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Hidden with code "Submitted as Feature" |
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News :: Peace |
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Gazette's Latest Whopping Omission |
Current rating: 0 |
by Peter Miller
(No verified email address) |
09 Feb 2003
Modified: 11:04:02 AM |
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Ever eager to support their president, N-G editors condemn people who question him, and hide facts that might help people evaluate his character and his motives. Also, critique of News-Gazette General Manager John Foreman and a suggestion that he dis-serves the community by belittling reasons to oppose this war. |
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Friday, February 7, 2002: News-Gazette Editorial, "World must decide who's worthy of trust".
"Who should the international community believe: the United States and its British allies, or Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein?"
"Powell, in a one-hour presentation, used electronic intercepts, satellite photos and reports from intelligence sources and defectors to portray Hussein as a despot determined to deceive the world community."
Saturday, February 8, 2002: Chicago Tribune, "Britain lifted old material for new Iraq report" (no version of this article appeared in the News-Gazette).
"The British government acknowledged Friday that large sections of it most recent report on Iraq, praised by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell as a "fine paper" in his speech to the UN on Wednesday, had been lifted from magazines and academic journals."
The British government posted the document to the prime minister's website and depicted it, "as an up-to-date and hightly unsettling assessment by the British intelligence services if Iraq's security apparatus and its efforets to hide it activities from weapons inspectors."
However, sections of the report "were plagiarized -- to the extent that even spelling and punctuation errors in the originals were reproduced in the government document."
The Guardian goes into more detail (see the first link, below):
"But on Channel 4 News [Thursday] night it was revealed that four of the report's 19 pages had been copied - with only minor editing and a few insertions - from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September.
"The content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged."
Not a word about any of this appeared in Champaign-Urbana's finest news source (cf. www.theonion.com), the News-Gazette.
#file_1#
John Foreman, News-Gazette Editor and General Manager
Instead, General Manager John Foreman used his Sunday column to issue personal attacks against Urbana City Council member Danielle Chynoweth for sponsoring an anti-war resolution which the council approved last Monday.
Foreman, a lock-step adherent to Bush's call to war, wrote, "Almost all of the sentiments [expressed during public comment periods at the Urbana City Council meetings] seemed more genuine than those of resolution sponsor Danielle Chynoweth. She insisted the isue was about what was good for Urbana and explained her thinking with a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland argument that the council was focusing atention on foreign affairs so the federal government could be free to concentrate on problems in Urbana."
He continues, "Do [war opponents] think Colin Powell is lying?"
Aside from betraying Foreman's expert ability to assess a woman's character (the FBI could probably use a lie detector like him), his screed raises a good question: should we trust what Colin Powell, George Bush, and the others tell us about Iraq?
Foreman has apparently forgotten the buildup to Gulf War I, during which a young Kuwaiti woman testified before the US Congress that Iraqi soldiers were removing babies from incubators in Kuwait and leaving them on the hospital room floor to die. A number of US Senators cited her testimony as a reason for their approving Bush I's Gulf War, but two years later, her story was shown to be a public relations lie, fabricated by Washington firm Hill & Knowlton for the exiled Kuwaiti royal family. The woman testifying was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. (See the second link below for a recent column about the lie, published in the Christian Science Monitor.)
I think it's fair to say that we don't know if Powell is lying, and that doesn't mean we should trust Saddam Hussein, either--despite Foreman's claim that war opponents must trust him. (Try to follow the logic yourself: you either support Bush or you're a terrorist/apologist for Saddam Hussein/child molester, etc.)
The public has dozens of reasons to question Bush's motives. His vice president's former company, Halliburton, is reaping windfall profits from services provided to the hundred thousand US troops in the middle east. Bush himself isn't a very trustworthy figure, given that his largest campaign contributor was close friend Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron, which suffered largest bankruptcy in US history, costing thousands of people their retirements and their jobs. Bush's Army Secretary, Thomas White, ran Enron's energy trading firm, which illegally manipulate energy markets and helped force brown-outs across the state of California.
And then there's the economy. Before Bush stopped the Bureau of Labor Statistics from reporting on Mass Layoffs in December, it was clear that the economy was sinking. In Bush's first two years, 69,000 jobs were lost every month. Unemployment has nearly doubled since he came into office, and Thursday's "good news" was that the low-wage retail sector forced 0.3 percent of the unemployed to stop claiming unemployment benefits.
How about our schools? Bush made a first-class public relations ordeal of signing the "No Child Left Behind Act", (a.k.a. the No Schools Left Standing Act), promising new resources to accompany new testing requirements. Yet, as Sen. Dick Durbin noted in January,
"As soon as the floodlights had dimmed and the television cameras had left, we learned something in this town of secrets, about a secret that had been kept by the administration. The secret was this: The President was prepared to sign the bill to approve the plan. The president was not prepared to put the Federal dollars on the table to make it work. As a consequence, we stand here today with mandates from this No Child Left Behind on school districts in States across America and the Bush White House refuses to fund those mandates."
