Update: What Press Won't Show that Wright Said

I also posted on Daily Kos and got some comments there about Wright's quoting from, or paraphrasing of, Ambassador Ed Peck. No one has been able to find the actual appearance on Fox that Reverend Wright claims to quote. So there is some dispute that as to whether the words are actually Peck's. I still feel that the sound bite does not reflect Wright's intended meaning. It doesn't come close. The most salient comment I got there was this one:

Simple answer: the truth doesn't sell ads.
Scandal does. Plus, a 5 second sound-bite is easier to put on air than 5 minutes of a sermon.

by skrekk on Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 05:40:23 PM PDT

Sound bite journalism doesn't serve the public at all. It gives us half truths and stirs up controversy that does not help us solve problems. In fact it creates problems. This kind of journalism serves the corporate media, whose motivation is profit, not truth. It creates controversy and spectacle that they can use to draw our attention and while we're there, try to sell us something. Not that selling something in and of itself is bad. We have ads here. But when it comes at the expense of truth and when spectacle is disguised as news in order to do so, it is a corruption of the purpose of the media.

I think corporate media is a more appropriate name for the MSM precisely for those reasons. It's a more accurate reflection of their real purpose and the reason they often fail to serve the public good they purport to serve.

-Fight the powers.

What the Press Won't Show You That Reverend Wright Said

Sometimes I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone when I'm watching TV and I see the media version of what's happening in the world and I see a completely contradictory version of it somewhere else. Or, metaphorically, like Charlton Heston must have felt at the end of the movie Soylent Green when he finally realizes that soylent green is made from people. It's not that I trust the media so unquestioningly that I can't wrap my brain around the fact that their version of what is real is so far from what actually is real, but that I just can't believe that it would be possible to have any remaining shred of credibility or status among the people of this country if you got something so absolutely, incredible wrong so many times. Even if you give people very little credit for paying attention to or caring about what's going on. Or even if you think they are not very smart. It still doesn't make sense.

Just how is it possible that you keep your status as the supposed watchdogs of government, and reliable sources of information from around the world? How can you not be laughed at when you call yourselves, The Most Trusted Name in News, or The Place for Politics, or the best political team on television, or whatever else the various marketing departments dream up for their news organizations? When I watch the in context versions of the sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and contrast them to the endless loops we've been seeing on the networks and cable TV news shows for weeks, they leave me with two views of supposed reality that just do not jibe.

Last night I heard commentators on CNN and MSNBC still speaking as if they had no idea that the loop they play of Wrights comments on 9/11 are in fact a quotation and not his own words. That to me seems like a relevant fact. Even the people I trust to tell me much more of the truth than the the networks generally do, people like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, are repeating the same mainstream media narrative. And if we extend the conversation to what's happening in the blogosphere, I have not heard Arianna Huffington (though I'm behind reading her posts) put this into perspective. Arguably one of, if not the biggest story of recent weeks, and only one show in the mainstream media has taken the time to actually listen to one of Wrights full sermons and put what was said in perspective. It was CNN's Rich Sanchez and he did a very poor job of it. He continually tried to move the focus back to the prevailing mainstream media narrative of Wright and Trinity United as wild-eyed angry black militants that should scare the crap out of the average American.

This story could have potentially derailed the chances of the only viable African-American candidate for president, ever. Yet no one who calls themselves a journalist took any time to look beyond the surface of 10 and 20 second sound bites. It took Trinity United itself to start their own Youtube channel and blog to start to get the truth out to people. And one of the great ironies of the whole story is that it may bring the church more serious attention than it would have ever gotten even if Obama does become president. I am not a religious person at all and that is not the relevant part of the story to me, but it is interesting.

One personal, but relevant irony for me is that I found the story in context by going to Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia, the icon for unreliable information in the mainstream media was where I found that the media was still not correctly attributing the statements made by Wright on 9/11. That they had still not said that Wright was "[Paraphrasing] Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq, former deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism under the Reagan Administration and former U.S. Ambassador to a number of countries." Wikipedia was my source for accurate information that the mainstream press had gotten wrong over and over again.

And to me that is the real story here. That through this very medium, through new new media, the people, both those misrepresented directly and those to whom the truth was misrepresented, have redress. From the editors of Wikipedia who have no motivation except to provide reliable information to people for free. Yes it is vulnerable to corruption, but it is self correcting and those who call it unreliable are no more reliable. And from the people at Trinity United who are just like you and me. Who saw their pastor misrepresented in the media and decided to become their own media and put their own story out so that people could make up their minds based on more than 20 seconds of sound out of entire career.

The career of a man who was a US Marine and served in the US Navy as a hospital Corpsman and who has a commendation from same for treating President Lyndon Johnson when he was hospitalized. The career of a man who traveled to Libya as part of an contingent which included Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan to free United States Navy pilot Lt. Robert Goodman, whose fighter jet had been shot down over Lebanon. And to bring that soldier held prisoner by a terrorist back home to America. I got that from Wikipedia too.

