Media Shield Law: another attack on free speech and whistle blowers

The government/big business wedding

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

"The worst thing that ever happened to journalism was that it became the professionalized province of the educated." Charles P Pierce

The LA Times reported on the passing of the new "media shield Law" passed by a Senate Committee earlier this month. The new law would protect "journalists and bloggers" who report news to the public from being forced to testify about their work.  The bill is supported by some major media organizations, you know, the ones that regurgitate the official line that comes out of government press agencies.  The likes of Wikileaks and other unfavorable sources are not protected.  Dianne Feinstein wants to define exactly what a journalist is, "Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) insisted on limiting the legal protection to "real reporters" and not, she said, a 17-year-old with his own website." the LA Times states.  "I can't support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I'm not going to go there," Feinstein said.

Feinstein introduced an amendment to the bill that defines a "covered journalist" as someone who gathers and reports news for "an entity or service that disseminates news and information."  According to the LA Times, "The definition includes freelancers, part-timers and student journalists, and it permits a judge to go further and extend the protections to any 'legitimate news-gathering activities.'"

Feinsten, a wealthy woman in her own right is married to Richard Blum, a speculator and coupon clipper who made a lot of his money through sweat shops in Asia, US government contracts, and through his lucrative position as a regent of the University of California.   In 2009,  Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to provide $25 billion in taxpayer money to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, the government agency that insures bank deposits.  The FDIC had awarded her husband's real estate firm, CB Richard Ellis, what the Washington Times called "a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms." (Wikipedia )  I was a shop steward for 25 years and always told my co-workers who asked how I could defend a worker that I knew was guilty that no worker could steal as much in a lifetime as these people steal in an day.

Blum is also Chairman of the Board of the CBRE Group and CBRE Group Inc. was awarded the government contract to be the sole marketer of USPS properties as the capitalist class moves to privatize the most efficient post office system in the industrialized world. This is the world in which we live, a public university board having so many investment bankers and other coupon clippers on it and the plundering of society's wealth by these characters.  The 1% keep their snouts buried deep in the public trough.

Naturally, the increased dismantling of the gains US workers have made over 150 years and the intention of the 1% to place us on rations is not a popular development and the increased surveillance, attacks on our rights and beefing up of the state security forces by their representatives in Congress are in preparation for the mass movements against these policies that we will see in the US in the years ahead.  The US capitalist class has no alternative but to attack the living standards of US workers and the middle class, the laws of their system; the global struggle for profits and endless wars to maintain them demands it.  Capitalism was dragged form the edge of the abyss by public funds and its continued crises ensure further cliffs are around the corner. The assault on workers cannot be avoided from their point of view.

Along with more police brutality and hi tech security and surveillance, we see increased oppressive legislation as Dianne Fenistein and her class colleagues are attempting to enact a law that defines what a journalist actually is. The "embedded" sycophants are "real journalists", Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden etc. are not. This is an anti-whistle blower law and an attempt to control information on the Internet and keep what they're doing under wraps.

Charles P. Pierce wrote a great piece on the media shield law and I urge readers to read it. He is not too pleased with the billionaires attacks on free speech:
"Hey, Dianne, here's the thing on that First Amendment business. I get to define what you do for a living. And if I decide to define what you do for a living is to be a mewling apologist for the national-security community and a lapdog for the surveillance state, I get to do that, and I get to do it in a newspaper, or video, or on-line, or on a pamphlet stapled to a telephone pole outside your door, if I so choose. You get to sit there, collect your government salary, raise money from plutocrats, and shut...the...hell...up."

Washington DC Shootings media mania but no social analysis.

Shootings drive up ratings and ad cost probably

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

I have just returned to the Bay Area after a long weekend away up in Tahoe and am listening to the ongoing reports of the shooting in Washington DC where 13 people were killed at a Naval facility there. As is normally the case, there is very little known about the details. One shooter is dead but the authorities say there may be another.  The dead shooter according to the media is Aaron Alexis, a military contractor shot by the police. So far they are saying little else.

But what just amazed me was the report from a chief medical officer, a Dr. Janis Orlowski from the hospital that is treating three people in critical condition.  She spoke at length answering questions form reporters about all sorts of details even the type of weaponry used.  Then she started to say something about what this means to her.  She explained that she sees trauma every day working in a big hospital like hers.  Then she started to question why these events happen.  She said something about the evil of it and it seemed to me that she was getting a little emotional about it.  She said something about this evil and clearly saw it as different to the everyday trauma she deals with.

She was about to say something about how we as Americans need to look at or try to see why this is happening in our country and that we have to endure this sort of thing at work and it seemed clear to me that she was about to express her views and concerns about the society in which we live.  I couldn’t get any more info as suddenly, despite being in the spotlight and answering questions about all sorts of details for some time, and the news informing us about injuries and “multiple engagements with the shooter”and the heroism of the police and other specifics, CNN cut to another reporter.

