US media

"The question is: Does NPR deserve underwriting support from thinking and feeling people?"

JayV — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:16:32 -0600

Not if you listened on Thursday to NPR's All Things Considered's disgusting and disrespectful "remembrance" of Howard Zinn, who had died the day before.

Fairness & Accuracy in Media & Reporting (FAIR) has issued an important Action Alert asking people to contact the NPR ombud to ask why "All Things Considered" brought on David Horowitz to trash Howard Zinn saying, "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect." ... Details for how to contact NPR are here.

Here's my letter to Alicia Shephard, the NPR ombud:

David Horowitz ruthlessly and verbally attacked Dr Zinn on public radio a day following his death, when people were mourning. That is disgusting behaviour for a guest on ATC and your Ms Keyes should have called him on it. As a commenter wrote on this ATC story, "The question is: Does NPR deserve underwriting support from thinking and feeling people?" A very good question, especially since Vermont Public Radio and North Country Public Radio tell us continually that their listeners are sensitive and caring people – they donate generously to underwrite NPR programming! I am writing the management at those stations, demanding them to consider dropping your expensive programming.

I included the above in my letters to VPR and NCPR management, adding,

"I urge also that you contact Ms. Shepard, Vivian Schiller [NPR's President and CEO], and Ellen McDonnell [NPR's Executive Director of News Programming] and demand NPR issue an apology to Dr Zinn's family - in national print media and broadcast it on NPR and the local stations.

Recommended: NPRCheck, a blog that monitors NPR's news programs.

Cross posted at Blazing Indiscretions.

Amsterdam is not Sodom & Gomorrah

JayV — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:17:21 -0500

NRC/international

A 25-year-old film student from Amsterdam has taken on Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly over his misrepresentation of the Dutch capital.

It is a much-belated response, but 25-year-old Robert Nieuwenhuijs' July 27 video reply to Fox News' description of Amsterdam as a "cesspool of corruption" has nevertheless become a hit on the video-sharing website YouTube.

"Amsterdam is a cesspool of corruption. Everything is out of control, it’s anarchy", a sidekick of Fox News conservative anchor Bill O'Reilly said during a broadcast in December 2008.

The O'Reilly Factor wanted to prove the point that the liberal drug policy of the Netherlands had backfired, since the Dutch government was planning to tighten the rules governing soft drugs use. "The Netherlands are becoming more conservative", said O'Reilly.

By showing smudgy images of Amsterdam's red light district over negative commentary - "It's a moral disaster" -, O'Reilly wanted to make his viewers believe that Amsterdam has turned into a modern equivelant of Sodom and Gomorrah.

25-year-old film academy graduate Robert Nieuwenhuijs from Amsterdam recently saw the show on YouTube and felt affronted by O'Reilly's Amsterdam-bashing. He decided to post a video reply on YouTube, calling it . He looked up numbers about drugs use from American and Dutch national surveys and made some striking comparisons.

For instance, the percentage of the population that has ever used cannabis is almost twice as high in the United States (40.3 percent) as in the Netherlands (22.6 percent). The number of drug-related deaths per million inhabitants in the Netherlands is 2.4, whereas the American figure stands at 38.

Nieuwenhuijs did copy one technique from O'Reilly: he interlaced his facts and figures with his own suggestive images of Amsterdam. Like a father and child cycling through the city, or people waving to passers-by on the city's canals. Nieuwenhuijs' point: With that, contrary to O'Reilly's depiction, Amsterdam is a pretty comfortable place to live. "Come and see for yourself", he asks O'Reilly in the last seconds of his movie.

Nieuwenhuijs' video reply has been reposted to some America's biggest blogs this week "O'Reilly Factor versus reality", wrote Mark Frauenfelder from BoingBoing. The libertarian blogger Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) commented: "The issue O'Reilly has with Holland is that, compared with the US in many respects, it values individual liberty."

