Lobbying and the media in the U.S.

The videos speak for themselves.

The power of Public Relations

Consider the case of Gary McKinnon. Bell Yard are litigation PR specialists who represent Gary McKinnon, and do so pro bono. They are terrifyingly formidable, as their track record and McKinnon’s growing media presence demonstrate. Bell Yard previously represented the Natwest 3. Using the example of the Natwest 3, Nick Davies explains how PR companies manage the media (see video below).

I raise the point not to discuss the specifics of the cases but to highlight the role of the PR industry. Even morally ambiguous examples of media management are often insidious. For every example of media management like the case of Gary McKinnon, there are countless examples of the PR industry effecting the news agenda for deplorable motives.

Much of the rightwing press often acts as little more than publishers of press releases by xenophobic and neoliberal lobby groups. Credit is due to those that doggedly expose Migration Watch and The Taxpayers' Alliance for corrupting the news agenda and denounce the media for its willingness to be corrupted.

The influence of the PR industry over news agendas is frightening. The extent of their influence is something that far too few are aware.

Update

Credit is also due to The Other Taxpayers' Alliance.

Military Coup in Honduras & the role of the U.S.

On Sunday, June 28, approximately 200 members of the Honduran military surrounded the presidential palace and forced the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, into custody and then flew him to Costa Rica. In the days following, the role of the U.S. has become clearer - this coup was U.S. supported.

School of Americas Watch reported at the time:

The Honduran state television was taken off the air. The electricity supply to the capital Tegucigalpa, as well telephone and cellphone lines were cut. [… T]he people of Honduras are going into the streets, in spite of the fact that the streets are militarized. From Costa Rica, President Zelaya has called for a non-violent response from the people of Honduras, and for international solidarity for the Honduran democracy.

Richard Gott explains that:

Manuel Zelaya, president since 2006, is an improbable revolutionary. A wealthy landowner with timber and cattle interests, he was the candidate of the Liberal party, one of the two traditional parties of the Honduras oligarchy that have controlled the country's political system for most of the past century, with a sizeable input from the armed forces. Foreign journalists of a certain generation have a vivid memory of Honduras in the 1980s when the country was a military base, organised and funded by the United States, for the operations of the "contras", the paramilitary forces that invented a civil war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua. … [ F]ew of those who voted at the elections in November 2005 imagined that Zelaya would embark on a programme of radical change. He won with only a slim majority over his rivals.

The official tenuous justification for the military coup d'état is that Zelaya was to hold a referendum to extend presidential terms beyond a single four-year term. This, it is argued, would be unconstitutional. Yet constitutional amendments are not uncommon, between the year of its approval, 1982, and 2005, the only years that it was not amended were 1983 and 1992. The constitution itself was approved during a period of heavy U.S. interference.

The genuine motivation for the coup d'état is that Zelaya allied Honduras with the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America (ALBA) - an alternative to Free Trade Area of the Americas. The U.S. feared that Honduras could turn into a 'pacifist state', at the cost of a U.S. miltary base, as happened in Ecuador.

Zelaya, always dark-suited, cuts a strange figure alongside such fiery radicals as Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, not to mention Raúl Castro. Yet in his small country of 7 million people, he has sought to introduce a range of social programmes, including a minimum wage, and to mobilise the poor majority. His success has been sufficient to summon up a violent challenge from the traditional elite before it is too late.

The subsequent period has been characterised by protests, military suppression, the interim president Roberto Micheletti forming a new cabinet, former cabinet misters going into hiding, and the poor fearing sanctions and greater economic hardship.

On July 6th the Honduran military blocked Zelaya’s planned return to Honduras and fired tear gas and live ammunition on protesters, who had initially intended to welcome the Zelaya’s. Estimates regarding injuries and deaths vary slightly.

This event was also captured by photojournalist James Rodriguez.

Despite ‘tough talk’ from Barack Obama, some have questioned whether the Obama administration is as opposed to the coup against Zelaya as it should be.

While the Obama administration have said that the coup is illegal and that Zelaya remains the only legitimate President of Honduras there has also been some vagueness. Unlike the ALBA governments the US has not recalled its ambassador from Honduras or refused to recognise the new government. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, when asked at a press conference if the US commitment to a return to democratic and constitutional practices in Honduras meant the restoration of Zelaya to office, gave no clear answer. It’s possible that the Obama administration’s attitude to Zelaya is ambiguous, or alternatively that it’s attempting to avoid handing ammunition to right wingers (including some Democrats) in the US congress who consider Chavez and Zelaya to be ‘dictators’ and enemies of the US or who want to revive the Free Trade Area of the Americas. It may even be, as Hugo Chavez has suggested, that Obama opposed the coup but other elements in the US government, military and intelligence agencies backed it

However Honduras’ military remains heavily US armed, funded and trained (there are even 300 US troops permanently based in the country) and it seems likely that if the Obama administration really wanted to restore democracy in Honduras it would only need to suspend all military aid and arms sales until Zelaya was restored to power. Many of the officers involved in the coup were trained at the notorious US School of the Americas in the 1980s and 1990s, including the main leader of the coup, General Romeo Vásquez Velasquez. Latin American History professor Greg Grandin says that “The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government. Honduras, as a whole, if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras....Its economy is wholly based on trade, foreign aid and remittances. So if the US is opposed to this coup going forward, it won’t go forward. Zelaya will return.”

