Our "Last Best Hope" for National Journalism?

If, as I have just suggested, American newspapers are suffering (perhaps irrecoverably) from "gutted staffs" and "gutted reputations" in the wake of the world the Internet (not to mention Google) has made, then we should probably take comfort in the fact that Al Jazeera is beginning to provide us with national, as well as international coverage. This has become particularly apparent since the beginning of this month, although AIPAC coverage might best be viewed as national news with strong international implications. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see the extent to which they covered the impact on Barack Obama's campaign (which, itself, also has international implications). More interesting, however has been the seriousness they have attached to the efforts of Dennis Kucinich to kick-start impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush. This seriousness has apparently not been lost on Kucinich himself.

So, it is no surprise that Al Jazeera put out a report on yesterday's efforts by the House of Representatives to thwart Kucinich's quest:

A US congressman and former presidential candidate has vowed not to give up his fight to impeach the president over going to war in Iraq, after the House of Representatives sidelined his bill, possibly until after George Bush leaves office.

Dennis Kucinich said if hearings on the issue were not held within 30 days, he would introduce more articles of impeachment against Bush to the US congress.

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to send Kucinich's impeachment bill to a committee in what has been seen as a delay tactic.

The House Judiciary Committee is not likely to hold hearings before the end of Bush's term in January.

What is surprising is that Kucinich seems to have allowed Al Jazeera to interview him on this matter:

Kucinich, a Democrat, told Al Jazeera that the impeachment attempt was not just about the past, but also about the future.

"If we do not establish that the rule of law must apply to the president of the US now, what we are doing is through our inaction creating a precedent that would let the next president know that he could go ahead and wage war without congressional approval.

"That he could approve of wiretapping, rendition, spying, torture or anything because congress wouldn't act.

"We need to take a stand now not just for justice for what's happened over the last six, seven years but also to restrain any abuse of power in the next administration."

This may well be because Al Jazeera was the only news source interested in interviewing him; but that does not diminish the significance of the encounter (and may even enhance Al Jazeera's standing among its competitors).

Shortly after Al Jazeera English was launched, I remember hearing an interview on the BBC in which their general manager said that he saw the BBC as Al Jazeera's primary competitor. My guess is that the BBC took this as a serious challenge. It may have even had something to do with the "full court press" they applied to covering the American primary elections, basically demonstrating that their desk in Washington was as strong as the one in London. Well, I have yet to hear a peep out of the BBC (on either radio or television) about Kucinich's latest activities; and I am beginning to wonder whether its Washington desk is as loathe to dig into news about progressives, who try to push the envelope of "established liberalism," as the Washington desks of American news sources are. If so, then, as Michael Porter put it in his Competitive Strategy book, they have discovered the "generic strategy" of differentiation and found a way to implement it. On the principle that everyone benefits from such competition, I wish Al Jazeera the best of luck and hope that more of those progressive voices, who have some very constructive things to say, will recognize that this institution provides a new platform from which they can be heard!

Spiking News about Impeachment?

It was not until shortly before 10 AM this morning that I encountered the following sentence in a report on the Al Jazeera English site:

Dennis Kucinich filed 35 charges against the president at the US congress on Monday, despite the fact Bush is due to step down from office in January.

I did not find either Kucinich's action or the number of charges particularly surprising. As a matter of fact, I was already aware of both through reading comments on Truthdig. This morning, however, it dawned on me that Al Jazeera was reporting that this had happened on Monday; but I had seen nothing about it on any of my RSS news sources for all of Tuesday!

This led me to do a Google News search with the keywords "Kucinich," "Bush," and "impeach." If I am to believe the time stamps on the search results, then the earliest report was provided by Associated Press and appeared at ap.google.com (where no time stamp is given). To give you an idea of the level of attention that was given, let me reproduce the content in its entirety:

Rep. Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution

1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential contender, said Monday he wants the House to consider a resolution to impeach President Bush.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi consistently has said impeachment was "off the table."

Kucinich, D-Ohio, read his proposed impeachment language in a floor speech. He contended Bush deceived the nation and violated his oath of office in leading the country into the Iraq war.

