The Washington Post’s dependence on the government it covers

How can media corporations be adversarial to the same political officials on whom their profits rely?

By Glenn Greenwald

Topics:Media Criticism, Washington Post

(updated below – w/correction)

The Washington Post this morning published a lengthy article detailing the fortune — and now the trouble — generated for its parent company, The Washington Post Co., as a result of its acquisition of Kaplan Higher Ed. While The Post continues to lose money, Kaplan — particularly its sprawling network of for-profit “universities” which the company began building in 2000 — generates huge profits for the company, profits on which the Post Co. depends almost completely for its sustainability.

Indeed, the newspaper has become little more than a side vanity project for the Post Co. and the Graham family which continues to dominate it; it is now, at its core, in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes. “The fate of The Post Co. has become inextricably linked with that of Kaplan, where revenue climbed to $2.9 billion in 2010, 61 percent of The Post Co.’s total,” the article detailed; “the company is more dependent than ever on a single business,’ [CEO Donald] Graham wrote in last year’s annual report, adding that the newspaper had never accounted for as large a share of overall company revenue as Kaplan does today.”

The article is largely devoted to recounting the corruption and abuses which pervade the for-profit education industry in general and Kaplan in particular (saddling poor people with debt in exchange for nothing of real value). But what I found most notable is how dependent is this industry — including The Washington Post Co. — on staying in the good graces of the Federal Government. Because these schools target low-income students, the vast majority of their income is derived from federal loans. Because there have been so many deceptive practices and defaults, the Federal Government has become much more aggressive about regulating these schools and now play a vital role in determining which ones can thrive and which ones fail.

Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration — the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. “By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government.” The Post Co.’s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.’s business — a reality of which they are well aware:

The Post Co. realized there were risks attached to being dependent on federal dollars for revenue — and that it could lose access to that money if it exceeded federal regulatory limits.

“It was understood that if you fell out of grace [with the Education Department], your business might go away,” said Tom Might, who as chief executive of Cable One, a cable service provider that is owned by The Post Co., sat in at company-wide board meetings.

Beyond being reliant on federal money and not alienating federal regulators, the Post Co. desperately needs favorable treatment from members of Congress, and has been willing to use its newspaper to obtain it:

Graham has taken part in a fierce lobbying campaign by the for-profit education industry. He has visited key members of Congress, written an op-ed article for the Wall Street Journal and hired for The Post Co. high-powered lobbying firms including Akin Gump and Elmendorf Ryan, at a cost of $810,000 in 2010. The Post has also published an editorial opposing the new federal rules, while disclosing the interests of its parent company.

The Post is hardly alone among major media outlets in being owned by an entity which relies on the Federal Government for its continued profitability. NBC News and MSNBC were long owned by GE, and now by Comcast, both of which desperately need good relations with government officials for their profits. The same is true of CBS (owned by Viacom), ABC (owned by Disney), and CNN (owned by TimeWarner). For each of these large corporations, alienating federal government officials is about the worst possible move it could make — something of which all of its employees, including its media division employees, are well aware. But the Post Co.’s dependence is even more overwhelming than most.

How can a company which is almost wholly dependent upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. Government possibly be expected to serve as a journalistic “watchdog” over that same Government? The very idea is absurd. The whole point of the First Amendment’s free press guarantee is that adversarial journalism is possible only if journalists are independent of political power. Yet the U.S. now has exactly the opposite dynamic: most major media outlets are owned by corporations that are anything but independent of government: they are quite dependent upon political officials for their profit in countless ways. We have anything but an independent press, which is another way of saying we have anything but a free press.

If you tell journalists that they are restrained in adversarial reporting by such motivations, they will vehemently deny it and perhaps even believe their denials. Media self-censorship is rarely overt; these journalists thus do not typically receive memos instructing them to lavish political officials with favorable treatment and avoid alienating them (though sometimes that’s exactly how they receive those dictates). But that’s because such instructions are unnecessary. Any employees who thrive in large corporations do so by learning what’s in their employer’s interests and acting dutifully to promote those interests. No corporate employee can remain for long if their actions subvert their employer’s core interests.

