Raise your hand if you smell horseshit

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NPR, my picture window into the corporate media bordello, has been flogging the marathon bombing story all week despite the fact that one of the suspects is as dead as bacon and the other one is in tighter custody than The Joker (Chechnyan pun intended). You see, it's just desperately important that we find out how Tamerlan was radicalized as long as there's some way we can link it to his overseas travel a few years ago. Because if we find that out, then we have a genuine case of "international terror" by "Muslim radicals." And that would give authorities to deploy killer drones in US skies under a plan that even the libertarian Rand Paul can approve of (see paragraph 5).

Since it's still somewhat early in terms of crafting the official marathon bomber narrative, it's a good time to observe how the process works. News editing decisions help to create a bias toward an official narrative by highlighting certain facts (or rumors or unsourced assertions) that support it while ignoring other facts that don't fit the story line. And so this week the storytellers are busy composing a portrait of vicious, desperate international terrorists who had New York City in its sights next. The trouble with that story line is this and this. Have any of you heard, via mainstream news media, that there are good reasons to ask whether our present-day Saccho and Vanzetti really were planning to take their pressure cookers to Manhattan? I haven't. Yet mitigating facts are right out there in public, non-obscure reporting channels like The Boston Globe and Esquire.

And furthermore, how about this: despite initial media reports depicting a teenage Chechnyan desperado shooting it out with police from his bunker in a Watertown, MA, drydocked cabin cruiser, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not armed when he was captured. He was halfway shot to pieces, though. My point isn't to second-guess how police do their jobs in a situation like this, but to second-guess the editorial judgments being applied. Those judgments make sense to me only as intentional decisions to shape and burnish a narrative.

The Narrative

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I woke up this Saturday morning listening to NPR "correspondents" stitch together a narrative of Boston Marathon international intrigue with Scotch tape and John McCain's used dental floss. As far as I can tell, an NPR "correspondent" does no actual reporting, but spends his or her workdays gleaning bon mots from think-tank experts, corporate spokesmen, and politicians speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The two suspects immigrated to this country from Chechnya (when the youngest was 8 or 9), you see, so therefore they must have been Muslim sleeper agents. It doesn't matter to the liberal NPR that no verified fact in the public domain indicates any foreign connection other than the suspects' country of origin and one trip to Russia by the older brother to renew his passport. Or that no third-party financing or logistical sophistication is evident in the known facts. Or that evidence known to date link only the older suspect to radical Islamic thought (via YouTube content)... and only within the past 5 years or so.

Meanwhile, NPR dutifully informs us that even though Boston police say the public threat has ended, Federal officials are likely to use a "public safety" exception to the surviving suspect's Miranda rights in order to grill him for "intelligence" (not "evidence") without a lawyer present. Then, implicitly accepting that possible approach to American law enforcement as legitimate on its face, they inform us that Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding that the surviving suspect be tried as an "enemy combatant."

Watch how this unfolds. I think it is an excellent opportunity to observe how corporate media assemble a narrative for the public. It is a feat of rhetoric, not news reporting. Techniques for producing a mass-media news narrative include the unwarranted emphasis of some facts over others; the omission of certain facts that don't fit the emerging narrative; unsupportable extrapolation from known facts to serve as a sort of roadmap for fleshing out the consensus narrative; injection of purported facts from anonymous sources; and so on. Watch how the coverage plays out and pretend you're the front-page editor for the Fifty50 Daily Pap-Smear---ask yourself where each presented fact came from, whether there are conflicting facts on the record, whether the item presented is a sourced fact, an opinion, or a speculation.

Also, ask yourself why officials and corporate media were reluctant to call the Boston Marathon bombing an act of terrorism until the suspects could be publicly branded as foreigners.

Boston strangler marathon bombing tea party

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I'll confine my contribution to the story of America's Bombing with a few stray notes about media coverage of it that I haven't seen in writing yet.

First, I'll look for some Beltway celebrity pundit to declare that during the "national tragedy" in Boston, the social media "came of age." Specifically, I expect someone to compare the Reddit crowdsourcing detective forums as well Facebook and Twitter sleuthing to how television news reporting "came of age" on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. The contribution of Reddit editors is certainly significant and worth considering, but celebrity commentators are always compelled to turn one thing into another, well known thing that we all can relate to. I'll leave the topic (for the moment) by stating that any such comparison is shrinkwrapped horseshit.

