If you're saying that the fact that we don't know about your friend and DO know about Tillman is "not new or notable," I agree. If you are also saying that the media is not to blame for that, I couldn't disagree more. Now, if we had a BBC-type network, that did not haveto worry about ratings, maybe people other than Tillman might be publicly, broadly valued in their loss. But when corporate commercialism rules all...
Excuse me but I thought the point of all this was in the military being held accountable for their mistakes? Willy's death in 1969 was reported in both the small town paper in which we lived, as well as the Sacramento Bee and the Sacramento Union. That was big-time news and big-time coverage at the time. His parents received a "handsome" settlement. (I never heard, nor asked how much.) In response to your concern about the TYPE of media we have here in the US, I would suggest the fact we have 3 major networks plus 3 cable independents, plus NPR etc., that all draw from international coverage as well, is an even greater coverage base than BBC. If nothing else, the competition for ratings is GOOD in that ALL the news folks know how concerned the nation is about the conduct of the war and will tune in to anything that will feed their concerns. That competition for ratings is a good thing. No one wants to miss out on something that may become a big story because the loss of viewers will kill ad rates. Again I would suggest your rigid position on "corporate commercialism" is hurting your objectivity and hence your credibility here. The facts don't support your position.
Yeah, because royal commercialism would be so much preferable. That's what Americans need, a news source accountable to a Queen's Board of Governors.
Corporate commercialism looks for and promotes event-based coverage; the bigger their "event," the more networks can anticipate charging for the spaces between their content. That is not a framework providing for the diverisity of opinion on issues during the daily drumbeat of coverage day in and day out. They use the airwaves of a democracy, yet operate only under the principles of an economic system expressly missing from the set of decision-rules and that everyone does not agree on in any case. Using those airwaves to provide the diversity of opinion that was present in the run-up to the war, and is present, that demanded that Americans see the bodies and hellish carnage war wages, in terms of deaths of soliders, insurgents and civilians (the latter always being the group that dies more than any other during these conlficts), and still demands it, the segment of the populaton wondering why there cannot be doctors alongside generals in the studio (where one guy can tell you what a daisycutter is used for and the other can tell you what happens when your arm is sheared off and you manage to live), and still wonders it, the portion of society that would have hoped that a network might embed reporters with Iraqi families, and at Iraqi hospitals and in Iraqi morgues, and still hopes it would be the beginning of media serving a democracy. The United States quite simply, and quite absolutely, does not have that. At all. I'm done hijacking this thread, but I lived there for three decades, and watched the news go from Cronkite and my dad telling me to get up to chage the channel for him to today's overhyped music-driven news managzine segments led by the cult anchor who is himself/herself an icon of personality, and sees himself/herself as such, and I know that you in the US do not have any investigative journalism on television. If you do, I'd like you to point to it, please. Now, I'm not really worried about your evaluation, or anyone else's evaluation, of my "credibility" in this forum based upon my posts in this thread or any other, but I will say that the BBC is not perfect. Nowhere near it. But I'll tell you, the first thing I noticed when I arrived and settled here in 2003 was how much more in-depth, how many more levels of the discussion, were reached in a BBC television investigation (often one by American Greg Palast, who cannot/will not work in the US because...US networks don't DO investigative work*). Now I STILL find, not unlike the arguments of Jerry Mander, that the very nature of television limits knowing. But there's no question that the BBC is closer to maximizing what the format CAN do, albeit a limited format, than any corporate commerical or corporate-funded (PBS) network has demonstrated it can or will do. Now, PSG is losing 0-1 to CSKA Moskva, and that's pissing me off, so I'm out. *Take this story of the list of Florida's faux felons that cost Al Gore the election. Shortly after the UK and Salon stories hit the worldwide web, I was contacted by a CBS network news producer ready to run their own version of the story. The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information: names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for a quickie TV story. I also freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls - real felons, but with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, thousands of these legal voters, almost all Democrats, would not be allowed to vote. One problem: I had not quite completed my own investigation on this matter. Therefore CBS would have to do some actual work, reviewing documents and law, and obtaining statements. The next day I received a call from the producer, who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." Well, how did the multibillion-dollar CBS network determine this? Why, "we called Jeb Bush's office." Oh. And that was it. I wasn't surprised by this type of "investigation." It is, in fact, standard operating procedure for the little lambs of American journalism. One good, slick explanation from a politician or corporate chieftain and it's case closed, investigation over. The story ran anyway: on BBC-TV. Let's understand the pressures on the CBS producer that led her to kill the story on the basis of a denial by the target of the allegations. (Though let's not confuse understanding with forgiveness.) First, the story is difficult to tell in the usual 90 seconds allotted for national reports. The BBC gave me a 14-minute slot to explain it. Second, the story required massive and quick review of documents, hundreds of phone calls and interviews, hardly a winner in the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am school of U.S. journalism. The BBC gave me two weeks to develop the story. Third, the revelations in the story required a reporter to stand up and say the big name politicians, their lawyers and their PR people were freaking liars. It would be much easier, and a heck of a lot cheaper, to wait for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to do the work, then cover the Commission's canned report and press conference. Wait! You've watched "Murphy Brown," so you think reporters hanker every day to uncover the big scandal. ****************. Remember, "All the President's Men" was so unusual they had to make a movie out of it. Fourth, investigative reports require taking a chance. Fraudsters and vote-riggers don't reveal all their evidence. And they lie. Make the allegation and you are open to attack, or unknown information that may prove you wrong. No one ever lost their job writing canned statements from a press conference. Fifth - and this is no small matter - no one ever got sued for not running an investigative story. Let me give you an example close to home. The companion report to my investigation of the theft of the election in Florida was a story about Bush family finances. I wrote in the Guardian and Observer of London about the gold-mining company for which the first President George Bush worked after he left the White House. Oh, you didn't know that George H. W. Bush worked for a gold-mining company after he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that this company has a long history of suing every paper that breathes a word it does not like - in fact, it has now sued my papers. I've gotten awards and thousands of letters for these stories, but, honey, that don't pay the legal bills. Finally, there's another little matter working against U.S. reporters running after the hard stories, papers printing them or TV broadcasting the good stuff. I'll explain by way of my phone call with a great reporter, Mike Isikoff of Newsweek. Just before the elections, Isikoff handed me some exceptionally important information about President Clinton, material suggesting corruption in office - the real stuff, not the interns-under-the-desk stuff. I said, "Mike, why the hell don't you run it yourself?" and he said, "Because no one gives a ********!" Isikoff was expressing his exasperation with the news chiefs who kill or bury these stories on page 200 on the belief that the public really doesn't want to hear all this bad and very un-sexy news. These lambchop editors believe the public just doesn't care. But they're wrong. Or are they? Some of you seem to fight for the level of so-called news you have.
Mel, you obviously either don't have access to anything like the diversity of coverage I have here, or you choose not to avail yourself of that diversity. None of your objections hold up to the coverage I am able to receive with a basic cable package here in California. While I appreciate the time you spent to compose your answer, it is not responsive to the matter we had been discussing.