So inextricably linked are these media corporations and government officials that it’s a cultural merger; the prevailing corporate ethos is that it is far better to be viewed favorably by those with political power than unfavorably. Why would any employee of these corporations — including their journalists, editors, and producers — possibly want to do something (such as alienating political officials) that is so plainly at odds with the financial needs of their corporate employers?

There are many well-documented reasons why the American media is so deferential to political power. Currying favor with political officials is how they secure scoops, leaks and access. Because media stars are now as wealthy and celebrated as the politically powerful whom they cover, they identify on socioeconomic and cultural grounds with these political officials; media stars are far more integrated into the halls of political power than they are outside of them. Whereas independent journalists are constitutionally inclined to scorn the powerful, employees of large corporations — by their nature — tend to be people who are revere institutional authority and are talented at flattering and accommodating those in power. And, as Jack Goldsmith recently argued, many establishment journalists are driven by what he bizarrely celebrated as “patriotism,” by which he means fealty to American political officials and their actions.

But one crucial factor driving this decisively non-adversarial journalistic posture is that the large corporations which own these media outlets need desperately to maintain good relations with the political class. How could you possibly be a journalist at The Washington Post — knowing that for your corporate employer “if you fell out of grace [with the Education Department], your business might go away” and that your boss is spending huge amounts of his time and money currying favor with federal officials — and not have it affect what you write? I don’t doubt that there are isolated reporters and editors who bracket out such considerations, but on the whole, the wholesale dependence of these companies on the Federal Government goes a long way toward explaining why the nation’s major media outlets are so eager to please — rather than check and expose — those who wield the greatest political power.

UPDATE: CBS is no longer owned by Viacom, so my inclusion of that specific example was in error.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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What Whitney’s death should have us talking about

Despite its obsession with the star's demise, the press ignores the real issues behind America's deadliest epidemic

By Maer Roshan, The Fix

(Credit: AP)

Topics:The Fix, Whitney Houston, Drugs, Media Criticism

This article originally appeared on The Fix.

Just minutes after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton last Saturday at the age of 48, a caravan of network trucks began slowly encircling the plush hotel, morbidly eager to document her untimely demise. Since then, it’s been nearly impossible to turn on the TV or log on to the Web without witnessing a tribute to the singer, often including depressing video footage of her long, painful decline. Her memorial on Saturday had the pomp and pageantry of a state event—complete with dignitaries, crying onlookers and flags at half-mast.

But while speakers talked movingly about her battles, mention of the word “addiction” was curiously scrubbed from the event.

It’s no surprise that the singer’s death has struck such a chord in the country. Incredibly talented, beautiful and ambitious, Whitney Houston was a rare kind of legend who changed the face of American pop music. In her later life she also became an addict whose cruel struggle with the disease unfolded in full public view. That she lay dying for hours in a luxe bathroom suite while her bodyguards cooled their heels outside is a sad commentary on the state of modern celebrity. That it took less than 10 minutes for the press to begin broadcasting her death is an even more searing indictment of contemporary media culture.

Houston, of course, is not the only celebrity whose problems have received rapt press attention. Last month it was Demi Moore. The week before that it was Disney’s Demi Lavato. Meanwhile, the weekly travails of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan have been breathless fodder for fleets of paparazzi. And for over a year before her death last year, fans of Amy Winehouse received daily updates of her ups and downs. One British tabloid even went so far as to embed a pack of paparazzi at her favorite pubs.

As a longtime editor at several magazines over the past two decades, I’ve admittedly been an active participant in this game—keenly aware that for ordinary readers grappling with the mundanities of daily life, stars offer a few rare moments of transcendence. But their intoxicating effect on the American public also gives them outsize power to shape public perception. In the 1980s, Rock Hudson and Magic Johnson forced the media to finally pay attention to AIDS only after it had already killed an army of Americans. Michael J. Fox’s battle with Parkinson’s helped bring invaluable attention and funding to the disease, while prompting a debate on stem cell research that promises to have profound effects on the treatment of other illnesses.