Maybe it is not that the people don't care, or pay attention when our news and view of the world is reduced to the 20 second sound bite, or that they aren't smart enough to understand it when it's not, but that they felt little power to do anything about it. Through new media they are starting to take back that power and the mainstream media should be paying attention. We the people are not only the government, we are the media too.

Please take the time to comment on this post, whether you agree or disagree. And please take time to pass it on to people who may not have seen Reverend Wright's comments in context. And finally, take time to write the mainstream media, whoever you get your news from and let them know that you are paying attention.

See update here.

-Fight the powers.

Making History Ugly

When this Democratic primary season began I was a hardened cynic. Hardened by the past nearly eight years of Democratic party history. By Al Gore laying down when the 2000 general election was stolen from him. And by his not winning by enough to allow it to be stolen. Hardened by John Kerry's allowing himself to be swiftboated out of the 2004 election. And I suspect that election was stolen from him as well. This time without hanging chads or a paper trail. Not to mention that the last Democratic administration ended in impeachment on the basis of an offense that was hardly impeachable, especially in view of what we have now. With impeachment "off the table."

I was always an Obama fan, but I never expected him to be a real viable candidate. Not many people did. I expected that he might win a few primaries. As much as I hate to borrow from Hillary Clinton's campaign rhetoric, I thought he would give some inspiring speeches. I thought he'd get people excited, bring people into the process who had never participated or who haven't in a long time. All of which would give us a better chance to win the general election. Then I expected I would have to swallow hard and vote for Hillary Clinton. And I would have.

I held out hope that someone would save us from the fate of Clinton inevitability. But I never thought it would be Obama. And the reason I could not get excited about her is that after 8 years of Bush, I simply hated the idea of having to vote for someone who sounded like Bush lite. Who voted for the war. Who supported it up and until it got unpopular to do so and still couldn't admit that voting for it was a mistake. Inability to admit to a mistake was a quality that also reminded me of the 8 years I would soon like to forget.

Obama did all the things I thought he would, and a lot more. After our long national nightmare, to hear a Democrat who is actually inspiring, who generates real excitement, who talks about hope and sincerely believes in it. Someone who gets young people fired up and involved, and brought the cynical and apathetic back into the fold. I have to admit that I was starting to actually believe something truly miraculous was happening. And I do honestly mean miraculous. Because in 2003 if someone had said that a black man with a funny first name, and a middle name of Hussein, would be winning the nomination for president at this point in 2008, I would have asked them what they were smoking. And to please don't bogart it, because I want a hit. I mean that only metaphorically of course.

And if another miracle cancels out this one out, and Hillary Clinton is the nominee, Democrats are still poised to make history. Democrats, in fact, are already making history. And that's why all the ugliness of this campaign is all the more disheartening. Even to a cynic like myself. The race baiting, the politics of fear, the dirty tactics and the fact that Senator Clinton has actually endorsed her Republican rival over the person likely to win the Democratic nomination, is almost tragic.

I thought a bit about this post and I wondered if there was someone out there with the ability, and with the influence to appeal to our better natures. This is our chance to make history and we are making it ugly. When we look back on this we may have as much to be ashamed of as we have to be proud of. I was going to write it yesterday and I wondered who and how someone could appeal to our better natures and make this something we will not be ashamed to look back on.

All day yesterday I watched the cable news shows, the best political team in show business, and that other one that I guess is not, show Obama's former pastor over and over again with the most damning sound bite that although it is not defensible, is certainly taken out of its context and chosen for it's incendiary effect. And I had to admit that in the case of Geraldine Ferraro, though I totally disagreed with her and thought her comment was racist, that they did the same thing to her. That what she'd said wasn't as bad, taken in full context as the sound bite. Yet it was played over and over again, just the most damning part.

I never got around to writing about what happened yesterday and when I was thinking about it again this morning it occurred to me that if there was someone who could, or something that could appeal to our better natures, if we had better natures that could so easily be appealed to, it wouldn't have taken until 2008 for an African American and a woman to have a chance to be president. If I think back to when history was made in my lifetime, and I was very young then, too young to realize exactly what was happening, it was not much different than now.

It was when Martin Luther King was doing something that at the time was even more miraculous, desegregating the south. Challenging Jim Crow and racism and making a real difference. He made history, but the whole thing was very ugly and many things happened then that we'd like to forget, and often do forget in the retelling. Somehow by the time a lot of history gets into the books we think of it as all, or at least mostly high minded and civil, but in every case it is absolutely the opposite. Even the history that resulted in this Democracy that we are continuing to improve, there were dirty tricks, and there was back biting, back stabbing and nastiness.

In fact, earlier in the week I saw a clip of Paul Giamatti in an interview about his role as John Adams in the HBO series which premiere's tonight and he said that Adams was contradictory, and sometimes too truthful and not a very good politician. Which is the PG way of saying he was kind of a dick. Also in the clip below, the show's producer, Tom Hanks talks about the very nastiness I spoke of above when our nations constitution was being drafted. Maybe this is precisely what it takes to make history. And we do it, because it is the right thing and as John Kennedy said of the space race in the early 60's, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.