Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Hacktivists come to Wikileaks defense
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/08/AR2010120804038.html
Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures
http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/public-accuracy-press-release#more-451
Ellsberg: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”
by MICHAEL ELLSBERG on DECEMBER 8, 2010
[Below is a news release put out by the Institute for Public Accuracy, co-signed by Daniel Ellsberg]
Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures
WASHINGTON – December 7 – The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.
How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that’s right, Russia’s Pravda): “What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic … After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …”
So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. … the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
Odd, isn’t it, that it takes a Pravda commentator to drive home the point that the Obama administration is on the wrong side of history. Most of our own media are demanding that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange be hunted down — with some of the more bloodthirsty politicians calling for his murder. The corporate-and-government dominated media are apprehensive over the challenge that WikiLeaks presents. Perhaps deep down they know, as Dickens put it, “There is nothing so strong … as the simple truth.”
As part of their attempt to blacken WikiLeaks and Assange, pundit commentary over the weekend has tried to portray Assange’s exposure of classified materials as very different from — and far less laudable than — what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg strongly rejects the mantra “Pentagon Papers good; WikiLeaks material bad.” He continues: “That’s just a cover for people who don’t want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”
Motivation? WikiLeaks’ reported source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.” Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: “I want people to see the truth … because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.
There is nothing to suggest that WikiLeaks/Assange’s motives were any different. Granted, mothers are not the most impartial observers. Yet, given what we have seen of Assange’s behavior, there was the ring of truth in Assange’s mother’s recent remarks in an interview with an Australian newspaper. She put it this way: “Living by what you believe in and standing up for something is a good thing. … He sees what he is doing as a good thing in the world, fighting baddies, if you like.”
That may sound a bit quixotic, but Assange and his associates appear the opposite of benighted. Still, with the Pentagon PR man Geoff Morrell and even Attorney General Eric Holder making thinly disguised threats of extrajudicial steps, Assange may be in personal danger.
The media: again, the media is key. No one has said it better than Monseñor Romero of El Salvador, who just before he was assassinated 25 years ago warned, “The corruption of the press is part of our sad reality, and it reveals the complicity of the oligarchy.” Sadly, that is also true of the media situation in America today.
The big question is not whether Americans can “handle the truth.” We believe they can. The challenge is to make the truth available to them in a straightforward way so they can draw their own conclusions — an uphill battle given the dominance of the mainstream media, most of which have mounted a hateful campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks.
So far, the question of whether Americans can “handle the truth” has been an academic rather than an experience-based one, because Americans have had very little access to the truth. Now, however, with the WikiLeaks disclosures, they do. Indeed, the classified messages from the Army and the State Department released by WikiLeaks are, quite literally, “ground truth.”
How to inform American citizens? As a step in that direction, on October 23 we “Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence” (see below) presented our annual award for integrity to Julian Assange. He accepted the honor “on behalf of our sources, without which WikiLeaks’ contributions are of no significance.” In presenting the award, we noted that many around the world are deeply indebted to truth-tellers like WikiLeaks and its sources.
Here is a brief footnote: Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) is a group of former CIA colleagues and other admirers of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. (For more, please see here.)
Sam did speak truth to power on Vietnam, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a truth-teller exemplifying Sam Adams’ courage, persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences. Previous recipients include:
-Coleen Rowley of the FBI
-Katharine Gun of British Intelligence
-Sibel Edmonds of the FBI
-Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan
-Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army
-Frank Grevil, Maj., Danish Army Intelligence
-Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.)
-Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
“There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.”
– Luke 12:2-3
The following former awardees and other associates have signed the above statement; some are available for interviews:
DANIEL ELLSBERG
A former government analyst, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. He was an admirer of Sam Adams when they were both working on Vietnam and in March 1968 disclosed to the New York Times some of Adams’ accurate analysis, helping head off reinforcement of 206,000 additional troops into South Vietnam and a widening of the war at that time to neighboring countries.
FRANK GREVIL
Grevil, a former Danish intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark’s Prime Minister (now NATO Secretary General) disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMD in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark.
KATHARINE GUN
Gun is a former British government employee who faced two years imprisonment in England for leaking a U.S. intelligence memo before the invasion of Iraq. The memo indicated that the U.S. had mounted a spying “surge” against U.N. Security Council delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval for an Iraq war resolution. The leaked memo — published by the British newspaper The Observer on March 2, 2003 — was big news in parts of the world, but almost ignored in the United States. The U.S. government then failed to obtain a U.N. resolution approving war, but still proceeded with the invasion.