But substantive stories about alcoholism and drug addiction remain largely outside the media purview—focused on the tribulations of A and C-list celebrities, they’re often ghettoized in gossip sites and channels like VH1. For all the daily hand wringing about celebrity overdoses and DUIs, there is precious little real reporting on the growing scientific understanding of the disease, the tragic lack of access to treatment or insurance coverage, or even the growing number of promising drugs that have begun to make real progress against this condition.

For a long time, I regarded this kind of journalism as business as usual. But my own perspective began to change as I was forced to confront the fact of my own addiction. For most of my early 30s I fancied myself a young version of the late Christopher Hitchens, a literary legend rarely spotted without a drink who once bragged that he couldn’t write without a hangover. Alas, I soon learned that I possessed neither his talent nor his hardy constitution. As a result, I spent two years in a series of rehabs and sober living facilities, witnessing firsthand the ravenous toll taken by addiction and the abject failure of our medical and political system.

My first roommate was a 23-year-old violinist from Iowa who had cycled through five detoxes and five rehabs in just 11 months. At the same rehab, I befriended an ad executive whose proclivity for Absolut eventually landed her in a homeless shelter. I met an investment banker whose weekend crystal meth binges led to a lifelong HIV infection. At one sober living facility I played poker with a rum-loving Catholic priest who led one of the largest congregations in Nigeria. I met countless others who maintain publicly productive lives while suffering through their own private hell. You can be certain that none of them will ever show up on CNN. But neither will the pernicious behavior of the insurance companies and Big Pharma, who have often illegally profited off the scourge while accumulating blockbuster profits.

As someone who’s seen the effects of alcoholism close-up, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by the failure of my colleagues to get beyond the superficial details of addiction, or to empathize with the lives of people who aren’t regulars on Perez or Page Six. Much of the mainstream media has been lazy—even downright derelict—when it comes to addressing the nation’s most pressing health crisis.

When I ask my journalist friends about their failure to take on the larger issues behind these stories, they usually reply that reporting on struggling stars is a teachable moment for many Americans. But that’s not much of an answer. It’s not really breaking news that drugs can be harmful and sometimes deadly. The real questions are: What can we do about it? And how exactly did we get here?

Ultimately, the torrent of coverage of the Whitneys and Winehouses of the world is little more than a distraction, a game of mirrors that deflects attention from millions of farmers, bankers and college kids who are also suffering and dying of drug-related causes at a record rate. It’s easier not to have to confront the reality of our drug-slammed towns, or jails full of untreated addicts, or high-school kids who swallow up to 50 Oxys a day. Entire regions of middle America have been decimated by poverty and crystal meth. America’s seemingly ravenous appetite for drugs raises questions that demand deeper explanations.

The fact is, while most major causes of preventable death in the U.S. are in decline, drugs—especially pharmaceutical drugs—remain a dramatic exception. A 2010 national survey by the Department of Health and Human Services found that over 22 million Americans suffer from alcohol or drug dependency. Drug overdose rates have more than tripled since 1999, claiming a life every 14 minutes. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a single person in the whole country who hasn’t been directly or indirectly affected. Rehabs and sober livings around the country have become a vast $20 billion business, many of them operating under woefully inadequate oversight. Many Americans under the age of 30 have become hooked on opiate painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin, buying them on the street for prices as high as $80 a pill. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the abuse of these painkillers was responsible for close to half a million emergency room visits in 2009, a number that has nearly doubled in just the past five years.

Our nation’s seemingly ravenous appetite for drugs also raises problematic questions about the larger culture the media has helped create. Why is it that a nation that enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world also suffers one of the highest rates of drug abuse? Why are so many of us driven to substances to obliterate reality? What does this continuing scourge say about the values and morals that underlie our society?

Given the expensive impact of drugs and alcohol on our medical and prison system and addiction’s massive impact on workplace productivity, the continued lack of serious discourse on the issue remains surprising. Certainly it’s not just reporters who are to blame. Though the Obama administration recently doled out extra funding for drug prevention programs, it still spends several billion more on a drug war than seems as unwinnable as Vietnam. To its credit, starting in 2014, Obama’s historic new health plan will mandate insurers for the first time ever to treat addicts the way they treat victims of other diseases, putting an end to decades in which desperately ill addicts were denied life-and-death treatment.