Since Duncan McFarlane’s post (quoted above), more evidence has come to light of U.S. interference. Eva Golinger reports that

Things are getting worse each day inside Honduras. Over the weekend, two well-known social leaders were assassinated by the coup forces. Roger Bados leader of the Bloque Popular & the National Resistance Front against the coup d'etat, was killed in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. Approximately at 8pm on Saturday evening, Bados was assassinated, killed immediately by three gun shots. Bados was also a member of the leftist party, Democratic Unity (Unificación Democrática) and was president of a union representing workers in a cement factory. His death was denounced as part of the ambience and repressive actions taken by the coup government to silence all dissent.

Ramon Garcia, another social leader in Honduras, was also killed on Saturday evening by military forces who boarded a bus he was riding in Santa Barbara and forced him off, subsequently shooting him and wounding his sister. […]

Meanwhile, the coup government has hired top-notch Democrat lobbyists in Washington to make their case before Congress and the White House and convince the US people to recognize them as a legitimate government. The New York Times has confirmed that Clinton lobbyist Lanny Davis, former Special Counsel for President Bill Clinton from 1996-1998, and close advisor to Hillary's campaign for president last year, has been hired by the Latin American Business Council - an ultraconservative group of Latin American businesses - to represent the coup leaders in the U.S.

In a more recent report several key facts have been established

• The Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup.
• The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organizations in Honduras that participated in the coup.
• The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded, and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to repress the people of Honduras by force.
• The US military presence in Honduras, which occupies the Soto Cano (Palmerola) military base, authorized the coup d'etat through its tacit complicity and refusal to withdraw its support of the Honduran military involved in the coup.
• The US Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, coordinated the removal from power of President Manuel Zelaya, together with Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon and John Negroponte, who presently works as an advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
• The Department of State has refused to legally classify the events in Honduras as a "coup d'etat," nor has it suspended or frozen its economic aid or commerce to Honduras, and has taken no measures to effectively pressure the de facto regime.
• Washington manipulated the Organization of American States (OAS) in order to buy time, therefore allowing the coup regime to consolidate and weaken the possibility of President Zelaya's immediate return to power, as part of a strategy still in place that simply seeks to legitimate the de facto regime and wear down the Honduran people that still resist the coup.
• The strategy of "negotiating" with the coup regime was imposed by the Obama administration as a way of discrediting President Zelaya - blaming him for provoking the coup - and legitimizing the coup leaders.

Robert McNamara has died

Robert McNamara, Defence Secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died June 6th. McNamara was the subject of The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara - a compelling documentary by Errol Morris. Indeed, it is one of my favourite documentaries by my favourite documentary maker.

Media Matters - five years old today

Media Matters for America, a non-profit organisation dedicated to scrutinising the media, is five years old today. It is fair to suggest that they have made a few enemies along the way …

For an example of the kind of thing they do, here is a compilation of Fox news’ coverage of the first 100 days of Obama’s presidency.

For more, see their website & youtube profile.

Be still my beating heart – electoral reform is on the agenda.

The news that Gordon Brown is to give electoral reform “consideration” was leaked in advance of the official announcement. According to Newsnight's Paul Mason, it is a condition placed on Brown for his uncontested leadership. The Alternative Vote system is the one the government favours. Surely, this is to be welcomed by all … surely not that is.

The problem? Nobody can agree on the best electoral system.

Meanwhile it looks like the House of Lords is to become elected. Moving aside the objection that an elected second chamber is not as desirable as most people think (now there is a future blog post to look forward too), is it really wise to reform the second chamber when the future electoral system of the first chamber is unknown?

No voting system is perfect. If the second chamber is to become elected, why not use a different voting system to the one used in the first chamber in order to balance out the faults. For example, a first past the post system in one chamber to deliver a strong government and proportional representation in the other in order to better reflect voter intention.

What will be the outcome? We wait with bated breath.

Dr George Tiller shot dead at church

Feministe

“He put the health of women above his own life. And now he is dead.”

Al Jazeera

George Tiller, 67, long a focus of national anti-abortion groups, was killed while serving as an usher at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita.

