Censored in 2008, Part 2

Censored in 2008, Part 2

Media Rants

By

Tony Palmeri

From the February, 2009 edition The Scene

Last month I identified half of the top ten stories that were underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by northeast Wisconsin corporate media in 2008. They were: (10) Journal Communications Laps for Lazich, (9) Isn’t Anyone Against TIF? (8) Keeping the Key Hidden, (7) ALEC’s Wisconsin Pull, and (6) Silencing the Winter Soldiers. To escape the censoring tendencies of the corporate press, regularly check these sites: foxpolitics.net, oshkoshnews.org, fightingbob.com, gannettblog.blogspot.com, and Lyle Lahey’s cartoons at www.weimar.ws/lahey/.

And now the top 5 censored stories of 2008.

No. 5: Historic McKinney/Clemente Ticket Ignored. In July the Green Party made history when it nominated the first all-women-of-color presidential ticket in US history. Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and her hip-hop generation journalist running mate Rosa Clemente campaigned on a platform of social justice, peace, ecology, and grassroots democracy. The ticket mobilized some spirited volunteers, but absent any mainstream media coverage the majority of Fox Valley residents never knew the campaign existed. Shameful.

No. 4: The True Cost of the Bush Years. The January 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine includes a jaw dropping report by former Commerce Department official Linda Bilmes and Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz called “The $10 Trillion Hangover: Paying the price for eight years of Bush.” Though President Bush in 2001 inherited a budget surplus of $128 million, he leaves office with estimates of a 2009 deficit of at least $750 billion. Government spending increased 59% during the Bush years, but the middle-class and poor saw few gains. The writers argue that “most Americans are worse off than they were in 2001. This is because money was squandered in Iraq and given as a tax windfall to America’s richest individuals and corporations, rather than spent on such projects as education, infrastructure, and energy independence, which would have made all of us much better off in the long term.”

Even on those occasions when mainstream media reported the gloomy statistics, they failed to link the gloom to the economic mistakes of the Bush Administration. And those mistakes, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, “will cast a long shadow over the next generation of Americans.”

No. 3: Our Subprime Financial System. NYU Economist Nouriel Roubini, chair of the respected financial think tank RGE Monitor (rgemonitor.com), is called “Dr. Doom” because of his pessimistic outlook on the economy. As early as 2005 he predicted the current economic mess. Now heralded by the New York Times and other corporate media as “the seer who saw it coming,” it must be noted that Roubini’s insights and predictions were marginalized and/or ignored by the press at the very moments that we should have been listening most. In fact, his articulation of the extent of our financial woes still hasn’t sunk in. What he told the New York Times in 2008 was already known years earlier and should have been part of responsible press coverage of the economy: “Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis . . . But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts . . . We have a subprime financial system, not a subprime mortgage market.”

No. 2: The Roots of Mainstream Media’s Financial Crisis. When a corporate media giant like Gannett announced layoffs and forced, unpaid furloughs for all employees, we assume that big media must be going broke. Not so. According to corporate media watchdogs freepress.net, the problem is greed: “It is true that profit margins have shrunk for some media companies, and the larger financial crisis undoubtedly impacts advertising. The Internet has changed the public’s media habits. But most media companies remain extremely profitable, just not profitable enough to please Wall Street. (Some papers in the now-gutted Gannett chain enjoy profit margins above 40 percent.).”

Freepress argues that our media system is the result of “policies and politics” that since the 1990s have favored consolidation and profit motive over diversity and public service reporting. They say that, “Just like the weak-kneed watchdogs at the SEC and Treasury stood by as subprime lending and ‘credit default swaps’ sank our economy, the public servants entrusted with the airwaves cheered deregulation as local voices and viewpoints were crushed by the now-tottering media behemoths.” If big media cannot report honestly and openly about their own failed economic ideology, how can we expect them to expose others?

No. 1: The Local Cost of the Iraq War. The top censored story for the fourth year in a row. Establishment media continue to lament the shortage of monies for basic services in local communities, yet rarely make the link to the waste of life and financial resources in Iraq. As I write this in late January, congressional appropriations toward Iraq are approaching $600 billion. Local media have done a miserable job of identifying the local cost. The National Priorities Project estimates that the war has cost cities of Oshkosh, Appleton, and Green Bay a combined total of almost $400 million. Last year’s flood victims in Oshkosh and other northeast Wisconsin cities with decaying infrastructures deserve to know why there’s not enough money in local budgets for repairs and maintenance. Maybe mainstream media will tell them in 2009.

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