For their part, however, the Republicans have been uncharacteristically more restrained on the subject. Not long ago they could dismiss the drug epidemic as symptoms of urban permissiveness and decaying inner-city neighborhoods. But as drugs intrude deeper and deeper into the leafy middle-class suburbs and the wide-open ranges of America’s heartland, the law and order types at the GOP have become tongue-tied. During the season’s endless series of GOP debates, not a single candidate was quizzed about their policies on drugs or treatment. While Ron Paul has been an articulate advocate of drug legalization, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum’s websites devote not a word to their drug policies, even though Bain Capital, once run by Mitt Romney, is one of the leading owners of the nation’s 20,000 rehabs and sober living facilities. Newt Gingrich, a one-time pot smoker who has lately taken to extolling the virtues of AA’s Big Book, has maintained a hard-line anti-drug stance, even though he’s backed down on his former pledge to put drug dealers to death. Last year, in Florida, newly elected Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott mounted a crazy and ultimately doomed campaign against an effort to regulate the state’s pill mills, which produce the vast majority of the country’s illegal prescription painkillers. Not to be outdone, the Tallahassee Republicans recently voted for a bill that would dramatically slash funding for drug prevention in a state that has one of the highest percentages of drug abusers in the country.

In short, there’s no lack of important, compelling stories out there that could benefit from a little media attention. And while some enterprising reporters and bloggers have risen to the challenge, they’re the exception rather than the rule. What’s responsible for their continued reluctance? The continuing stigma around addiction undoubtedly has something to do with it. Even though decades of research proves addiction is a condition with complicated genetic and chemical roots, far too many journalists continue to see it as a sort of moral weakness. Their failure to actively report on the issue represents both a lack of initiative and funding. After all, covering Whitney’s last moments is a lot easier (and less expensive) than going up against the wrath of formidable lawyers and lobbyists employed by corrupt pharmaceutical behemoths. It’s also a lot more comfortable than venturing into the ravaged small towns of Iowa and Montana to witness firsthand the devastation wrought by poverty and crystal meth.

The senseless death of one of America’s most outsize talents is undoubtedly a cause for mourning. But tragic as her death may be, Houston is just another person lost to an epidemic that has also killed thousands more in just the path month. It would be a fitting coda to her impressive legacy if her death ended up providing a genuine “teaching moment” for America: one that would encourage the media and public to look beyond the scandals and personalities to the complicated causes and consequences of this miserable disease. But that’s probably wishful thinking. More likely, in a couple of weeks the hysterical pundits and satellite trucks will roll on to the scene of the next tragedy. As Truman Capote famously noted, “The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.” Meanwhile, the 22 million people affected by this disease will stay exactly where they are.

: Maer Roshan is Founder and Editor of The Fix. Previously he served as Founder and Editor-in-Chief Radar Magazine and Radaronline.com, Editorial Director at Talk, Deputy Editor of New York, and Senior Editor of Interview. He is also Founding Editor of the forthcoming I-Pad publication, Punch! More Maer Roshan

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Debunking the right’s contraception myths

Access to contraception would reduce abortions and unintended pregnancies. Here are the simple facts

By Irin Carmon

(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Topics:Birth Control, Editor's Picks, Media Criticism, Abortion

Unable, apparently, to convince the public that women having sex without “consequences” is inherently bad for society, conservatives have taken to claiming that increasing access to contraception won’t actually prevent abortions. They’re wrong.

In his recent column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat argues that even though conservatives have failed in selling chastity to the public (even in solidly red states), a remedy he seemingly wants to offer for married couples too, ”the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well.” What, exactly?

To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.”

Douthat also cited high abortion rates in blue states as a sign of liberal failure, as if abortion rates wouldn’t naturally be higher in places where abortion tends to be more available and less legally restricted, or as if women don’t routinely travel to more accessible locations to have abortions. Meanwhile, syndicated columnist Rich Lowry cited the same CDC study and claimed that “by any reasonable standard, we are one of the most lavishly contracepted societies in the history of the planet.” He added, “Of all the causes of the explosion in illegitimate births, limited access to contraception can’t be high on the list.”