Tiller had been attacked several times in the past, and protests had been held outside his Wichita clinic.

In 1985, his practice was bombed, and in 1993 he was shot in the arms.

The Guardian

A man, identified after his arrest as Scott Roeder, 51, allegedly walked up to Tiller as he stood alongside three or four others and aimed a gun at his head. He shot once.

Jill Filipovic - The Guardian

[Tiller] was also a major lightening-rod in the abortion wars. Anti-choicers harassed his patients, day in and day out. They bombed his clinic. They shot him once before. They filed lawsuit after lawsuit and even convinced local prosecutors to launch criminal investigations and trials (none were successful). They published his home address and the full names of his family members on their websites. They posted information about anyone who did business with him, from where he got his coffee to where he did his dry cleaning.

They had him and his staff wearing bullet-proof vests to work every day. Tiller drove an armoured car and protected his home with a state-of-the-art security system. And, to better enable stalking and harassment, they posted his daily comings and goings – including the fact that he attended services every Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church, the place where he was ultimately shot and killed.

All because he was a licensed physician who performed legal medical procedures.

In life, Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the US who, under certain circumstances, provided abortions to women after 20 weeks of pregnancy. His death means that women have fewer options in such cases – if any at all. This will most greatly affect those in the central United States, particularly the poor.

It would be easier to insult anti-choice/pro-lifers by calling them ‘backwards’ and ‘stupid’, which many will, rather than to face the real culprits. Bigotry is often born of ignorance and misinformation. The spread of bigotry through misinformation lies at the feet of those in power, the media, politicians, religious leaders, & the masses. We each played a role in what lead to Dr Tiller, a brave and admirable man committed to women in need, being shot at his church in front of his family and friends.

The media spread misinformation. Bill O'Reilly might well be a ‘straw-man’ but he is popular with great influence, his making Tiller a cause célèbre and the crass deceitful manner in which he did so means that Bill O'Reilly has Dr. George Tiller's blood on his well-stained hands. Fox news is a dangerous propaganda tool for far-right authoritarian extremists.

Politicians that use carefully selected expressions help little. Abortion is all too often described as a 'difficult' issue when in many cases it is not. Incest provides an example that few can argue against. Situations in which the life and health of the mother or potential child are at severe risk provides another. Yet there are many who see no merit in abortion in even these circumstances.

Lest we forget that the 'South Dakota Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Act (HB 1215)' was signed into Law by South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds on March 6, 2006. Although it did not manage to come into effect, it sought to establish that "life begins at the time of conception" and to ban all abortions with the only exemption being physicians who perform the procedure when "designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant mother". Doctors who performed abortions on the basis of rape, incest, ill-health (but not likely death), terrible birth defects or a woman's right to chose, would be liable for murder charges.

Below is just one example of Bill O’Rielly’s criticism of Dr George Tiller.

He conflates aborting foetuses with killing babies, and he accuses Tiller of, ‘killing babies’ ‘for just about any reason’, performing ‘thousands of late term abortions’, of being ‘a doctor who will terminate a pregnancy at anytime’.

He accuses abortion clinics of protecting child rapists. He asks his interviewee whether she is ‘okay with rapists walking around the street?’ He accuses her of tacitly supporting ‘babies to be killed and rapists of 10 year olds to get away with it’.

The media’s misinformation, misrepresentation and emotive rhetoric fuels anti-choice/pro-life pressure groups. As Jill Filipovic wrote in The Guardian:

[I]f you yell "Murderer!" "Baby-Killer!" and "Holocaust!" long enough, it's reasonably foreseeable that someone will take it upon themselves to make sure that vigilante justice is done (especially if you provide the name and address of the person who you claim is committing "genocide").

A few links & a video

I intended to link articles by Tabloid Watch and Enemies of Reason; however, Angry Mob not only beat me to the punch but also did so with style. I make no apology for this blog-post loop as Angry Mob’s post includes the links and adds substantial value. The topic itself is the media’s lacklustre response to anti-Muslim protests – “rather than being roundly condemned on the front page of every tabloid they are left to small articles and are treated somewhat sympathetically in them.” In response to the, at least, 1451 people who voted in favour of the views of a “fucking moron”, who believed that the violence was “due to Politcal [sic] Correctness”, Angry Mob writes:

Sadly this is the mindset of some people who think that political correctness is somehow stripping people of fundamental rights - and in some ways I guess it is.

For example, if you are the kind of un-evolved, ignorant, shit-kicker that attends this kind of protest then you have been stripped of the right to call a black person a 'nigger' or an Asian person a 'fucking Paki'. You can no longer beat up a person for being a different colour or for being gay. You have lost these rights because we live in a world that is on the whole becoming more tolerant - whatever you or the Daily Mail may think you are merely a noisy minority.

