??'
  
  
• Not one word in reply to the question about Bin Laden's driver.
  
  
• Not one word about investigative reporter Ron Suskind's expose of the Bush administration lame attempts at covering their asses, with a forged letter from Saddam's former head spook.
  

I've said it once, and I'll say it again. The Daily Show has replaced The Onion as "America's Finest News Source."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784

PS -- I was disappointed, but not especially surprised to discover that former Journal Sentinel reporter Bruce Murphy's revealing expose about editorial decision-making protocols at the paper seems not to be available any longer, on line. You can read *about* his article in some detail, here, but that's about all I could find. None of the links (or links to other webpages from those) gets you the original story.

http://www.wisopinion.com/blogs/2005/06/inside-journal-sentinel-where-talk.html

PPS -- The real injury added to insult comes in a paragraph of "News Analysis" provided by the Associated Press, on page 19 of that same section of yesterday's paper. This 'news analysis' reads like something from "Soap Opera Digest," as if future Russian-U.S. exchanges should be decided on the basis of their public posturing, and personal relationships between the White House, the Kremlin, and the other 6 members of the G-8.

...Bush helped set himself up for a fall by sounding so openly optimistic over the years about Russia's desire for full legitimacy alongside the democratic, free-press nations on the other side of the old Iron Curtain...

"Free-press nation?"

We're no longer members of a 'free-press' nation. We're Wisconsinners. (Or Wisconsinites, I guess, is the more popularly heard phrase.) We're no longer entitled to hear any reporting that includes much actual history, relevant context, or facts on the ground. At least none which haven't already been thoroughly filtered and pre-shrunk, by the A.P., and other 'official sources.'

A D.U. thread from the other day:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3808641

...included this quote:

"I'm still taken aback at the extent of indoctrination and propaganda in the United States. It's as if people there are being reared

in a sort of altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen." -Arundhati Roy

...Or so many herds of consumer cattle...

Since the editorial staff at the paper is clearly making a play for the
demographic most cherished by advertisers -- all those magnificently fed, beefy heifers and bulls in Waukesha County, too busy ruminating to do much actual thinking -- the rest of us will have to be satisfied with our places, on the wrong side of a slippery, 21st century News Curtain.

Edit -- I took out a left-over word, "unashamedly", from the bracketed aside about sports coverage.

[mojowork_n]

1. PPPS -- Funny echo from another J-S editor

I was thinking of maybe using an alias when I checked the rules for The Journal's once a year cattle-call for "community columnists," here:

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=778918

It includes the following, avuncular, words of caution:

...you should submit two sample columns of a maximum of 600 words each.

As in previous years, elected officials need not apply. Folks a bit more grassroots are most welcome.

We welcome expertise, but if we get the sense that you’ll be a one-note Charlie — writing on one topic to the exclusion of all else — you’ll likely not make the cut. We’re looking for folks to write on a broad range of mostly local, state and regional topics. And mostly on public policy rather than musings of a more personal nature.

If you want to tackle national or international topics, that’s OK a few times, but it’s best even with these if you localize them. In other words, how does what you’re writing about affect metro Milwaukee? Frankly, we already have plenty of columnists we can tap for national and international issues.

If you’re chosen, we will pay $25 per column. You’ll write for about a year, and then we’ll put out another call.

...Twenty five bucks? Even in today's market (there are too many writers chasing too few jobs) that seems a little bit low. In the old days, the going rate for selling your soul was 30 pieces of silver. (And a stout rope.)

I was thinking of dusting off something old...

...This morning I happened to pick up the revised, updated (2000) edition of Phillip Knightley's classic book on the history of military reporting, The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo.

The title comes from U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson's observation, in 1917, that, "the first casualty when war comes, is truth."

I happened to pick up the book because the cable TV Military Channel was showing a documentary about the early months of the first world war, concentrating on the reports of German atrocities in Belgium.

Phillip Knightley's book (originally published in 1975) exposed many completely bogus German 'atrocity stories', which were reported in the Western press during that period of the war, only to be revealed as completely made up, after the war ended.

But what else would you expect from The Military Channel?