Kucinich introduced a resolution last year to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. That resolution was killed, but only after Republicans initially voted in favor of taking up the measure to force a debate.

Kucinich won 50 percent of the vote in a five-way House Democratic primary in March, beating back critics who said he ignored business at home to travel the country in his quest to be president.

I am still not quite sure about that "1 day ago" excuse for a real time stamp; but, compared to the Al Jazeera coverage, this was a pretty skimpy piece of work.

Reuters did a slightly better job. They provided a real time stamp: "Mon Jun 9, 2008 10:10pm EDT." They also provided one more paragraph than Associated Press did, but neither of those wire services chose to give the count of the number of articles of impeachment. Even more amusing was that I was only able to find the Reuters article from a link on a blog post that Michael Clancy had provided to the Web site for The Village Voice. However, even Clancy fell short of the amount of background that the Al Jazeera team mustered.

At this point I need to make a digression before I get to my punch line: My morning actually began over at Truthdig by examining the comments over a report that Ron Paul had announced that he would be staging an event of his own in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area during the week of the Republican convention, probably on the day that John McCain would be officially named the Republican nominee. Anticipating that this would be yet another news story that would be ignored by mainstream media (MSM), I wrote the following comment:

Just remember, if it doesn’t happen on television, it does not happen. Make sure to let all those media sources that depend on “eyeballs for advertising” (beginning with MSNBC) know that you want to hear what Paul has to say. If their channel decides not to give the event live coverage, you will switch to one that does! (My guess is that, if all of the commercial channels give the event a pass, CSPAN will still cover it!) If our voices can affect the choice of a nominee, they should be able to affect the speeches we hear!

This was followed by a comment from cyrena (who writes some of the most interesting "no-prisoners" comments I have encountered on any of the news sites) taking me to task for supporting Paul in spite of all the questionable items on his record. She then took my to task for my underlying premise:

In other words, I’m less likely to believe that for serious people, ‘it’ doesn’t happen if it doesn’t happen on TV. We have different ways of communicating now, which is exactly why Barack Obama is the Democratic Party nominee. He’s used 21st Century technology to build a *new* movement of the Democratic Party. Most of his supporters have *not* relied on MSM for their information or their motivation.

This brings me back to my punch line, which is that we all have a responsibility to stick thorns in the side of the media whenever the opportunity presents itself. This can involve a "preemptive strike" over anticipated lack of attention to what Ron Paul chooses to say during the week of the Republican Convention; or it can involve asking, as stridently as possible, why Kucinich's (albeit quixotic) effort to bring articles of impeachment to the House floor was virtually (if not actually) spiked by just about every news source (including my beloved BBC) except for Al Jazeera! After all, Paul did an impressive job of fund-raising through those "different ways of communicating;" yet, as I observed in my reply to cyrena, as far as his active campaigning was concerned, "it was harder to gather reports on what he said on a day-to-day basis than it was to do the same for Kucinich (only because the latter had, and still has, the chutzpah to be brash and outspoken)!"

Meanwhile, for what it is worth, CNN has now "recognized" this story. Their time stamp reads "updated 3:07 a.m. EDT, Wed June 11, 2008;" and their account opens with the claim that Kucinich introduced his resolution on Tuesday, thus contradicting the other accounts that claim the resolution was introduced late Monday! The lesson to be learned is not whether or not "serious people" find out about things through television but about how well-equipped even the most "serious" reader is to filter out signal from noise. My guess is, in this case, that most media sources either do not want us to know that there is a signal or do not particularly care whether or not we get that signal. Either option is pretty pathetic for someone who grew up with the slogan "All the news that's fit to print!" It is equally pathetic that the only way in which we may be able to assert our rights against these media is to fight them on the advertising front. This is not to imply that there was once a "golden age" when reporting the news was "fair and unbalanced;" but, if Internet evangelists are going to go on and on about how their technology empowers us, then the least we can do is exercise our empowerment in the interest of being better informed!