Also by way of Angry Mob, indirectly this time, an illustration by Procrastinationathon.

The video below is an animated music video interpreting the war on terror from the point of view of Leo Blair. Although it is a couple of years old, it still affects. If you can forgive the relatively obscure and pretentious reference, it is like something from Nancy Spero’s War Series in the internet age.



The video came via bloggerheads.

Netanyahu says that West Bank settlements are to expand.

News that manages to be both unsurprising and almost unbelievable. The West Bank settlements, which are considered illegal under international law, are to expand.

"I have no intention to construct new settlements," Binyamin Netanyahu was quoted by officials as telling his cabinet on Sunday.

"... but it makes no sense to ask us not to answer to the needs of natural growth and to stop all construction," he added.

Whereas Obama said to Netanyahu just days earlier …



As for Netanyahu vowing to remove makeshift outposts in the West Bank that the Israeli government itself considers illegal …

In defence of Stephen Fry

I would like to defend Stephen Fry for dismissing MPs' expenses row.

The major issues are what elections should be decided on. Perhaps he overstated the case, but he is neither a politician nor a journalist. He did not seek a platform to express his views. He was interrupted and responded off the top of his head.

I have no complaints with investigating sleaze – what does bother me is that the story eclipses all others. The intense focus on expenses is particularly myopic parochialism. Other stories are overlooked – but who cares about oppression in Burma, or that innocent people were killed in Afghanistan, or that the people protested about it.

UPDATE
For an interesting “let’s get MPs’ expenses in perspective” post see Between the Hammer and the Anvil.

To Carol Thatcher, “That is why it is not on the jam jars – because we have moved on.”

Witness Carol Thatcher being asked whether she regrets "using the word that she did" by Andrew Marr twice. "No" is her obstinate response, at the second time of asking. Her initial response was obfuscatory - she attempted to reposition herself as the victim. She also suggests that plenty of people agree with her. If The Daily Mail agrees with her about political correctness, how could she be wrong? (!). She had over two months to construct a response. The best she could muster was arrogant denial.

Another thought occurred to me after the initial disgust for her misplaced conviction. What was she doing on television? Of course, she should be granted a right of reply, but she has already had many opportunities. What this short clip does not reveal is that she was on there to review newspapers primarily. It is only for the 1 minute 28 seconds that it was even acknowledged that she had been offensive and is unrepentant about it. For the most part Carol Thatcher was treated in a familiar cosy manner.

Although not entirely relevant - here is Stewart Lee’s response to an audience poll that revealed that the majority thought that political correctness had gone mad.

Thank-you Stewart Lee – that makes me feel better.

UPDATE
Since originally writing this post, I have stumbled across Mongoose Chronicles. She offers a spirited assessment of Carol Thatcher’s performance worthy of a link. 'Carol Thatcher disgusts me'

[J]ust because you grew up seeing golliwogs on the side of your jam jar as you sat at your breakfast table with your white, wealthy family and friends, does not entitle you to decide for another group of people what they are and are not allowed to be offended by. […]

I was disgusted by Thatcher in this Andrew Marr interview, because alarmingly, she seems to be part of this club of golliwog collectors who think their quaint little hobby is more valuable than the historical and current subjugation of an entire group of people; and worse, she is also one of those who has assumed the role of victim because The Man wants to take away her right to hurl racial slurs at people. And the rest of us should just get over it so she can have her golliwog fridge magnets and make fun of black people.

Chris Langham - Shrink Rap

Langham discusses being sexually abused as a child as well as the events that led to his conviction for downloading indecent images of children with clinical psychologist Dr Pamela Connolly. Conducted days after his release, this is a griping and tense interview. Given the press' fervour in reporting the allegations against him, it is refreshing to hear Langham give his side of the story with such remarkable frankness.

The British Comedy Guide offers a sample of press reviews of this episode of Shrink Rap and report that the programme had received no complaints, as of 16th January 2008. ‘News - Viewers back Chris Langham interview’

You might also find this article by Carol Sarler of interest. It is quite provocative because it uses three very different men to support its case. It questions the treatment of celebrities in legal cases that relate to allegations of sexual assaults on minors. On the whole, there are some pertinent points. Using Matthew Kelly as an example to support her case works well. Using Jonathan King as an example to support her case on the other hand does not.

Although the article is right to claim that King was “questioned over allegations subsequently withdrawn [… which were] leaked to the tabloids” it neglects to mention that he was convicted for four indecent assaults and two other sexual offences on boys under the age of consent. The fact that the media spotlight on the unproven allegations may have helped to bring people forward to form a more robust case that would lead to his eventual conviction serves to undermine Sarler’s case. It also provides ammunition for those that wish to dismiss Sarler.