The documentary didn't bother to mention even one of the dozens of discredited original reports. Instead, it was exclusively focused on the kernel of truth behind them, instances where the German military did condemn some civilians to death. However, the story about the infant whose hands were chopped off as it clung to its mother, the story about the German 'corpse factory', processing stacks of bodies for constituent chemicals with military application, the story that the Kaiser had 'personally ordered the torturing of three-year old children, specifying the tortures to be inflicted' -- not one of those spectacular lies were considered to be worth re-visiting, by the producers of the documentary.

The really tragic -- and still under-reported truth -- is that as bad as news reporting is, on domestic issues, when there's a "war" going on, all bets are off. The official propagandists' version of events, as they're unfolding, is very difficult to challenge, and the truth doesn't come out until months, or years later.

So, in the run up to first Gulf War, replayed on news channels countless times until it was finally exposed as a complete PR fabrication, we had the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador testifying for Congress about Iraqi soldiers 'stealing infant incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals.

Knightley writes that the origins of the Kuwaiti babies story, "go back to the First World War when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf War, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq. ...the story lacked the human element--it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for television and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies. That was soon rectified. An organization calling itself Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10 million contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill and Knowlton. ...President Bush picked up on the story and referred to it six times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam Hussein's regime. Amnesty International lent its weight to the atrocity in its report of human rights violations... The Sunday Times of London helped keep the story alive by tracing a Dr. Ali Al-Huwail, a Kuwaiti, said to be living at a secret address in the United Arab Emirates. The doctor played down the number of babies said to have been murdered-- he could vouch for 'only ninety-two deaths'. ...It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a total invention, a fabrication and a myth."

These days, unless you count the very small percentage of Americans who might have caught Seymour Hersh's reporting on the Highway of Death, in the New Yorker, all anyone remembers about the first Gulf War are the video game images of "surgical strikes" and the "accuracy of smart bombs." In fact, 'smart bombs' accounted for just seven percent of the bombs dropped on Iraq. As Knightley reported, "...the rest were modern area impact munitions, like the cluster bomb, designed to devastate a wide area rather than confine their destruction to a precise target... these bombs missed most of the time. The Washington Post, quoting a senior Pentagon source, said that of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq, no fewer than 70 percent missed their target."

A few years later, the 3 month NATO bombing attack on Serbia was justified by "genocide."

Again, the Serbs were 'willing to talk, but the US was not.'

Knightley reported, "...the American government decided that 500,000 Kosovar Albanians missing, feared dead, was an impressive figure and this was the one issued by the State Department on April 19. The U.S. defense secretary, William Cohen, reduced this on May 16 to 100,000. ...The British government said on June 17 that the Serbs had killed 10,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo... But before the western media lost interest, no one had been able to uncover evidence to justify even this greatly reduced estimate... {After the war}...with twenty forensic teams in Kosovo throughout the summer, the total number of bodies exhumed by early November was 2,108. But both US State Department officials and UN investigators warned that some of the dead in graves already examined were fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or may have died ordinary deaths." Reports of mass atrocities -- 350 at Ljubenic, 1,000 at the Trepca mines -- turned out to have no basis in fact (Trepca), or they were grossly exagerrated (5, not 350.)

Knightley's final two paragraphs, in the updated (2000) edition:

"...the likelihood is that governments, their spin doctors, propagandists and military commanders will find further justification for managing the media in wartime and that the Gulf and Kosovo will become the pattern for all future wars. In fact, I predict that control of war correspondents--both open and covert--will be even tighter and that in general this will be accepted by the media because in wartime it considers its commercial and political interests lie in supporting the government of the day.
The age of the war correspondent as hero is clearly over. Whether they wish to continue as propagandists and myth makers, subservient to those who wage the wars, is a decision they will have to take themselves."

Leaving no one to report the following, incredible statistic, (UNDP, Human Development Report, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 47)

"...at the beginning of the {twentieth} century, ninety percent of casualties in war were soldiers; at the end of the century ninety percent of casualties in war were civilians."

...Ah, screw it. Way too many words over the permitted word count....

[Connonym]

2. all the more reason to save your money on a Journal Sentinel Times Post Picayune

and just get your news online. Frakkin' "news"paper isn't even good enough to line a birdcage.