Wheat from the Chaff Blog

The recent Israeli campaign in Gaza officially began on December 27, 2008. It started with many days of aerial bombardment of the Gaza territory, and then intensified on January 3, 2009, when the Israeli army invaded. 13 Israelis and over 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the fighting, which finally ended on January 21, 2009, when Israel withdrew its forces from the Palestinan territory. For a summary of the war, see the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict

One of the really fascinating aspects of the war was who the western media portrays as the aggressor; not surprisingly, they blame the rocket-firing militants of the Hamas. There’s a problem with this claim. It isn’t true. The first side to break the June 2008 ceasefire was Israel. On Nov. 4, 2008, the Israeli military crossed into Gaza and destroyed what they claimed was a Hamas tunnel. The Israelis killed 6 Hamas militants in the raid.

Of course, something else was going on on November 4th: the American election. So, while the New York Times did report the raid, it was clearly a day when that piece of news would be forgotten by the euphoria of the election. Indeed, the news item is so generic that it hardly emphasizes the raid as the first major violation of the June ceasefire.

Moreover, it didn’t stop major new organizations in the West from blaming Hamas when the Israelis started their invasion 7 weeks later. Even though most of the rocket attacks occurred after November 4, 2008, these attacks were the prime reason for laying the blame on Hamas. On Dec. 29, 2009, the New York Times argued that “Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.” The vast majority of other major western newspapers concurred, and since then most of the focus has been on Hamas’ culpability.

A significant contrarian view came from the official UN Report, but of course Israel, the US and the western media condemned it:

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/48e5e2be2.html

Though the twisting of this story has been noticed by many people in the alternative press, I first heard about the inconsistency via, of all places, CNN (though CNN has since ignored the issue, and even in this report one of the commentators tried his weaselly-best to mitigate the impact of Israel’s responsibility):

The connection to the American election was pointed out to me on a Rabble.Ca podcast. I strongly recommend it:

http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/redeye/freedom-speech-under-siege

Florida used to be the golden child of free-wheeling neo-liberal capitalism: low taxes, little regulation and scant attention paid to the future. But now that people need help from their government, Floridians are reaping what they (didn’t) sow. Here’s a selection from a recent article:

……………………..

By Neil Macdonald
CBC News
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/10/f-rfa-macdonald.html

… Gary Mormino, a professor at the University of South Florida, has compared the economy here to a giant Ponzi scheme, the confidence game in which investors are paid with the money of new investors.

The Ponzi State. The phrase is catching on and it’s making Mormino famous.

He says Florida’s economic setup has always depended on ever more people, often retirees on fixed incomes, arriving from out of state with money to spend. Since 1970, the state has grown by an average of 350,000 new residents a year — or a thousand a day. To accommodate them, politicians in Tallahassee basically let developers build whatever they wanted just about anywhere they wanted. Usually, that has meant apartment towers and minimally inspected cinder-block homes on concrete slabs. The construction barely paused and neither did the waves of tourists — as many as 80 million vacationers a year, all ready to pay hotel taxes and rental taxes and restaurant taxes and sales taxes.

Now, everything’s flat. In fact, more residents might be leaving than arriving. And the tourists are staying away. For Mormino, Florida is just a palm tree fantasy with a tax structure “that was insane.” And now, he says, “we’re paralyzed.” Unemployment is nightmarish and rising. Tax-hating Floridians, turning to their government for help, are finding a stunted, business-driven entity with nothing to offer. “When people began looking behind the palm trees and into the account books,” says Mormino, all they discovered was “massive fraud and lack of oversight.” …

Though it’s nothing new to those who analyze Canada’s media industry, the right-wing and pro-business nature of Canada’s media may not be understood by the average Canadian. The following is a fairly surprising op-ed from Lawrence Martin, a stalwart with BCE’s The Globe and Mail (which, as Canadian political scientist Rand Dyck has observed, “tends to set the agenda” for “top-level decision makers and media executives”). Martin’s piece essentially confirms what critics of Canada’s media system have been arguing for decades: there really isn’t a left-wing, progressive media voice in this country, unless you make an effort and seek out under-funded sources that are well beyond the mainstream. This lack of voice is the flip-side of another reality: Canada has one of the most concentrated media industries in the western world (except maybe Italy), and Vancouver might be the most monopolized media market on the continent.