Second, instead of regurgitating all the corporate media reporting failures this past week, not limited to CNN and Murdoch's New York Post, I'll point to a really competent aggregator of confusing and contradictory breaking news reports: Greg Mitchell's Pressing Matters blog. He has been way ahead of other aggregators I follow (such as TPM and Huffington Post), pulling together news from a wide variety of sources and commenting minimally to provide a professional, old-school journalist's interpretation. Most of his remarks are directed at helping the reader to avoid overinterpreting the reporting or to point out examples of bad journalistic practice. I only noticed one or two ham-handed quips in all his liveblogging over the past 2 or 3 days.

Third: Boston was not on "lockdown," as all media were breathlessly reporting this morning. I say this because the use of that term is nonsensical. You can't put a city on "lockdown"! As far as I can tell, no curfew was declared either: the police told people in Boston and environs to stay off the streets and to "shelter in place." Both seem to be sensible recommendations. And I'll add that the phrase shelter in place is a legitimate term of art for terrorism and hostage-type situations. The use of lockdown, though, is an example of what I see as a creeping compulsion by media and their slavish consumers to glamorize every aspect of life as if it were an action movie or made-for-TV drama. The news, you see, becomes much more thrilling to consume if described in terms of entertainment programming. I think of it as a social disease---an infection of real culture with the virus of mass media narrative. In my lifetime I've seen journalism migrate from (1) traditional news reporting, to (2) finding the "story" in the news to "help" the audience understand, to (3) intentionally communicating durable "story lines" to which facts are fit and cherrypicked against. This last stage is The Narrative. Many media and political scholars argue that the narrative long predates my perception of memory of it, and I wouldn't argue against that. But I think my basic point here remains intact.

Last: NPR's so-called counterterrorism correspondent on All Things Considered tonight, "Dina Temple-Raston," behaved like a colossal douchebag by repeatedly telling everyone how taking the suspect alive was a top priority in order to get "intelligence" from him about "the plotters," with thick implications that we already know that the bombing was a coordinated foreign terrorist operation. No verified fact reported so far remotely supports that kind of language; everything that I've read and heard up to this moment indicates that two guys created some crude antipersonnel IEDs out of household materials and may have had their getaway car in queue for work at a body shop as late as Wednesday morning. Some plot! It may actually turn out to be true, but even the liberal NPR should know that it's best to wait for some facts to emerge before extrapolating too far along The Narrative.

Giffords on NPR

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As I suspected, the Arizona congresswoman targeted in today's assassination attempt is the same one I heard on All Things Considered while driving home from work on 5 January 2011 (had forgotten her name). I remember quickly becoming exasperated with her opening statement, smelling of namby-pamby "centrism," regarding what she intended to do during the 112th Congress:

First and foremost, work with the Republicans. I come from the state of Arizona, which is a pretty bipartisan state. I formerly served in the minority, know what it's like to work with my Republicans in the majority and in the minority. And that's truly what American people want. I do think it's important, though, to look back on the reflection. 

But her tone and her words soon became much more nuanced as she pushed back against the Republican midterm "mandate" nonsense. She easily handled the remarks of know-nothing Illinois Republican Pete Roskam while clearly and succinctly taking down the main Republican talking points against HCR. By the end of the piece I came around to thinking that she might be a good egg after all.

"Barring info...speculation benefits no one"

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That is NPR's rejoinder about the Giffords shooter and his motives. They're concerned about "speculation."

Little "speculation" is necessary when facts are available.

Rep. Giffords's Republican opponent Jesse Kelly had campaign rally shoot-in to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office."

The federal judge shot dead in today's incident, John Roll, had previously received right-wing death threats by telephone that required intervention by the U.S. Marshals Service.

One account, a second-hand attribution to the Democratic National Committee Western States Director, posted by Atrios, has the perpetrator calling out the name of each victim he shoots.

Anybody following national news for the past several years knows that Arizona has a highly expressive right-wing gun culture that has normalized the concept of bringing firearms to political events. (Sorry, don't have time to find a link right now.)

