Search Results

The Steven Spielberg movie “The Post” opens today.

MARK HERTSGAARD, mark at markhertsgaard.com, @markhertsgaard
Hertsgaard’s books include On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.

COLMAN McCARTHY, cmccarthy at starpower.net
A former Washington Post columnist, McCarthy is founder and director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C., and the author of several books including I’d Rather Teach Peace.

He said today: “As with all corporations, and as with all individuals, The Washington Post, whether headed by Katharine [Graham] or Jeff Bezos, is a mix of flaws and virtues. Its most grating negative was the early and avid editorial support it gave to the U.S. military invasions of Vietnam in the mid-1960s and the invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2002. Its virtues included giving space to conscientious and anti-guff reporters like Morton Mintz and William Greider. As a pacifist, I was privileged to be given space on the Post’s op-ed page and other parts of the paper from 1969 to 1997. I don’t ever recall an editor spiking a column because it was too far to the left.”

Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, recently wrote the piece “The Other Side of the Post’s Katharine Graham” for Consortium News, which states: “Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was indeed laudable, helping to expose lies that had greased the wheels of the war machinery with such horrific consequences in Vietnam. But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for ‘The Post’ will change that awful truth.”

Ben Bagdikian, the Washington Post editor who actually obtained a copy of the Pentagon Papers from whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, left the paper shortly afterward, criticizing the paper; see his 1976 piece for the Washington Monthly: “Maximizing Profits at the Washington Post.” Bagdikian appeared on many Institute for Public Accuracy news releases before his death in 2016. See his memoir, Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession. Also see Sanford Ungar’s “The Papers Papers.”

EDMUND GHAREEB
Professor at American University, Ghareeb is author of several books including The Kurdish Question in Iraq and The Kurdish Nationalist Movement. Ghareeb can assess the strategic interests of the various political operators.
More Information

SUREYA SAYADI, MD
An Iraqi Kurdish doctor and academic now living in the U.S., Sayadi is an activist and closely monitors Kurdish media. She stresses the human impacts of the conflict.
More Information

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Professor emeritus and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Bagdikian is most widely known for his book The Media Monopoly. He is also author of Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession, which is in part about his Armenian heritage — Bagdikian’s family survived a massacre in present-day Turkey.

He said today: “The face-off with Turkey over their decades-long fight against their own independence-seeking Kurds, has become a multi-sided dilemma for all parties. Kurds have lived for centuries in the mountains that straddle the Turkish-Iraqi border. In Iraq, the Kurds are among the U.S. Army’s most stable friends, and also occupy the other end of Iraq in its oil rich region. Dilemma No. 1. But Turkey hates the Kurds and hints it might stop cooperating with the U.S. Dilemma No. 2. Turkey needs U.S. help to enter the European Union. Dilemma No. 3. But the U.S. needs the big Turkish airfield to supply Iraq. Dilemma No. 4. Bush has threatened Iran if it does not stop nuclear development and Cheney has raised the threats of military action against Iran. But Iran has oil and is Shiite. Dilemma No. 5. In Iraq various Shiites are our ‘friends.’ But so is Israel a U.S. friend. Dilemma No. 6. If we move militarily against Iran, it has missiles it can send into Israel. Israel could fire back. Dilemmas 7 and 8.

“It is a mess with no way to satisfy all the conflicting problems created when Bush decided he would try to dominate the entire Middle East.”
More Information

VERA BEAUDIN SAEEDPOUR
Available for in-depth interviews, Saeedpour is editor of Kurdish Life and director of the Kurdish Library. She said today: “The notion that the PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party] is inaccessible is simply ludicrous. Scores of Western journalists have visited their mountain retreats. …

“Ironic. The PKK is on the State Department’s terrorist list; the U.S. claims it doesn’t ‘talk with terrorists.’ But the U.S. — and Israel — aids and abets the PKK through local Iraqi Kurds. And why? The PKK arm, Pejak, attacks Iran. For services rendered, while the PKK attacks Turkey the administration winks and has kept the Turkish military from retaliating. …

“For giving safe haven to the PKK/Pejak, for doing Washington’s bidding in Baghdad, [Massoud] Barzani and [Jalal] Talabani have been more than amply rewarded. In 2003 the U.S. military facilitated their takeover of ‘security’ in Kirkuk and even in Mosul. Now, under the pretext of fighting al Qaeda, units of the U.S. military have been joining Kurdish fighting units (veiled as members of the ‘Iraqi’ military) in ethnically cleansing ‘contested areas’ of non-Kurds in advance of a referendum that will determine under whose jurisdiction these parts of Diyala and Nineveh provinces will fall.