DAVID MacMICHAEL
MacMichael is a former CIA analyst. He resigned in the 1980s when he came to the conclusion that the CIA was slanting intelligence on Central America for political reasons. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
RAY McGOVERN
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, whose duties included preparing and briefing the President’s Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
CRAIG MURRAY
Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, was fired from his job when he objected to Uzbeks being tortured to gain “intelligence” on “terrorists.” Upon receiving his Sam Adams award, Murray said, “I would rather die than let someone be tortured in an attempt to give me some increment of security.” Observers have noted that Murray was subjected to similar character assassination techniques as Julian Assange is now encountering to discredit him.
COLEEN ROWLEY
Rowley, a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She recently co-wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, “WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if? Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks.”
LARRY WILKERSON
Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who criticized what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal.” See recent interviews
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
Ellsberg: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”
by MICHAEL ELLSBERG on DECEMBER 8, 2010
[Below is a news release put out by the Institute for Public Accuracy, co-signed by Daniel Ellsberg]
Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures
WASHINGTON – December 7 – The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.
How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that’s right, Russia’s Pravda): “What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic … After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …”
So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. … the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
Odd, isn’t it, that it takes a Pravda commentator to drive home the point that the Obama administration is on the wrong side of history. Most of our own media are demanding that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange be hunted down — with some of the more bloodthirsty politicians calling for his murder. The corporate-and-government dominated media are apprehensive over the challenge that WikiLeaks presents. Perhaps deep down they know, as Dickens put it, “There is nothing so strong … as the simple truth.”
As part of their attempt to blacken WikiLeaks and Assange, pundit commentary over the weekend has tried to portray Assange’s exposure of classified materials as very different from — and far less laudable than — what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg strongly rejects the mantra “Pentagon Papers good; WikiLeaks material bad.” He continues: “That’s just a cover for people who don’t want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”
Motivation? WikiLeaks’ reported source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.” Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: “I want people to see the truth … because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.
There is nothing to suggest that WikiLeaks/Assange’s motives were any different. Granted, mothers are not the most impartial observers. Yet, given what we have seen of Assange’s behavior, there was the ring of truth in Assange’s mother’s recent remarks in an interview with an Australian newspaper. She put it this way: “Living by what you believe in and standing up for something is a good thing. … He sees what he is doing as a good thing in the world, fighting baddies, if you like.”
That may sound a bit quixotic, but Assange and his associates appear the opposite of benighted. Still, with the Pentagon PR man Geoff Morrell and even Attorney General Eric Holder making thinly disguised threats of extrajudicial steps, Assange may be in personal danger.
The media: again, the media is key. No one has said it better than Monseñor Romero of El Salvador, who just before he was assassinated 25 years ago warned, “The corruption of the press is part of our sad reality, and it reveals the complicity of the oligarchy.” Sadly, that is also true of the media situation in America today.
The big question is not whether Americans can “handle the truth.” We believe they can. The challenge is to make the truth available to them in a straightforward way so they can draw their own conclusions — an uphill battle given the dominance of the mainstream media, most of which have mounted a hateful campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks.
So far, the question of whether Americans can “handle the truth” has been an academic rather than an experience-based one, because Americans have had very little access to the truth. Now, however, with the WikiLeaks disclosures, they do. Indeed, the classified messages from the Army and the State Department released by WikiLeaks are, quite literally, “ground truth.”
How to inform American citizens? As a step in that direction, on October 23 we “Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence” (see below) presented our annual award for integrity to Julian Assange. He accepted the honor “on behalf of our sources, without which WikiLeaks’ contributions are of no significance.” In presenting the award, we noted that many around the world are deeply indebted to truth-tellers like WikiLeaks and its sources.
Here is a brief footnote: Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) is a group of former CIA colleagues and other admirers of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. (For more, please see here.)
Sam did speak truth to power on Vietnam, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a truth-teller exemplifying Sam Adams’ courage, persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences. Previous recipients include:
-Coleen Rowley of the FBI
-Katharine Gun of British Intelligence
-Sibel Edmonds of the FBI
-Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan
-Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army
-Frank Grevil, Maj., Danish Army Intelligence
-Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.)
-Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
“There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.”