So, NPR, why don't you take "political junkie Ken Rudin" off the pontification beat this evening and assign him try some real reporting on the alleged shooter's internet ramblings? Based on an initial look at samples posted to TPM, the shooter would seem to have been motivated to a large extent by psychosis. But in the few of his utterances I've glanced at so far there appears to be a stack of kindling cut fresh from the right-wing noise bush. As one would expect, those political assassination attempts that are not the work of paid hit men are typically the finale of a grand vision obsessing an individual who has lost his mind. We don't have to go too far out on the "speculation" limb to write a reasonable first draft of what went wrong in Arizona today.

Due process: a fading memory to "Constitution buffs"

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For the umpty-ninth time, tonight on NPR this time, I heard some belligerent-sounding asshole at a Nevada state Republican party convention bluster about how sick he is of government not following the Constitution. Predictably, he was speaking in the context of right-wing outrage about the "government takeover" of healthcare. The reporter, of course, failed to ask old Chamber-Of-Commerce Dick if he was aware that the legislation was passed and signed by a duly elected Congress and President, respectively, and has not been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Well, OK, the guy is entitled to an ignorant opinion. Sound bytes like I described above wouldn't souse me with hate, though, if these same people were also blathering on the news shows about things like this --- Soviet-style security policies that vomit on due process (a Constitution thing, you know) when a licensed commercial pilot declines to submit to a "backscatter" full body scan after clearing an airport metal detector. These scans are capable of clearly imaging a subject's genetalia and other mammalian protuberances, and in the absence of reasonable suspicion related to smuggling nonmetallic weapons or ingested cocaine-stuffed condoms, are useless except for titillating bored TSA workers. So... why chorus of silence, wingnuts?

It's almost as if Republicans, libertarians, and Tea Partiers are angry only about things they're told to be angry about.

The sanctity of contracts [updated]

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Today on All Things Considered I heard some New York Times reporter named "Andrew Ross Sorkin" try packaging a lame apologia for criminally incompetent executives as good old American contrarian horse-sense. His point seems to be that the government can't just "rip up contracts" because we have laws, and therefore AIGFP retention bonuses (for example) "must" be paid if we (we-who, he didn't say) are to retain the fabric of trust in society. Or something.

To her credit, ATC co-host Melissa Block quizzed this fool about the difference between ripping up AIGFP executive bonus contracts and ripping up union contracts as part of the in-progress auto industry bailout. But I wish she would have told him that nobody is literally expecting the government to "rip up contracts." By failing to follow up insistently to question Sorkin's premise, she allowed him to waste 3 minutes of my time in the car that I could have been listening to "Playground Psychotics." Meanwhile, Sorkin explained to all us rubes that "we" really need to keep these AIGFP execs on board because they're the only ones how know how to "unwind" the exotic derivative securities that they conjured. Yes: they need to be paid excessive bonuses in addition to their salaries so they will continue to do the jobs they are contractually obligated to perform.

See, the way I process this in my cinder of a brain, I am convinced that both parties to an emploment contract need to honor said contract. Therefore, before we hear any more horseshit like this from reporter Sorkin, he needs to employ the Google, Nexis and Lexis, his telephone, and his Outlook address book to find out for the American public (who is an 80 percent majority shareholder in AIG) whether the AIGFP bonus recipients did in fact fulfill the terms of their contract. If he's too frightened, lazy, or unskilled to do that, then he could at least check TPM a few times a day to keep up with the facts of the story... just for appearances.

When it's time to unwind" the AIGFP mystery securities portfolio for real, we AIG majority shareholders won't need to pamper and coax reporter Sorkin's smarmy MBA pals to do that job. We will go to the real experts: auditors, bank examiners, criminal investigators, and federal prosecutors.

Update: that cute little Ezra Klein addressed a similar topic today, referencing Sorkin's NYT column as source material. There's a bit of ambiguity in his point, however, possibly due to the lack of vetting his text through a simple country editor. To make up for the ambiguity, there are a number of interesting remarks in the comments thread below the post. No, we can't confiscate money from a small, specific group of people without any valid legal framework. Yes, there are many possible ways to approach the quashing of the AIGFP bonuses, such as legislation about executive bonuses working in corporations that have accepted TARP funds or giving AIG a friendly reminder that they're fucking bankrupt and must settle up with a long line of customers and shareholders before making good on contracts that rewarded gross mismanagement or worse. One commenter suggests freezing the accounts out of which executive bonuses are to be paid pending the outcome of a fraud investigation; I like that one.