Remembering John Sirica

For those of us who lived through Watergate, today is a good day to remember John Sirica, former Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. That is because of the lead for the story Laurie Kellman just filed for Associated Press:

President Bush invoked executive privilege Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides about the firings of federal prosecutors.

This was the Nixon gambit back in the day of Watergate (probably under the advice of Fred Fielding, who is now advising Bush). Sirica's response was one of the memorable quotations from the whole Watergate saga: "Executive privilege is executive poppycock!" Of course Watergate was also a time when the Judiciary had a bit more balance to it and the reason for investigation did not involve upsetting that balance!

The Question of Repudiation

Last Thursday Scott Ritter, never one to mince his words, posted a Truthdig report entitled, "Repudiation, Not Impeachment." This report has attracted so many comments that the bulk of them now extend to two Web pages. Unfortunately, almost all of them are about impeachment. This should be no surprise. My guess is that "repudiation" was not in the working vocabulary of most of Ritter's readers; and, in light of all those comments, it would be fair to say that he did not do a particularly good job of bringing them up to speed on the concept. Nevertheless, one reader, Mark A. Goldman, decided to take a stab at trying to figure out what Ritter was actually advocating. Here is the comment he wrote:

In once sense Scott Ritter is correct. He didn’t really say this, but I think what he meant to say, or at least would agree with, is this:

the reason that impeachment is inappropriate now is because as a people we have been complacent and neglectful to the point of now being complicit. And so to impeach Bush and Cheney would be incomplete and in this sense unjust. They would only be scape-goats. For we are all to blame for the crimes and the treason committed. For now we can see that they have actually represented us all along. If they hadn’t we would have stopped them a long time ago. Our half-hearted complaints do not obsolve us from responsibility. And so what is necessary for us to do is not to impeach but to take responsibility for our crimes. And this means to acknowledge what was done, to tell the whole truth about what has happened and what part we played in it and to demonstrate that we understand where we failed… and then to recommit ourselves to the ideals we left behind. What is needed is a complete telling of the truth so that everyone in our society understands what crimes were committed and what values were sacrificed. So, in fact, impeachment is not enough. We have lost our moral compass and our moral authority and the only way to get them back is to demonstrate to the world… to our children… and to ourselves, that we understand what has happened, we know where we went wrong, and we know what we need to do to redeem ourselves. We need to tell the truth. And we need to make amends.

http://www.gpln.com

Goldman wrote this comment yesterday morning; but it has had little effect in keeping the discussion "on message." In keeping with the strategy behind many of my own posts, I decided I had better consult my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The primary definition of "repudiation" is “Divorce (of a wife).” This makes for a great metaphor, but the second definition is more attuned to the Truthdig discussion. It, too, has two parts, one general and one specific. The general definition is “The action of repudiating someone or something; the fact of being repudiated; rejection, disownment, disavowal.” The second part is specific to legal usage: “Refusal or failure to meet with the terms of a contract; a denial or serious breach of contract.” (Note that this reflects back on the primary definition in the context of those cultures in which a marriage is “sealed by contract.")

What strikes me as most interesting about these definitions is that the agent doing the repudiating is essentially rejecting (or disowning or disavowing) some decision or action committed by the agent in the past. An agent who repudiates is essentially saying, “I screwed up, and I now disavow the decisions and actions that brought about this mess.” If we now move from denotation to connotation, then the agent is saying something else: “I screwed up, and I am committed to undoing the mess I made.” For me this cuts right to the bone of the question of what it means to repudiate, what turns the noun from the abstract concept on which Mr. Ritter has expounded to specific actions to which we commit.

Unfortunately, such commitment requires the strength of will; and, as I have proposed both in Truthdig and on this blog, we are far too comfortable to muster such will. Regular readers know that I thank Russ Feingold for prompting my thinking along those lines. He was the one who, after Congress caved into to the White House on troop funding, accused all of his colleagues, regardless of party, of placing their own political comfort above the voice of their electorate. Vonnegut also wrote about our lack of will for getting out of the messes we make. Unfortunately, a nation whose citizens who lack individual will is easy prey for a dictator who has it in ample supply. Guess what?