– Luke 12:2-3
The following former awardees and other associates have signed the above statement; some are available for interviews:
DANIEL ELLSBERG
A former government analyst, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. He was an admirer of Sam Adams when they were both working on Vietnam and in March 1968 disclosed to the New York Times some of Adams’ accurate analysis, helping head off reinforcement of 206,000 additional troops into South Vietnam and a widening of the war at that time to neighboring countries.
FRANK GREVIL
Grevil, a former Danish intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark’s Prime Minister (now NATO Secretary General) disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMD in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark.
KATHARINE GUN
Gun is a former British government employee who faced two years imprisonment in England for leaking a U.S. intelligence memo before the invasion of Iraq. The memo indicated that the U.S. had mounted a spying “surge” against U.N. Security Council delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval for an Iraq war resolution. The leaked memo — published by the British newspaper The Observer on March 2, 2003 — was big news in parts of the world, but almost ignored in the United States. The U.S. government then failed to obtain a U.N. resolution approving war, but still proceeded with the invasion.
DAVID MacMICHAEL
MacMichael is a former CIA analyst. He resigned in the 1980s when he came to the conclusion that the CIA was slanting intelligence on Central America for political reasons. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
RAY McGOVERN
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, whose duties included preparing and briefing the President’s Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
CRAIG MURRAY
Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, was fired from his job when he objected to Uzbeks being tortured to gain “intelligence” on “terrorists.” Upon receiving his Sam Adams award, Murray said, “I would rather die than let someone be tortured in an attempt to give me some increment of security.” Observers have noted that Murray was subjected to similar character assassination techniques as Julian Assange is now encountering to discredit him.
COLEEN ROWLEY
Rowley, a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She recently co-wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, “WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if? Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks.”
LARRY WILKERSON
Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who criticized what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal.” See recent interviews
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
Monday, November 22, 2010
Dangerous hatred in the US?
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/09/2009918102535246265.html
Dangerous hatred in the US?
Mainstream media begins to debate whether racism has been fueling the healthcare debate.
Rob Reynolds, senior Washington correspondent Last Modified: 18 Sep 2009 19:17
Email ArticlePrint ArticleShare ArticleSend Feedback
Obama's healthcare reform proposals have been met with such vitriol that some fringe groups have compared him to Hitler and the Antichrist [GALLO/GETTY]
Michelle Bachmann, the US Republican Representative for Minnesota, tells a radio interviewer she believes Barack Obama, the US president, plans to set up mandatory "re-education camps" to indoctrinate young Americans.
Glenn Beck, a television personality working at the Fox news network, says on the air that Obama is a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people".
Comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler, an Iowa man named Tom Eisenhower speaks up at a town hall meeting held by Republican Senator Charles Grassley, and says "The president of the United States, that's who you should be concerned about."
"I'd take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me."
Retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson, a prolific writer and speaker about conspiracy theories involving devilish sex cults and the Illuminati, tells a gathering of right-wing "Patriots" in Florida that the federal government has set up 10,000 internment camps across the country and is storing thousands of guillotines for mass executions.
Mel Sanger, a self-described "political researcher", offers visitors to his website a $24.97-report full of "cutting edge evidence" that Obama is the biblical Antichrist.
Tens of thousands of right-wing demonstrators march on the US Capitol waving signs reading "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy" and calling Obama a "bloodsucking Muslim alien".
Steven Anderson, the pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, preached a sermon last month entitled "Why I hate Barack Obama", in which he declared, "I'm going to pray he dies and goes to hell".
Old-fashioned racism
On August 22, I posted an article on this website (Fear, racism at town hall meetings) about the element of old-fashioned retrograde racism running through the outpouring of venom and hatred for Obama in town hall style meetings, ostensibly over his healthcare reform plans.
I received a lot of feedback from you, the readers - the overwhelming majority of which was positive, with a few obscenity-laced screeds thrown in.
The mainstream media in the US have been slow to catch up on the story of white racial hatred for Obama. But now the debate over the racist roots of the anti-Obama upwelling is out in the open, discussed on television networks and in newspapers.
"Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it," writes The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
"There's something loose in the land, an ugliness and hatred directed toward Barack Obama, the nation's first African American president, that takes the breath away," offered Colbert King in the Washington Post.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, an essential US institution that researches and exposes hate groups, notes "… unmistakable signs of a revival of what in the 1990's was called the militia movement," adding that "… the fact that the president is an African-American has injected a strong racial element" into the radical right.