NPR Fuct Check: the U.S. Constitution

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All Things Considered reporter Tom Gjelten extruded a Grand Old Piece of crap this afternoon in his puff piece about an outstanding new idea by aged establishment hacks James Baker (R) and Warren Christopher (D). These former U.S. Secretaries of State (who served, respectively, under Bush I and Reagan II --- I mean Clinton) think we need to replace the unconstitutional yet ineffectual War Powers Act of 1973. I say "unconstitutional" because the Act enables a President to attack a sovereign nation without seeking a Declaration of War from Congress. I say "ineffectual" because the so-called safeguards built into the Act have never been complied with. Nevertheless, this democracy-eroding law has facilitated a sense of normalcy in the American psyche regarding "fine little wars" that the President says are beneficial to us, and that is bad. Given that the War Powers Act has facilitated the transformation of this nation from a republic to an empire, it's hard for me to understand why people corporate imperialists like Baker and Christopher can't just be happy with the way things are.

But judging from the tone of his dutiful reporting, Tom Gjelten sounds sold on the idea that what America needs now (instead of that musty, outdated Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) is "a special joint congressional committee made up of House and Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of key committees" that the President "would have to consult with that group before sending troops into any 'significant armed conflict.' "

Former Secretary Christopher tells us that this new War Powers Consultation Act is necessary "[s]o that when the president decides he wants to go to war he has to take into account the independent views of the members of Congress, and not just any members of Congress, but this selective group of the leaders of both parties of Congress and of both House and Senate." "Selective." That's a good one.

Achtung, assholes! Consult this: "The Congress shall have Power... To declare War...." There is no "question of how a U.S. president and Congress should approach war decisions," as Gjelten asserts on the basis of having found a presidential historian to tell us that Thomas Jefferson himself desired to circumvent Congress when waging war. The only people who question the plain language of the Constitution regarding the separation of war powers are imperialist Presidents, their co-conspirators, and their media apologists. This separation is not an "ambiguity," Tom Gjelten: it is an intentional limitation on both branches of government.

This kind of reporting infuriates me. It contributes to the mass-culture idea that the President is the supreme source of authority in the United States. If Tom Gjelten is confused about the plain language of the U.S. Constitution, maybe it's time to reassign him to a less challenging beat such as spitting into the burritos at Taco Bell. What a d-bag.

"I heard it on NPR"

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Back-to-back stories on All Things Considered this afternoon:

First, a strangely objective update on an under-reported story about a "loner," found comatose in a Las Vegas motel room, in possession of (1) firearms, (2) undisclosed amounts of the neurotoxin Ricin, (3) castor beans, from which Ricin is synthesized, and (4) an "anarchist-type textbook." Although the man's ethnicity was not reported, we can be fairly certain that he does not come from any brown-skinned, funny-accented region of the world. Why? Because, according to ATC co-host Melissa Block, Vegas police have stated that "it doesn't make you a terrorist to have an anarchist-type textbook." No word from John Law on whether it makes you a criminal to possess a deadly illegal poison previously used in terrorist attacks.

The frame for this first NPR story was something to the effect that, 'well this is certainly an interesting mystery, isn't it?' The report does represent an admirable presumption of innocence by an often-hysterical press in This Time Of War. They give us this tale of a simple country pizza delivery guy, living in his cousin's basement, taking his anarchist's cookbook and his castor beans and his guns along with undisclosed amounts of illegal neurotoxin on a road trip to Vegas, just minding his own business and living there with no visible means of support, when he mysteriously goes into a coma. Maybe he was "just trying to do harm to himself," one reporter mused. There are probably easier ways to do that, but who knows?

Second, a strangely sanctimonious story about a New York cabbie, briefly hailed as a hero for having rescued an infant abandoned in his taxi, until it was discovered that he was indirectly acquainted with the baby's father. NPR calls the story "Taxi Driver Arrested for Helping Girlfriend Ditch Kid." Nice. ATC co-host Robert Siegel clumsily walks the listener through the convoluted facts by asking the New York Daily News police reporter he's interviewing questions such as, "Is he from Ecuador, is that what I read?" Ah-HA! (How the hell should the police reporter know what Siegel read?)