First, a crucial note about how we talk about limiting abortions. Perhaps it is a sign of rhetorical defeat when the strongest final flourish Douthat can come up with in a column opposing contraceptive access is that abortion “isn’t a pretty sight” (very few medical procedures are) or that only 12 percent had trouble accessing contraception. As Guttmacher’s senior public policy associate Adam Sonfield pointed out to me this morning, that 12 percent who had problems obtaining birth control translates into about “68,000 abortions, or about a 5 percent reduction in the total number of abortions in the country. That’s not small change.”

But it’s also worth reiterating, as Adele Stan did this weekend and reproductive rights activists have been saying for years, that if you’re more than nominally pro-choice, you cede important ground by embracing the “safe, legal and rare” formulation that Douthat cited as a consensus. As the National Network of Abortion Funds tweeted, ”Let’s reject ‘rare.’ If abortions are legal & accessible, number of abortions performed should = exactly the number of abortions necessary.” Contrast the following data points — the 87 percent of U.S. counties that lack an abortion provider, the financial barriers that right-wingers would like to increase with insurance bans, and the significant stigma around abortion — with the fact that almost half of all pregnancies are unintended. Suddenly, “rare” becomes more about a lack of real choice rather than choosing from an abundance of options. If, as a matter of public health policy, we are doing a terrible job of preventing unintended pregnancies, and some women want abortions and can’t have them, then the current rate is too low.

But even if you believe women have no right to terminate pregnancies in any circumstance, it requires serious, willful ignorance to argue that contraceptive access has nothing to with lowering the U.S.’ unusually high number of unwanted pregnancies, which is what we should really be talking about here. Douthat claims that ”if social conservatives haven’t figured out how to make all good things go together in post-sexual-revolution America, neither have social liberals.”

But, in fact, even “blue states” and “social liberals” have so far been unable to fully put into practice policies that might help make “all good things go together,” partly because of barriers put into place by Douthat and Lowry’s compatriots. That’s exactly what the Affordable Care Act guidelines they oppose are trying to do.

To a significant extent, contraception is already preventing unintended pregnancy, though not enough of them, for reasons I’ll explain. According to Guttmacher’s testimony last year in favor of the new Affordable Care Act guidelines:

The proportion using contraceptives among unmarried women at risk of unintended pregnancy increased from 80 percent in 1982 to 86 percent in 2002; this increase was accompanied by a decline in unmarried women’s unintended pregnancy and abortion rates over the same period, with the abortion rate for unmarried women falling from 50 per 1,000 women in 1981 to 34 per 1,000 in 2000.

Another study cited in the testimony found that improved contraceptive use among sexually active high school students was “responsible for 77 percent of the sharp decline in pregnancy among 15-17-year-olds between 1995 and 2002 (decreased sexual activity was responsible for the other 23%) and increased contraceptive use was responsible for all of the decline in pregnancy among 18-19-year-olds.” Even more recent data show teen pregnancy at a 40-year low.

But the U.S. still has the highest rate of unintended pregnancies in the developed world, and public policy has a lot to do with it, including lack of access to reliable sex education. (That same CDC study, after all, found that 31.4 percent of pregnant teens didn’t use contraception because they “thought they could not get pregnant at the time.”) Crucially, economic barriers to accessing healthcare can make all the difference. After all, for higher-income women, the rate of unintended pregnancy has declined since 1994 by 29 percent; unintended pregnancies among women living below the federal poverty line rose 50 percent in the same period.

This is about much more than just the average cost of birth control, although it is about that too. It’s about access to reliable information about sexuality and to the most effective forms of birth control, both of which conservatives are on record opposing. About half of unintended pregnancies and abortions occur among women using contraception inconsistently or incorrectly, Sonfield pointed out, but the same Affordable Care Act guidelines include education and counseling around contraceptive use and sexuality.

Public health experts are also hoping that the new insurance mandates will help women switch to the more effective forms of birth control they have told researchers they’d be interested in, like the IUD, the implant or sterilization. These have far lower failure rates — around 1 percent or less — than typical use of condoms, at 17 percent, or the pill, at 9 percent. (The one method the Catholic Church approves of, officially termed “fertility-awareness-based methods” has a failure rate of 25 percent.) Such forms may be better suited to women who have more disrupted lives and schedules, and are ultimately cheaper, but they’re more expensive upfront and harder to find providers for.