The rage from the right has nothing to do with healthcare reform or any other factual policy issue. It is a concerted effort to de-legitimise Obama as president. Former President Jimmy Carter summed it up concisely in an interview with NBC News:
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said.
"I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that share the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans.
"And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."
Fearful times
Some believe the healthcare debate has re-ignited the racial debate [AFP] Abominable - and dangerous. The simmering potential for political violence underlies the ugly jeers and insults.
They are a motley group: white supremacists, Patriots, Sovereign Citizens, anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, Neo-Confederates, Skinheads, Teabaggers, end-times prophecy adherents, birthers, Minutemen, New World Order conspiracists, Oath Keepers - the list is long and depressing.
Thousands of videos posted to YouTube show white militia members playing soldier - with real guns.
What they have in common - besides hatred for non-whites - is their worship of firearms and their intense paranoia about the government. They are continually encouraged in their outrage by right wing media and radio talk show hosts.
In several recent instances, right wing rage has exploded in bloodshed. In April, Richard Poplawski, who frequented anti-government and white supremacist websites and feared Obama would take away his guns, allegedly ambushed three Pittsburgh police officers, killing them with a hail of bullets from his rifle, pistol and AK-47.
The same month, Joshua Cartwright of Okaloosa County, Florida, got fired from his job, beat up his wife and headed down to the local gun club. When two sheriff's deputies arrived to arrest him for assault, he pulled out a gun and shot both men dead.
Cartwright's wife said he feared the government was out to get him and was "severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected president."
Last July, Jim David Adkisson of Knoxville, Tennessee wrote a vitriolic suicide note denouncing liberals, democrats, blacks, and Obama, then allegedly marched into a Unitarian church and opened fire, killing two churchgoers and seriously wounding six.
Here in Washington in June, an elderly neo-Nazi named James von Brunn allegedly opened fire with a rifle at the US Holocaust Museum, killing an African American security guard. Police found a note in his car. "You want my guns, this is how you'll get them," von Brunn wrote.
"The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews."
America, the sorry truth
Obama, centre front, was heckled during a speech to a joint session of congress [EPA] While Republican spokespeople and elected officials scoff at the notion that racism is behind their protests, the spectacle of a white, Republican Congressman from the Deep South state of South Carolina shouting "You lie!" at the president from the floor of the House of Representatives blatantly revealed the sorry truth that this country has not entered a "post-racial" period, as some liberals like to believe.
We would like to believe that the racist right-wingers are just the leftover dregs of hate in a society steadily becoming more enlightened.
After all, Obama won the election last November by nine million votes. That means an awful lot of white people voted for him.
But while their numbers may be relatively small, the right-wing radicals - and the media bomb-throwers who fire them up - can do a lot of damage.
A few armed lunatics can alter the course of history. Think of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Think of James Earl Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King. Or think of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
Those last two examples were not chosen at random.
The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Dangerous hatred in the US?
Mainstream media begins to debate whether racism has been fueling the healthcare debate.
Rob Reynolds, senior Washington correspondent Last Modified: 18 Sep 2009 19:17
Email ArticlePrint ArticleShare ArticleSend Feedback
Obama's healthcare reform proposals have been met with such vitriol that some fringe groups have compared him to Hitler and the Antichrist [GALLO/GETTY]
Michelle Bachmann, the US Republican Representative for Minnesota, tells a radio interviewer she believes Barack Obama, the US president, plans to set up mandatory "re-education camps" to indoctrinate young Americans.
Glenn Beck, a television personality working at the Fox news network, says on the air that Obama is a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people".
Comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler, an Iowa man named Tom Eisenhower speaks up at a town hall meeting held by Republican Senator Charles Grassley, and says "The president of the United States, that's who you should be concerned about."
"I'd take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me."
Retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson, a prolific writer and speaker about conspiracy theories involving devilish sex cults and the Illuminati, tells a gathering of right-wing "Patriots" in Florida that the federal government has set up 10,000 internment camps across the country and is storing thousands of guillotines for mass executions.
Mel Sanger, a self-described "political researcher", offers visitors to his website a $24.97-report full of "cutting edge evidence" that Obama is the biblical Antichrist.
Tens of thousands of right-wing demonstrators march on the US Capitol waving signs reading "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy" and calling Obama a "bloodsucking Muslim alien".