The comments regarding CBC are particularly interesting, as our federally funded broadcaster is often cited by conservatives as proof of media diversity. Apart from the fact that the CBC lacks any newspaper – the preferred choice of the 20% of Canadians who follow politics on a daily basis – CBC TV has serious ratings problems. This can be confirmed by BBM Canada, Canada’s main surveyor of media viewership. And, as Martin points out, CBC TV’s key news celebrities are definitely not steering us to port.

What is still unclear is the impact of progressive media voices that take advantage of new technologies. CBC’s website is apparently well used, but it doesn’t appear to be anymore left-wing than its television cousin, and is certainly not as strident as The National Post is on the other side of the spectrum. There are other promising progressive voices, but nothing like The Nation in the United States or the The Guardian in the United Kindom. Included on my blog are links to progressive news sources (along with some not-so-progressive sources), and I can only hope that they will effect a positive change in the future.

By LAWRENCE MARTIN

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail
April 2, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT

These are – or should be – heady times for the political left. It’s when the big economic engines falter that bleeding-heart parties surge. It was in the 1930s when the CCF, which later became the NDP, was born. Even our Communist Party enjoyed some popularity then.

With today’s economic tremors, government activism is the big deal everywhere. The New Democrats couldn’t ask for a better philosophical turn.

And yet, they’re stagnant. In the low teens in the polls, they have actually lost ground since last fall. It’s hard to figure. They were onto the economic file early, issuing dire warnings and calls for action. And it turns out they were on the mark a good deal of the time, occasionally even prophetic.

But there are no apparent dividends in Dippersville. No groundswell of support. Few praiseworthy headlines. No heightened profile in a media wedded to the two main parties. Without a media proprietor of any size in Canada hailing from the left, there is no one to sing the NDP’s song.

So even with capitalism on its derrière, even with the Liberals opening up space by moving more to the centre, the left gets no traction. Jack Layton can stand there all day and pound the blue-collar bible and get only minor mention in the next day’s press.

Charlie Angus, the Northern Ontario NDPer and one of the best MPs in the Commons, wonders what the party has to do to get credit. “We stood here year after year being ridiculed when we warned of the dangers of deregulation, or when we talked of the need to have a backup plan for pensions. We pressed the government on the need to have an auto-sector strategy and that was something that was absolutely ridiculed by the Conservatives. It was the same with infrastructure spending.”

On Afghanistan, Mr. Angus noted how the New Democrats were the most skeptical in Parliament. “I mean we were attacked in the newspapers for saying where’s the long-term plan, for saying how are we going to win this, for saying we can’t win this strictly militarily.” On Iraq, Mr. Angus added, it’s been much the same.

All in all, not a bad record. “Much of what we were saying is now common wisdom.” But no uptick and, in a party better organized and funded than ever, a bit of bewilderment.

There are some reasons that may explain it. The NDP is still saddled with a dated image. For all his strengths, Jack Layton can’t tap into any populist anger. His party’s role in last fall’s coalition may have taken a toll. On policy, other parties are stealing some of the left’s thunder. The Liberals have a new, more popular leader. Unemployment numbers, while rapidly climbing, are not as bad as the double-digit figures of not so long ago.

There’s also a lesson the left should have learned by now. To change the voting culture, you have to change the media culture. Without a bigger voice in the fourth estate, the left’s chances of making a breakthrough are minimal. The Reform/Alliance party eventually hit pay dirt, becoming the dominant force on the conservative side, because big media promoted its religion.

“We should get the CLC [Canadian Labour Congress] to buy the National Post,” one of Mr. Layton’s officials was saying this week. It was said half jokingly, but it’s the kind of thing the New Democrats need take seriously. There are fewer left-side media voices in the country than probably ever. The Toronto Star has the odd left-wing columnist but is predominantly Liberal. The CBC has a leftish reputation, but try finding anyone among its top TV commentators who trumpets NDP values. Rex Murphy leans right, Andrew Coyne is predominantly conservative, Allan Gregg has been anchored in the Tory party for decades and, among Chantal Hébert’s many colours, pink is not prominent.

The NDP has a good public relations team and a media-conscious leader. But even with prevailing economic orthodoxies shamefaced, New Democrats can’t break the journalistic ritual that sees Liberals and Conservatives with a stranglehold on coverage.

Until they do, until they alter the media perspective, until their supporters gain ownership of media properties – as happened on the right with Fox News and CanWest Global – not much will change.