This year, 85% of Illinois school districts are running deficits (Education Week, 11/6/02). In Urbana, the deficit is $3 million. Should we call on the federal government to support our schools? Do our schools lose out when the military budget rises to $400 billion, with a commitment to spend $2.7 TRILLION over the next 6 years? (www.cdi.org)
None of this merits comment from the News-Gazette, only bashing of people who might raise those issues.
News-Gazette managers implore us to support "independent local newspapers" like the News-Gazette. They cite declining readership as an alarming sign, and rather than look internally, they blame the nonreading public for their problem.
Another explanation for poor circulation may lie in the gross imbalance of the paper's editorial page, regular personal attacks on political leaders with whom they disagree (and coddling of those who they like), insults toward readers with whom they disagree, and selective omission of "inconvenient" facts for the paper's poor reputation with a significant portion of the public.
Recommendation for improvement at the News-Gazette? Fire the editors.
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See also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,890898,00.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.html
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Comments
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Re: Gazette's Latest, Latest Whopping Omission |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Feb 2003
Modified: 11:30:17 AM |
The News-Gazette always manages to one-up itself when it comes to yellow journalism of the Republican type. After hearing news reports yesterday about a new plan to be advanced by France and Germany to increase the size of the UN inspection teams in Iraq, as well as supplementing it with armed peacekeepers and reconnaisance flights, I expected to read at least something about the proposed plan in the Sunday morning edition.
What readers got was Rumsfeld's "livid" (as described in the NY Times, not the N-G) reaction to the new plan with bitter charges against these Europeans efforts to avoid war by giving the inspection teams the time to complete their job (which is what the US _claims_ to want) and more teeth to make it work. Oh, and there is a Henry Kissinger screed against Europe on the front of the editorial section. But _absolutely_ nothing about the reports of the new plan itself, which will make it obvious to the world whether the US really wants Iraq's disarmament -- or simply a war to seize its oilfields.
Then Foreman launches into a new round of Urbana-bashing claiming that the time spent on the resolution against war might have been better spent on finding a new business to replace the soon to close K-Mart.
Foreman does not even bother to explain the obviuos contradiction in why a government, which under capitalism is supposed to let market forces decide what business comes to a community, should be dabbling in getting busines started in Urbana. I guess this is because he really feels that bringing up the "wonder of the market" should only be invoked when government is asked to to "interfere in the market" when it is petitioned to make paying public workers at least a Living Wage official policy. Foreman is a man who never saw a corporation that didn't need another handout from government and never saw a worker who didn't simply need to be told that they should be happy that they even get paid the minimum wage.
The News-Gazette, never a paper that lets the facts stand in the way of the jingoistic desires of its editorial board. |
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Re: Gazette's Latest Whopping Omission |
by anon
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Feb 2003
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The SnoozeGazoo is a business, serving the largest market in Champ.County, the conservative, provincial segment. They have their place, and it's to tell their customers what they want to hear. Standard procedure in communities like ours.
From where I sit, they don't even register on the(my) radar.
I know I'm not saying anything y'all didn't already know, just wanted to vent. |
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Re: Gazette's Latest Whopping Omission |
by RDR
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Feb 2003
Modified: 01:16:14 PM |
Isn't it a newspaper's job to assume the possibility that their sources are lying and do adequate fact checking?
Bush Sr. lied to the Saudies with false satallite photos of a massive Iraqi military build-up on their border to get them on board for the first Gulf war. These were later proved to be fake.
If Powell can find photos of decomination trucks, which looked like vans to me, why couldn't he get satellite photos of the mobile labatories? After all they look moch more distinctive than those decomtamination vans.
Almost nothing he said is verifyable by a neutral party. If he had adequate evidence to start a war, killing tens of thousands, wouldn't he want to invite verifycation?
He could have given the name of the Iraqi defectors and detainees. We can provide their safty after all we do it all the time in the witness protection program, and the detainees are in our prison camp.
Can we trust the word of detainees? Wouldn't you say anything your captors want to hear to get out of the prison camp? Not to mention to stop the torcher.
Also wasn't the US in voilaton of the UN resolution by witholding this "evidence" of weapons of mass distructions from the weapons inspectors?
And about Chynoweth's asserion that this war will cost Urbana, how about proving that it will help Urbana. Well, on second thaought, it might help Danville where the VA hosbpitol is located when the vetrans come back with radiation poisioning from depleated uranium.
I fear America was once agan snoockered by a confident sounding man in a smart suit. Remember Ollie North? |
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