Steven Anderson, the pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, preached a sermon last month entitled "Why I hate Barack Obama", in which he declared, "I'm going to pray he dies and goes to hell".
Old-fashioned racism
On August 22, I posted an article on this website (Fear, racism at town hall meetings) about the element of old-fashioned retrograde racism running through the outpouring of venom and hatred for Obama in town hall style meetings, ostensibly over his healthcare reform plans.
I received a lot of feedback from you, the readers - the overwhelming majority of which was positive, with a few obscenity-laced screeds thrown in.
The mainstream media in the US have been slow to catch up on the story of white racial hatred for Obama. But now the debate over the racist roots of the anti-Obama upwelling is out in the open, discussed on television networks and in newspapers.
"Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it," writes The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
"There's something loose in the land, an ugliness and hatred directed toward Barack Obama, the nation's first African American president, that takes the breath away," offered Colbert King in the Washington Post.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, an essential US institution that researches and exposes hate groups, notes "… unmistakable signs of a revival of what in the 1990's was called the militia movement," adding that "… the fact that the president is an African-American has injected a strong racial element" into the radical right.
The rage from the right has nothing to do with healthcare reform or any other factual policy issue. It is a concerted effort to de-legitimise Obama as president. Former President Jimmy Carter summed it up concisely in an interview with NBC News:
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said.
"I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that share the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans.
"And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."
Fearful times
Some believe the healthcare debate has re-ignited the racial debate [AFP] Abominable - and dangerous. The simmering potential for political violence underlies the ugly jeers and insults.
They are a motley group: white supremacists, Patriots, Sovereign Citizens, anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, Neo-Confederates, Skinheads, Teabaggers, end-times prophecy adherents, birthers, Minutemen, New World Order conspiracists, Oath Keepers - the list is long and depressing.
Thousands of videos posted to YouTube show white militia members playing soldier - with real guns.
What they have in common - besides hatred for non-whites - is their worship of firearms and their intense paranoia about the government. They are continually encouraged in their outrage by right wing media and radio talk show hosts.
In several recent instances, right wing rage has exploded in bloodshed. In April, Richard Poplawski, who frequented anti-government and white supremacist websites and feared Obama would take away his guns, allegedly ambushed three Pittsburgh police officers, killing them with a hail of bullets from his rifle, pistol and AK-47.
The same month, Joshua Cartwright of Okaloosa County, Florida, got fired from his job, beat up his wife and headed down to the local gun club. When two sheriff's deputies arrived to arrest him for assault, he pulled out a gun and shot both men dead.
Cartwright's wife said he feared the government was out to get him and was "severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected president."
Last July, Jim David Adkisson of Knoxville, Tennessee wrote a vitriolic suicide note denouncing liberals, democrats, blacks, and Obama, then allegedly marched into a Unitarian church and opened fire, killing two churchgoers and seriously wounding six.
Here in Washington in June, an elderly neo-Nazi named James von Brunn allegedly opened fire with a rifle at the US Holocaust Museum, killing an African American security guard. Police found a note in his car. "You want my guns, this is how you'll get them," von Brunn wrote.
"The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews."
America, the sorry truth
Obama, centre front, was heckled during a speech to a joint session of congress [EPA] While Republican spokespeople and elected officials scoff at the notion that racism is behind their protests, the spectacle of a white, Republican Congressman from the Deep South state of South Carolina shouting "You lie!" at the president from the floor of the House of Representatives blatantly revealed the sorry truth that this country has not entered a "post-racial" period, as some liberals like to believe.
We would like to believe that the racist right-wingers are just the leftover dregs of hate in a society steadily becoming more enlightened.
After all, Obama won the election last November by nine million votes. That means an awful lot of white people voted for him.
But while their numbers may be relatively small, the right-wing radicals - and the media bomb-throwers who fire them up - can do a lot of damage.
A few armed lunatics can alter the course of history. Think of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Think of James Earl Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King. Or think of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
Those last two examples were not chosen at random.
The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news
By Ted Koppel
Sunday, November 14, 2010;
To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.
Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?
We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.
The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men's jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.
Perhaps it doesn't matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.
To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC's mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.
On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.
Until, that is, CBS News unveiled its "60 Minutes" news magazine in 1968. When, after three years or so, "60 Minutes" turned a profit (something no television news program had previously achieved), a light went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed.
I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, took questions from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the company's world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.