“Perhaps it all depends on who’s doing the cleansing. In 1992 Armenians in Nagorno Karabagh aided by the Republic of Armenia ethnically cleansed Red Kurdistan, the largest and oldest Kurdish community in the Caucasus — 160,000 Kurds simply disappeared. With few exceptions, Kurds elsewhere said nothing. Kurdish Life did a detailed report on the issue and distributed it to members of Congress, not least Rep. Tom Lantos, Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Joe Biden, all still in office. President Bill Clinton did nothing. Instead, Armenians were rewarded with direct U.S. foreign aid.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

AP reports that “Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, said Tuesday it received an unsolicited bid from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to buy the company for $5 billion.”

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Author of The New Media Monopoly and professor emeritus and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Bagdikian has worked as an editor at major metropolitan dailies.

He said today: “If Murdoch gets control of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and if he follows the pattern of his past acquisitions, he will use the Wall Street Journal to serve his own purposes, financial and political. …

“Every media property Murdoch has owned has been put to his political purposes, as is demonstrated by how he uses the Fox networks to project right-wing politics [into] news and commentary and to cheapen the national culture.

“It would seem impossible that the original Bancroft family owners would sell to a man like Murdoch, but by now second, third, and maybe fourth generations of that family have shares among the children and grandchildren who may not have the original owners’ emotional investment in the Journal. If this is so, it would be a repetition of what happened to the Pulitzer and Courier Journal papers when heirs preferred to sell to high-paying (and politically conservative) owners like Gannett, in return for millions instead of earlier annual dividends.

“One hopes that the original Bancroft family tradition has survived the decades. Otherwise, the present editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which already is the most conservative in the country, will also get into the news.”
More Information

STEVE YOUNT
President of the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees, which represents employees of Dow Jones across the United States and Canada, Yount said today: “Mr. Murdoch has shown a willingness to crush quality and independence, and there is no reason to think he would handle Dow Jones or the Journal any differently. Despite our differences of opinion with current management, we strongly encourage the Bancrofts to continue to stand up for the institution’s independence, and to walk away from this offer.

“Moreover, the massive premium Mr. Murdoch is offering suggests only one recourse to make the acquisition profitable: gutting the enterprise and slashing the staff that make it the leading financial news organization.”
More Information

Further background on Murdoch

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, was announced today as a recipient of this year’s Right Livelihood Award, sometimes referred to as the “alternative Nobel Peace Prize.”

The award jury noted about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: “In October 1969 he started copying this and passing it to Senator Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When Fulbright did nothing, and after the invasion of Laos and Cambodia, he gave it to the New York Times, then the Washington Post and, when injunctions not to publish rained down on these papers, to seventeen other newspapers. The Pentagon Papers were out. They showed that the government had misled the U.S. public about the war in Vietnam. …

“President Nixon was so concerned that Ellsberg might have even more sensitive papers that he would leak, that he illegally arranged the burglary of Ellsberg’s former psychoanalyst, hoping to find information with which to blackmail Ellsberg into silence. This became part of the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation and, ultimately, the end of the Vietnam War. …

“In 2004 Ellsberg founded the Truth-Telling Project to encourage the insiders to expose official lying.” [More information]

Other recipients of the award this year are Brazilian Chico Whitaker Ferreira, who helped found the World Social Forum, and Indian social activist Ruth Manorama.

DANIEL ELLSBERG
Ellsberg said today: “I’m hopeful that my receiving the Award for my own past and current efforts to blow the whistle on war or on deeply undemocratic and dangerous government activity will encourage others to do likewise, not in hopes of personal reward but because this unusual public recognition makes them aware that doing so can be widely regarded as ‘right livelihood,’ as the right thing to do, despite official condemnation and personal costs to themselves and their own families.”

Ellsberg’s most recent article, “The Next War,” is in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine and calls on government officials to leak documents regarding war plans on Iran. In the piece, Ellsberg writes of his regret for not leaking the Pentagon Papers earlier, and his wish that Bush administration officials like Richard Clarke had shared crucial information with the public before the invasion of Iraq. Ellsberg is author of the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
More Information

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Bagdikian was an editor at the Washington Post and was leaked portions of the Pentagon Papers by Ellsberg in 1971. He said today: “I’m glad this is getting the recognition it deserves. It’s timely because we’re right back with our government lying about a … war and doing it by violating not just the Geneva Conventions, but also the Constitution. It’s a reminder that Ellsberg was justified in what he did in … the Vietnam War. We can never take for granted that the government has a right to tell us that to criticize is to be unpatriotic. We need people to stand up to the government when we disagree and fight to preserve the constitutional rights that are in jeopardy today.”

Author of the groundbreaking book The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian is professor emeritus and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
More Information

MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maguire wrote today: “I would like to congratulate Dan Ellsberg on being awarded the Right Livelihood Award. His courage and self-sacrifice for humanity’s sake, when he followed his conscience and revealed to the World the Pentagon Papers, is an example and a challenge to all those who today know the truth of governments’ plans for war, invasion and occupation of other people’s countries. The war plans made and carried out, undemocratically, by a political and military elite, in contradiction to the wishes of the World’s people as represented by the United Nations, must be exposed. Those who have such information should be encouraged and supported to make public such information. It will not be easy but the consequences of their silence continue to condemn many thousands of people, both now and in the future, to needless death and suffering.”