So far, 1,133 YouTube-users made the effort of posting a reply to Nieuwenhuijs' video.

I was born in Amsterdam. Dit is echt zo geweldig gedaan!!! I am a proud Amsterdammer! The truth about Amsterdam! --

Cross posted at Blazing Indiscretions and also at The Peace Tree. Hat tip to 24oranges.

Public Radio Programming Pushes Commercial Banking in Poor Communities

JayV — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:26:48 -0500

Last Saturday I heard a disgusting segment of Marketplace Money (produced by American Public Media) on "Vermont's NPR Station": "Banking on the previously unbanked", praising the opening of commercial bank branches in the poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Just the kind of feel-good/do-gooder programming that would appeal to Vermont Public Radio's successful, smug, elite listener and donor base: we know better, so let's help the poor people who don't!

But the copy was was straight from the marketing departments of commercial banks. No matter what their public relations people will tell you, Bank of America and Wells Fargo (featured in the segment) are not caring institutions; they want to make a profit and will do anything to attract customers, even by using deceptive marketing in lower class neighborhoods.

A few telling quotes from the program: "He found that lots of banks simply don't think they can make money in these neighborhoods."

"But I think that often the banks find it very difficult to visualize a whole bunch of low-income consumers as being a vibrant market, but in fact they can be."

"The mayor's office says its goal is to add 10,000 people to the banking system and get them away from predatory lenders, like check-cashing storefronts, payday loan outfits and even liquor stores.."

"Predatory lenders" indeed! More like "Pot calling the kettle black."

There was neither a mention of small town, neighbourhood "community banks" nor of credit unions.

VPR should review its purchase of this kind of programming from American Public Media. But like most NPR affiliates, it won't. Its stations receive 31% of funding from local business underwriting and rely heavily on underwriting from Chittenden Bank. (Vermont's largest full-service bank - now owned by a Connecticut bank - bankrolled the establishment of VPR's separate 24/7 classical music station.) In 2007, then VPR president Mark Vogelsang praised Chittenden in the bank's community newsletter, "With Chittenden’s help, we've created a resource for the community that connects neighbors across the state." To VPR, neighbors = bank customers, wealthy retirees and "summer" contributors. So naturally, this NPR affiliate continues to run programs that look positively on corporate bank scum like Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Chittenden.

A recommendation: Antemedius readers - of any economic class - in Vermont who want to keep their money in the state - away from corporate banks - should join Vermont Bank Users Strike.

Double Standards: Two Quotes

JayV — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:20:24 -0500

Quote:
President Obama said (via NPR's ATC program):

"I have made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering in Iran's affairs. But we also must bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. We deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place. [...]

[On Neda Agha Soltani and the video showing her killing:] "It's heartbreaking. It's — it's heartbreaking. And I think that anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about that."

And if the victims of violence had been Palestinians?

Quote:
NPR's Morning Edition:

Airstrikes believed to be carried out by U.S. predator drones have killed at least 45 militants in Pakistan and injured scores more. The reported death toll would make the attack the deadliest since the U.S. deployed its remotely guided missiles to target the Taliban leadership dug into Pakistan's mountainous border with Afghanistan.

Details of the assault on the remote tribal area of South Waziristan known as Pakistan's badlands are still emerging. Local media report that dozens of militants were killed when three drone missiles were fired on Taliban fighters as they gathered for a funeral for fellow militants. Those fighters had been killed earlier in a separate drone attack. [...]

The United States would like the area as flushed of Taliban as possible in advance of a new deployment of American troops just over the border in Afghanistan later this year.

Would the NPR report have been less sanguine if those killed had been American, British, Dutch or Israelis?

Cross post at Blazing Indiscretions and The Peace Tree.

Blurt: The Nation on USAID, Plan Colombia and Burlington (VT)-based ARD

JayV — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:33:15 -0500

Ken Picard, a reporter for Vermont's Seven Days weekly newspaper, has a post on that paper's staff blog, Blurt, about a "local" connection to a "global" war.