“It may be true that you can get a condom at a drug store,” Sonfield says, “but you just can’t come in and get an IUD.” In one 2004 study, a third of women said they would switch methods if they didn’t have to worry about cost, and if you give women the choice of any method, Sonfield says, two-thirds of them choose a long-acting method.

As for the claim that the United States is somehow more “lavishly contracepted” than anyone else ever (including those other industrialized countries with some form of universal healthcare), it’s tragically absurd. For one thing, the Title X program that some on the right, from Lowry to Foster Friess, have cited as proof that low-income women can get contraception is perennially under attack, either on political or budgetary grounds. “There’s certainly some irony there that politicians that have been foes of that program are trying to pretend that they support it as a way to attack a different policy,” says Sonfield.

That public funding does a lot: The Department of Health and Human Services says that annually, it “prevents about 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, including almost 400,000 teen pregnancies. Preventing these pregnancies results in 860,000 fewer unintended births, 810,000 fewer abortions and 270,000 fewer miscarriages.” All in all, since giving birth is expensive (not to mention that unintended pregnancies tend to be associated with greater health risks for both mother and baby) taxpayers save $4 for every $1 spent on family planning. But it’s not enough; the services are only free for women who are at the poverty line, and from there it’s on a sliding scale.

Spacing out and planning pregnancies (or avoiding them altogether) improves the overall health of women and babies; the federal Institute of Medicine’s own research has indicated that unintended pregnancy is linked “to a wide array of health, social and economic consequences, from delayed prenatal care and poor birth outcomes to maternal depression and family violence to a failure to achieve educational and career goals.” The new contraceptive coverage guidelines could be the single most significant pro-active policy tool to combat those consequences, and it already represents one of the few positive national developments in expanding reproductive rights, in a time where effective defense is considered victory.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that contraception is good for society, even if you don’t believe that women have a fundamental right to determine their own destinies. Of course, it helps to ignore the former if you don’t want the latter.

: Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon

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The truth about violence at Occupy

In Oakland, the camp coincided with a significant drop in crime. But that wasn't the story we were told

By Rebecca Solnit

Members of the Oakland Police Department arrest an Occupy Oakland demonstrator in Downtown Oakland, California January 28, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/Stephen Lam)

Topics:Occupy Oakland, Media Criticism, Occupy Wall Street

This originally appeared on TomDispatch.

When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them — or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.

This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.

And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless — some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.

And then there was the violence.

The Faces of Violence

The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.

On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.

That old line of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.

But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men — and with the rarest of exceptions they were men — who stole the world.

That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers). And the police clubbed their opponents for them, over and over, everywhere across the United States.

The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence

Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.

The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon. Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.

Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.

A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants. Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino, and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.

This country is segregated in so many terrible ways — and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land — this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19 percent in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time — a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 a.m. on October 25th. The sleepers were assaulted; their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2nd.

That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about. (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.

That said, they are still a problem. They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with. They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement, and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.

But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere. Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.

Those who advocate for nonviolenceat Occupy should remember that nonviolence is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Violence Against the Truth

Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2nd and January 28th.

The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported on the day’s events this way:

“Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said. Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.”

Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.

I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That’s sloppy.”

The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the piece was meant to convey police violence as well.

When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).

Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” There’s always something.

Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades and rubber bullets on January 28th. It’s true that a small group vandalized City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.

The action on January 28th that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.

Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.

All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.

Now for the Real Work

The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill. Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.

Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system. If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront — and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.

Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere.

In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies. February 20th, for instance, was a national day of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day, and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville to San Francisco have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.

Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum. A popular environmental campaign made President Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood. Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joes into line with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.

These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power. They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.

What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want and how we get there, and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

: More Rebecca Solnit

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The right is attacking Media Matters because it matters

The Daily Caller's heavy-breathing "expose" is light on facts

By Zaid Jilani

Media Matters' founder David Brock (Credit: Fox)

Topics:Media Criticism, Daily Caller, Media Matters, David Brock, Editor's Picks

“Inside Media Matters,” declares a Daily Caller headline on an article written by right-wing icon Tucker Carlson and journalist Vince Coglianese earlier this month, which claims that “Sources, memos reveal erratic behavior close coordination with White House and news organizations.” The article launched a series aimed at attacking and undermining the popular progressive media watchdog group.