I do not believe this was an accident.  The media spends hours reporting on all sorts of demoralizing scenes of mass shootings, murders, rapes, and abuse of all kinds.  Who shot whom when and how is big news.  The role of the police and the authorities in catching and killing the perpetrators is also big news, proof we are in a society where the “rule of law” is protected.  What is not acceptable is for someone with some social influence (a head of a huge medical facility) and with a huge captive audience to raise questions or comment on the, nature of society, the society we live in.

Readers may recall that the thug Margaret Thatcher stated that there was no such thing as society, she said, "I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

Thatcher and her class keep their snouts firmly buried in the public trough and the taxpayers paid for her funeral.  This is true of all these people, British or American.  This is how hypocritical they are but more importantly, they do not want a discussion about society and how it works.

The US has more people in prison than any other country.  We execute children, we execute the mentally impaired; we kill each other at an alarming rate but this, or the crimes they are supposed to have committed are never attributed to “society”. We must not go there. We are all individuals and that’s it as Thatcher and her friend the “B” Movie actor Ronald Reagan argued, people who had pretty much everything given to them. We have mass homelessness, poverty, hunger, racism, you name it, but it’s all the fault of the individual, just a matter of making the right choices.

This news will keep people occupied for days. The details are being repeated, the number of dead, the shooter, interviews with the survivors and the “horror” they felt. The number of deaths and other information they will repeat over and over again throughout the day.  “I heard three shots, pow!pow! pow!” says one, “He was down the hall and he pointed the gun at us” says another as I heard her say before and the time before that. And they tell me the identity of the shooter again.

Obama just came on and described this as a, “cowardly act.”,  this from a man who authorizes drone killings without batting an eye. And now they are claiming this could be a workplace shooting as opposed to terrorism as the shooter was a navy man although authorities are not sure of the motive. Now Wolf Blitzer is nailing down the time the first gunshots were fired.

What won’t be asked is what is wrong with our society that mass killings like this occur almost every day, or what it is about our society that people feel so insecure, alienated and afraid?

At the motel we’re staying since our house caught fire they have the TV news on every morning when we go to the eating area for breakfast. I call it the “murder channel”. The first half hour or so is always filled with the various killings and acts human beings commit as capitalist society around them degenerates and becomes ever more alienating. It keeps us in a perpetual state of fear and bolsters the idea that we need to isolate ourselves further from an evil world. That was George W Bush’s best shot at analyzing events, all bad things are the results of “evildoers” and we should let the government get on with ridding the world of them as we isolate ourselves as best we can from each other.

Thatcher knows society exists and it has rules and laws and a structure that is in a constant state of flux.  We have a ruling class, and the laws of society are aimed at protecting and enforcing that rule.  It is the true nature of society, of an exploitative society, that must not be discussed because if we realize that society changes all the time, and that certain human behavior is very much related to how society functions, we are more conscious of reality and once we recognize that, we come to understand that, we see that what we do matters and that we can change it for the better.

Charlie Rose interview's Syria's Assad

From OaklandSocialist.com
 
We must not lose sight of the fact that Assad, like Obama, is an enemy of working class people, but Rose is no friend of ours either as the comments below point out.

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Here is the full interview US “news” caster Charlie Rose did with President Assad. Exercise extreme care in watching it, because you may intend to only watch a few minutes but the more you watch, the more difficult you will find it to tear yourself away. Several things are clear: Rose is simply a representative of the US State Department posing as a newscaster. He repeats time and again the accusations of Obama & Co., dressed up as questions or as “some people say.” For instance, he questions Assad time and again about the evidence Obama claims to have that the Assad regime used chemical weapons “against his own people.”

Rose’s problem is that he has been stupefied by the lap dog role he and his kind have been playing for years now. They simply blindly repeat whatever the US regime claims without questioning them in the slightest. As a result, he is totally unprepared to deal with Assad, who keeps answering Rose by saying that at least in the case of Colin Powell and the evidence of weapons of mass destruction, Powell presented some evidence. The evidence turned out to be a lie, Assad points out, but at least he presented something in public. In Obama’s case, he hasn’t presented anything; he has only claimed he has evidence. “You are a reporter. Why don’t you go to your president and ask him for the evidence so you can present it to the American people?” Assad asks Rose.

Rose scurries away from that question and on to another subject. In fact, this happens time and again. Rose repeatedly implies to Assad that the only reason he’s still in power is the support he’s getting from Iran and Russia. Assad simply says that his government has agreements with those countries just the same as the United States has with other countries, but that any “support, if you want to call it that” he says, cannot keep a government in power. He gives the example of Mubarak in Egypt. Mubarak had the support from the most powerful countries in the world and that couldn’t keep him in power. Rose scurries on to the next issue. And so it went. Of course, Assad is the enemy of working class people in Syria and elsewhere. But so is Obama and the reactionaries that he is supporting within Syria. Rose’s problem – and the problem of the US media – is that they pretend to be objective newscasters while, in fact, they are simply the agents of one wing of the global capitalist class. Would that any of these types would subject the US president to the same type of grilling.