About six months ago, I got a phone call from a reporter who claimed he was calling from Colombia. I automatically assumed he meant the institution of higher learning in upper Manhattan.

"Columbia University?" I asked.

"No, Colombia the country," he replied, without a hint of condescension.

The man was looking for some background info on ARD, an international development firm headquartered on Bank Street in downtown Burlington. (Former Mayor Peter Clavelle took a job there after his unsuccessful bid for governor.) Why call Seven Days? In 2007, I'd written a short piece about ARD after it was bought out by a much larger firm, Tetra Tech, of Pasadena, California, which has close ties to the U.S. military.
The reporter, whom I can only assume now was Teo Ballvé, said he was working on an investigative piece for the Nation about Plan Colombia and ARD's work in that country. He asked me about a half-dozen questions about ARD and its Burlington offices — none of which seemed particularly relevant to international narco-trafficking — then thanked me for my time and said he'd email me the story when it came out.

I never heard back from him and assumed he'd lost my email address, the story had been killed or he'd been. (Hey,drug traffickers don't waste their time sending nasty emails to your editors when you piss them off.)

This morning, Ballvé forwarded me a link to this week's story in the Nation, "The Dark Side of Plan Colombia". In it, he alleges that USAID grant money, channeled through firms such as ARD, "appears to have put drug war dollars in the hands of a confessed narco-paramilitary and two accused paramilitary-linked drug traffickers," a possible violation of federal law.

Clearly, a lot of time and research went into this story. Give it a read, and let us know what you think.

(Cross-posted at Blazing Indiscretions.)

It's not worth the anger, if no follow-through

JayV — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:34:38 -0500

North Country Public Radio and Vermont Public Radio, the two NPR affiliates in my area, offer some excellent local (and award-winning) programs, but I get extremely frazzled when I listen to - usually when on the road and rarely on my home radio - the NPR news and pundit programs. An interview with a smug, smart-ass Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money and "bailout" monitor and Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren happened over a week ago. TalkLeft calls it "infuriating," which indeed it is. (The comments at TL are also worth a read.) Corrente has a transcript of the ugly parts. I'd never listened to Planet Money or this interview until today. Actually, I admire Warren and think she's a breath of fresh air and definitely spot on in the thankless work she's doing now. I first heard her on Terri Gross's Fresh Air talking about the credit card industry (2007) and the rising costs of credit card debt (2008), and right away, I knew she was worth listening to.

Have you seen NPRCheck? It's a "watch-dog" blog full of gotcha comments by "liberals" and "progressive" listeners - people pissed off by the regular NPR correspondents and news analysts. It's true that NPR has earned the sobriquet "Nice Polite Republicans." I've read NPRCheck occasionally, just for fun, but never really take their rants seriously, because they love to complain, and that's all. I just wish these fuckin' arm-chair liberal types - whingers all - would take the advice of a commenter in the TL discussion on the Warren interview, it's [n]ot worth the anger, if no follow-through

Do what I did -- file a formal complaint with NPR. It does no good to blow our own gaskets merely amongst ourselves; you might as well just shrug your shoulders and move on, for all the good it does.

Rather, we should harness that anger for righteous purpose. If more liberal / progressive listeners complained consistently about the wasted airspace taken up by the biased likes of Adam Davidson, Mara Liasson and Cokie Roberts, I guarantee that it would eventually get NPR's attention.

I've commented on programs and have written the (useless, but well-paid) NPR Ombudsman, who rarely responds (with the usual excuses and formula letters). I'm even on some NPR Listen's panel and receive periodic questionnaires via email. I don't hesitate to complain about their biases when I have a chance. NCPR and VPR are always asking for money, but donations cannot be earmarked to local programming. So, next time they ask for a hand-out, I'll tell 'em, don't expect any dosh from me until they - as an affiliate - tell NPR to clean up its act.

(Cross-posted at Blazing Indiscretions.)