I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the enormous talent of the corporation's cartoonists, I pointed out that working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.
The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early 1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major ingredient. It was a struggle.
Peter called me one afternoon in the mid-'90s to ask whether we at "Nightline" had been receiving the same inquiries that he and his producers were getting at "World News Tonight." We had, indeed, been getting calls from company bean-counters wanting to know how many times our program had used a given overseas bureau in the preceding year. This data in hand, the accountants constructed the simplest of equations: Divide the cost of running a bureau by the number of television segments it produced. The cost, inevitably, was deemed too high to justify leaving the bureau as it was. Trims led to cuts and, in most cases, to elimination.
The networks say they still maintain bureaus around the world, but whereas in the 1960s I was one of 20 to 30 correspondents working out of fully staffed offices in more than a dozen major capitals, for the most part, a "bureau" now is just a local fixer who speaks English and can facilitate the work of a visiting producer or a correspondent in from London.
Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed.
It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.
The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.
Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.
As you may know, Olbermann returned to his MSNBC program after just two days of enforced absence. (Given cable television's short attention span, two days may well have seemed like an "indefinite suspension.") He was gracious about the whole thing, acknowledging at least the historical merit of the rule he had broken: "It's not a stupid rule," he said. "It needs to be adapted to the realities of 21st-century journalism."
There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a particular niche - sports, weather, cooking, religion - and an infinite variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, "That's the way it is."
Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news
By Ted Koppel
Sunday, November 14, 2010;
To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.
Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?
We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.
The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men's jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.
Perhaps it doesn't matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.
To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC's mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.
On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.
Until, that is, CBS News unveiled its "60 Minutes" news magazine in 1968. When, after three years or so, "60 Minutes" turned a profit (something no television news program had previously achieved), a light went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed.
I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, took questions from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the company's world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.
I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the enormous talent of the corporation's cartoonists, I pointed out that working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.
The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early 1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major ingredient. It was a struggle.
Peter called me one afternoon in the mid-'90s to ask whether we at "Nightline" had been receiving the same inquiries that he and his producers were getting at "World News Tonight." We had, indeed, been getting calls from company bean-counters wanting to know how many times our program had used a given overseas bureau in the preceding year. This data in hand, the accountants constructed the simplest of equations: Divide the cost of running a bureau by the number of television segments it produced. The cost, inevitably, was deemed too high to justify leaving the bureau as it was. Trims led to cuts and, in most cases, to elimination.
The networks say they still maintain bureaus around the world, but whereas in the 1960s I was one of 20 to 30 correspondents working out of fully staffed offices in more than a dozen major capitals, for the most part, a "bureau" now is just a local fixer who speaks English and can facilitate the work of a visiting producer or a correspondent in from London.
Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed.
It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.
The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.
Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.
As you may know, Olbermann returned to his MSNBC program after just two days of enforced absence. (Given cable television's short attention span, two days may well have seemed like an "indefinite suspension.") He was gracious about the whole thing, acknowledging at least the historical merit of the rule he had broken: "It's not a stupid rule," he said. "It needs to be adapted to the realities of 21st-century journalism."
There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a particular niche - sports, weather, cooking, religion - and an infinite variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, "That's the way it is."
Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Schedule - November 18 update
WEEK TWELVE
Do media represent realistic images of Arabs?
DUE 11/16 Unit 1, Issue 3, page 48
DUE 11/18 Interim draft of Research Project Write-Up
WEEK THIRTEEN
Is hate speech in the media directly affecting our culture?
DUE 11/23 Unit 4, Issue 12, page 256
DUE 11/25 Thanksgiving break
WEEK FOURTEEN
Hate speech, cont’d
DUE 11/30 Hate speech, cont’d
DUE 12/2 Research Project Presentations
WEEK FIFTEEN
Semester wrap-up and final exam.
DUE 12/7 Final Quiz
DUE 12/9 Research Project Presentations
Do media represent realistic images of Arabs?
DUE 11/16 Unit 1, Issue 3, page 48
DUE 11/18 Interim draft of Research Project Write-Up
WEEK THIRTEEN
Is hate speech in the media directly affecting our culture?
DUE 11/23 Unit 4, Issue 12, page 256
DUE 11/25 Thanksgiving break
WEEK FOURTEEN
Hate speech, cont’d
DUE 11/30 Hate speech, cont’d
DUE 12/2 Research Project Presentations
WEEK FIFTEEN
Semester wrap-up and final exam.