As near as I can tell, here's the story. The father of an "angelic" 5-month-old baby girl tells his sister he can't care for the baby himself because he works construction and the underage mother has left him. This guy's sister tells her boyfriend, the Ecuadoran taxi driver, that they must bring the baby to a city fire station, which is reasonably in sync with the intent of the city's safe harbor law if not the letter of it. The immigrant does this, but he fabricates a story about how the baby was abandoned in his taxi, presumably to protect the brother of his girlfriend. Bad call, of course. But before the cabbie confesses to his fib, the heartwarming story hits the press: Ecuadoran Samaritan Toast O' Town --- Read All About It! But then the fairy tale is spoiled by an inconvenient detail, and everybody feels chumped. So the cabbie loses his livery license and faces prosecution for filing a false police report. Forget about the fact that this guy actually did take charge of an abandoned baby and did the right thing --- he made an error doing it. Let's pile on and strip him of his livelihood, then send him back where he belongs. Unless he has an apartment full of guns, castor beans, and an anarchist-type textbook.

Good riddance...

...to Bill Buckley, whose Cold War-era hallucination of conservatism (e.g., blacks shouldn't have civil rights, government spending is Socialism except when it's an investment in Empire, corporations shouldn't have to follow laws or pay taxes) played a key role in helping to create half a dozen intractable real-world national and international crises. His charming, polysyllabic patrician demeanor and "genius for friendship" was eulogized by David Folkenflik on NPR this afternoon. (Click the "Listen Now" link at the NPR page if you can stomach it, but I don't recommend it.)

"He drove the kooks out of the [conservative] movement," said Buckley's son, Chris. "He separated it from the anti-Semites, the isolationists, the John Birchers. He conducted, if you will, a kind of purging of the movement." Well, actually, no he didn't, Chris; he only got rid of the isolationists because they're not good allies when a guy is trying to intellectually justify turning a republic into an empire. And all those other "kooks"? They've been ruling us for 28 years.

I'm not a person who believes we are obligated to be polite about the dead if we strongly feel they were premeditated assholes who left the world a worse place than when they entered it. I will, at least, wish Mr. Buckley luck with his "genius for friendship" as he shakes hands with The Devil.

Fact checking, NPR style

This morning NPR had a nice 'fact checking' round-table regarding the Democratic debate in Iowa last night. Economics correspondent Adam Davidson was asked to truth-squad a statement on Iran made by Joe Biden. Biden, who was rebutting some Clinton baloney about the recent non-binding Senate resolution demonizing Iran's Revolutionary Guard, said:

The moment that declaration was made, oil prices jumped over $18 a barrel.

Davidson wasn't buying it, being the economics correspondent that he is. Davidson:

I'd say this is the single most obviously untrue statement I heard in the debate.... Never in human history have oil prices spiked that high or anything like that.

Then Davidson swiftly supported his assertion by reminding listeners of the date of Republican Guard resolution, and presenting a brief summary of oil price movements immediately after the Senate resolution, deftly sending Biden scuttling for the cover of an MBNA mobile hospitality suite. Oh, wait a minute --- he didn't do that at all. Instead, evidently based mainly on his high respect for his own opinions, Davidson declared that the "generally accepted risk premium" added on top of the market price of oil accounting for "all the political tension in all the world is about 10 or 15 percent." And so, he concluded:

...the idea that one vote having to do with Iran at one moment would cause such a dramatic increase in prices is utterly unjustified.

I'm just a simple country editor, but I feel that an NPR fact check should make reference to some facts. This should have been a simple one to put to bed, too. But here I am, cranky as ever before bedtime, and I still don't know whether or not Biden's a big fibber about Iran. And the answer is not insignificant, either, issue-wise: if rattling sabers at Iran can affect oil prices or supplies, Matt and Stacey Merlot should be aware of that before committing to buy a bomb-Iran magnetic yellow ribbon for the Land Cruiser. (They might be able to get one at the NPR Gift Shop.)

This exciting public radio journalism circle-jerk format is so awesome that it deserves its very own special name: let's call it a "fuct check." They do it all the time.