Maguire founded the Northern Ireland Peace Movement, which is now known as Community of Peace People.
More Information

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

AP is reporting that “the McClatchy Co. has reached a deal to buy Knight Ridder Inc., the second-largest U.S. newspaper publisher, for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock.”

The following analysts are available for interviews:

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Author of the groundbreaking book The Media Monopoly and professor emeritus and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Bagdikian has worked as an editor at major metropolitan dailies. He said today: “In the long view, this can be seen as probably the highest-quality news group being sold because of Wall Street. Big banks, which are major stockholders in Knight Ridder, don’t care about public information, but about making as much money as possible. Because of these pressures, we have more commercially-oriented information and less public information, civic information. This forces the average citizen to be sophisticated in the Internet and other sources to find the crucial information that is needed to create an informed electorate in a democracy.”
More Information

STEVE RENDALL
Senior analyst at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, Rendall said today: “The loss of a media outlet is bad for journalism and for democracy because it decreases the number of voices in the debate. This is especially clear in the case of Knight Ridder, whose Washington bureau was one of the only mainstream journalism outfits to consistently challenge the government in the run-up to war in Iraq.”
More Information

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

In the largest corporate merger in history, America Online and Time Warner announced a $350 billion deal today. The following analysts are available for interviews:

ROBERT McCHESNEY
Professor at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois and author of “Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times,” McChesney, who participated in a CNN discussion on the future of media with Time Warner head Gerald Levin a week ago, said today: “This deal culminates five years of frantic deal-making that have seen our media culture come to be dominated by less than 10 transnational media firms operating in largely non-competitive markets…. It hammers the last nail in the coffin of those utopians who regarded the Internet as providing the mechanism to radically change our media culture for the better. The Internet was established by massive public subsidies and now, without a shred of public debate, the system has become the plaything of a handful of billionaire investors who use their power to commercially carpet bomb every possible moment of our lives.”

JILL NELSON
Author of “Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience” and a columnist for MSNBC, Nelson said: “This may be good for business, but it’s bad for people and the free flow of information. In our lust for profits, we have forgotten democratic principles. This can only increase the public’s deep skepticism of the quality of the news.”

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Author of “The Media Monopoly” and professor emeritus and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Bagdikian said: “This acquisition is standard in the strategy of media corporations that no significant media company in the country will remain independent.”

JEFF CHESTER
Executive director of the Center for Media Education, Chester said: “[AOL head] Steve Case is the Benedict Arnold of the digital age. Now that he has bought himself a piece of broadband cable access, he is no longer advocating for public policy to ensure open access to the Internet.”

FRANK BEACHAM
A writer specializing in technology criticism, Beacham said: “AOL has focused on making the Internet into a shopping mall. It also has a miserable track record of keeping people’s information private. In the hands of Time Warner, that could be more dangerous. This merger demonstrates the failure of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to provide competition…. AOL was concerned that it didn’t have access to broadband cable lines; now they have bought that access.”
More Information

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

A nationwide outcry is growing as the Pacifica Foundation continues its lockout of staff and volunteers at radio station KPFA in the San Francisco area. A week ago, the foundation’s management halted the station’s evening newscast in mid-sentence while the news anchor was reporting on the latest developments in the KPFA-Pacifica conflict. Since then, archival tapes have been airing. Among those who can be called for interviews are:

MATTHEW LASAR
Author of Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Temple University Press, 1999), Lasar said: “The Pacifica Foundation is clearly abandoning the most basic precept of community broadcasting — that those who work at and support a station have something to do with its policies. Pacifica’s actions here are unprecedented in the organization’s history.”
More Information

AILEEN ALFANDARY
News co-director at KPFA, Alfandary said: “There are disturbing indications that Pacifica is considering the sale of KPFA’s or [New York City station] WBAI’s lucrative frequencies. Equally troubling is that Mary Frances Berry, the chair of Pacifica’s board and of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, would use her Justice Department connections in an apparent attempt to get the Berkeley police to crack down on nonviolent protesters.”

ANDREA BUFFA
Executive director of Media Alliance, a 22-year-old media accountability organization based in San Francisco, Buffa said: “The Pacifica Foundation really underestimated the breadth and depth of support for KPFA.”
More Information

J. IMANI
A member of KPFA local advisory board, Imani said: “Berry wants to diversify Pacifica from the top down; we’ve been working to diversify it from the bottom up.”

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Author of The Media Monopoly, a former top editor at the Washington Post and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Bagdikian said: “The national board has only limited time to reverse the present course of events if they wish to preserve Pacifica and what it stands for.”

MARY FRANCES BERRY
The chair of the Pacifica Foundation, Berry did not respond to IPA’s request for comment.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167