DUE 12/7 Final Quiz
DUE 12/9 Research Project Presentations
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
CNN ad about bias on FOX & MSNBC
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/cnn-calls-out-fox-news-msnbc-for-political-slants
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Research Project
Choose a question not specifically addressed by our book. Your choice of topic should reflect your interests and/or any focus in your major.
Write a hypothesis, which represents the results or answer you believe you will find.
Construct a plan of action using quantitative research to attempt to prove your hypothesis (answer the question).
Present your results using the format that best represents your interests and/or any focus in your major. If you would like to be a newspaper journalist, your format should be a newspaper article. If you would like to be a field journalist submitting raw video to a broadcast station, your format should be a video. If you would like to be a TV show anchor or talk show host, your format should be a video of you presenting the findings on your show. If you would like to be a vocal artist, your format should be a song, etc.
Whatever the format, your presented results should incorporate the following sections:
Introduction (including your hypothesis - what you think your survey will find, and a brief summary of the existing literature on the subject - i.e. who has already written about it?)
Description of the Survey - how is your approach different from what has already been done?
Method - a description of your survey method (verbal questioning, paper, online, population, and sample size, etc.
Results Summary - a summary of the results of your survey - this can be in whatever graphical or table format makes most sense to you given the kinds of questions you asked, the kinds of correlations you drew from the responses, and the format of your presentation
Conclusion - What do your results mean? Was you hypothesis correct? Incorrect? Inconclusive? So what?
DUE 11/4: A 2-3 page proposal outlining your research project. This will count as Reading Analysis #3
DUE 11:18: An interim draft of your research project write-up or other presentation format
DUE 12/2: Final Research Project & Presentation
Write a hypothesis, which represents the results or answer you believe you will find.
Construct a plan of action using quantitative research to attempt to prove your hypothesis (answer the question).
Present your results using the format that best represents your interests and/or any focus in your major. If you would like to be a newspaper journalist, your format should be a newspaper article. If you would like to be a field journalist submitting raw video to a broadcast station, your format should be a video. If you would like to be a TV show anchor or talk show host, your format should be a video of you presenting the findings on your show. If you would like to be a vocal artist, your format should be a song, etc.
Whatever the format, your presented results should incorporate the following sections:
Introduction (including your hypothesis - what you think your survey will find, and a brief summary of the existing literature on the subject - i.e. who has already written about it?)
Description of the Survey - how is your approach different from what has already been done?
Method - a description of your survey method (verbal questioning, paper, online, population, and sample size, etc.
Results Summary - a summary of the results of your survey - this can be in whatever graphical or table format makes most sense to you given the kinds of questions you asked, the kinds of correlations you drew from the responses, and the format of your presentation
Conclusion - What do your results mean? Was you hypothesis correct? Incorrect? Inconclusive? So what?
DUE 11/4: A 2-3 page proposal outlining your research project. This will count as Reading Analysis #3
DUE 11:18: An interim draft of your research project write-up or other presentation format
DUE 12/2: Final Research Project & Presentation
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Midterm
As announced in class today, you do NOT need to come to class on Thursday for a midterm. In lieu of a midterm, please conduct your survey and prepare a write-up of the results which includes at least the following sections:
Introduction (including your hypothesis - what you think your survey will find)
Description of the Survey (including a copy of the survey itself)
Method - a description of your survey method (verbal questioning, paper, online, population and sample size, etc.
Results Summary - a summary of the results of your survey - this can be in whatever graphical or table format makes most sense to you given the kinds of questions you asked and the kinds of correlations you drew from the responses
Conclusion - What do your results mean? Was you hypothesis correct? Incorrect? Inconclusive? So what?
A hard copy of this write-up is due the Tuesday after midterm break.
Introduction (including your hypothesis - what you think your survey will find)
Description of the Survey (including a copy of the survey itself)
Method - a description of your survey method (verbal questioning, paper, online, population and sample size, etc.
Results Summary - a summary of the results of your survey - this can be in whatever graphical or table format makes most sense to you given the kinds of questions you asked and the kinds of correlations you drew from the responses
Conclusion - What do your results mean? Was you hypothesis correct? Incorrect? Inconclusive? So what?
A hard copy of this write-up is due the Tuesday after midterm break.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Assignment for RA#2
Your assignment for Reading Analysis #2 is to create a survey through which you answer a slightly modified version of the question posed in the reading this week: Are citizens better informed in the information society? Your survey should seek 3 or 4 basic data points relating to the responder's level of informedness relating to the upcoming elections. It should also ask 1 or 2 questions about the responder's use of internet, TV, texting, or specific websites like facebook or twitter. Your job is to draw correlations between the responder's access to information and his or her level of informedness. For Tuesday, bring in a copy of your survey exactly as you propose to use it, but do not begin surveying responders yet. If you missed class this Thursday, please check in with at least 2 students who were in class for notes to ensure that you are doing the project appropriately.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Assignment - Reading Analysis #1
Student’s Name
Andrews/World History
October 5, 2010
RA #1
Analysis Paper
Write a letter, song, ad or other communication to one of the major media outlets we have looked at either here in the United States or in another country. Your communication should be a critique of their news service – either complimentary or critical – from any one or more of the perspectives we have discussed in class so far. You may want to focus, for example, on the role of the media in keeping the voting public informed within the context of a democracy.
Your communication should be approximately two pages or two minutes in length. Whatever its format, it should contain all the elements of any good piece of writing, including cogent organization and purpose, evidence to support your reasoning, analysis to relate your evidence to your main point, effective word choice and appropriate references.
Andrews/World History
October 5, 2010
RA #1
Analysis Paper
Write a letter, song, ad or other communication to one of the major media outlets we have looked at either here in the United States or in another country. Your communication should be a critique of their news service – either complimentary or critical – from any one or more of the perspectives we have discussed in class so far. You may want to focus, for example, on the role of the media in keeping the voting public informed within the context of a democracy.
Your communication should be approximately two pages or two minutes in length. Whatever its format, it should contain all the elements of any good piece of writing, including cogent organization and purpose, evidence to support your reasoning, analysis to relate your evidence to your main point, effective word choice and appropriate references.
Schedule - October 5 update
Day-by-Day Schedule of Activities & Assignments
October 5 update
WEEK SIX
International perspectives on local/global issues.
DUE 10/5 spend at least 2 hours reading / watching news from international press online, taking notes on one particular issue and the different perspectives you can perceive about that issue – online sources include: England (www.bbc.co.uk), Russia (www.en.rian.ru, http://english.pravda.ru), Qatar (http://english.aljazeera.net), Australia (http://australianetwork.com, www.canberratimes.com.au), Japan (www.nhk.or.jp), Vietnam (www.vietnamnews.com, www.thanhniennews.com)
DUE 10/7 Prep for in-class workshop on RA#1
WEEK SEVEN
Are people better informed in the “Information Society”?
DUE 10/12 RA#1
DUE 10/14 Unit 6, Issue 18, page 364
WEEK EIGHT
Midterm week
DUE 10/19 RA #2
DUE 10/21 Study for midterm quiz
WEEK NINE
Is advertising good for society? Midterm 1:1 reviews.
DUE 10/26 Nothing – enjoy your break
DUE 10/28 Unit 2, Issue 7, page 129
WEEK TEN
Do video games encourage violent behavior?
DUE 11/2 Unit 2, Issue 5, page 9
DUE 11/4 TBD
October 5 update
WEEK SIX
International perspectives on local/global issues.
DUE 10/5 spend at least 2 hours reading / watching news from international press online, taking notes on one particular issue and the different perspectives you can perceive about that issue – online sources include: England (www.bbc.co.uk), Russia (www.en.rian.ru, http://english.pravda.ru), Qatar (http://english.aljazeera.net), Australia (http://australianetwork.com, www.canberratimes.com.au), Japan (www.nhk.or.jp), Vietnam (www.vietnamnews.com, www.thanhniennews.com)
DUE 10/7 Prep for in-class workshop on RA#1
WEEK SEVEN
Are people better informed in the “Information Society”?
DUE 10/12 RA#1
DUE 10/14 Unit 6, Issue 18, page 364
WEEK EIGHT
Midterm week
DUE 10/19 RA #2
DUE 10/21 Study for midterm quiz
WEEK NINE
Is advertising good for society? Midterm 1:1 reviews.
DUE 10/26 Nothing – enjoy your break
DUE 10/28 Unit 2, Issue 7, page 129
WEEK TEN
Do video games encourage violent behavior?
DUE 11/2 Unit 2, Issue 5, page 9
DUE 11/4 TBD
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
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