The Daily Caller paints a picture of a nefarious organization founded by an egomaniacal leader operating in the cover of darkness, working to prop up Democratic Party politicians. Boasting of their access to internal Media Matters memos and interviews with “current and former” employees of Media Matters, Carlson and Coglianese breathlessly report about some admittedly strange antics of founder David Brock and of the organization’s success in achieving “its central goal of influencing the national media.”

The Daily Caller pieces have served as a sort of a bat signal for foes of Media Matters, with attacks on the organization now coming from all direction. Fox News psychiatrist Keith Ablow claimed Brock is “dangerous” because he was adopted, and Alan Dershowitz — a hard-line supporter of Israel’s government who once advocated for bulldozing entire Palestinian villages –thoughtfully likened the group to “Neo-Nazis” who could cost Obama the election due to publishing blog posts critical of Israel.

Among the more than half-dozen articles and blog posts the Daily Caller has written in its “Inside Media Matters” series, there is little in the way of actual substance. From Carlson and Coglianese’s original piece we learn that Brock regularly staffs himself with bodyguards, even at social events. A later piece focuses on the fact that Media Matters contributor Karl Frisch once suggested hiring personal investigators to “look into the personal lives of Fox News” staff. Yet most of the content of the articles is hardly surprising or shocking. On the contrary, it points to an important fact: Media Matters matters.

Take, for example, one admission by a former Media Matters employee that “virtually all the mainstream media was using [their] stuff.” The Daily Caller portrays this fact as shocking, evidence of a secret and ominous level of coordination between Media Matters and the mainstream media. Another former Media Matters staffer notes that certain journalists at the Huffington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other outlets were receptive to Media Matters stories and regularly published articles based on their material.

What the Daily Caller ultimately fails to articulate about this high level of coordination between Media Matters and the mainstream press is what makes it so scandalous. It would be one thing if the group were providing secret payments to journalists in order to get its stories covered, or if journalists were shown to be intentionally fudging facts or skewing the truth to toe Media Matters’ line. The most notable omission from the Daily Caller “exposé” is that it does not allege any inaccuracies in Media Matters steady stream of denunciations and corrections.

Rather, what the interviews and memos obtained by the Daily Caller show is that it’s doing something that’s perhaps even more threatening to the right-wing: its job. Media Matters was expressly launched with the purpose of providing a response to right-wing misinformation and to reshape the mainstream media narrative in a way that benefits progressives. Readers of Media Matters don’t have to guess that its staff will regularly be in touch with major journalists to help shape the media narrative — it’s actually something the group informs people of on its website.

Since its launch, the organization has rapidly grown. In 2011, the organization spent $15 million, increasing its budget by five times since it began in 2004. Meanwhile, it employed around 90 people, nine times the size of its original staff of 10. Its comprehensive reports — like one landmark 2006 study of Sunday talk show guests that found that they overwhelmingly lean conservative – have helped reshape the media’s dialogue and empower progressive critics of the mainstream press.

The group doesn’t hide its agenda.

“Media Matters works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits and the general public about instances of misinformation,” reads its “About Us” page, “providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and to take direct action against offending media institutions.”

That last part — the taking “direct action against offending media institutions” — is also portrayed as shocking by the Daily Caller articles. Carlson and Coglianese write about a Media Matters memo detailing how the organization pressured CNN to take Lou Dobbs’ show off the air. The memo lists tactics such as running Spanish language advertisements and working with civil rights groups to target CNN. Yet the campaign against Dobbs was far from secret — it was widely covered in the media — and not particularly shocking, either. After all, Media Matters simply used Dobbs’ own words against him, something its massive media monitoring apparatus has perfected.

The Dobbs memo and other pressure campaign materials revealed by the Daily Caller prove little else than that Media Matters thinks and behaves the same way in private as it does in public. The organization meticulously monitors the media and highlights behavior by the press and politicians that are against progressive values. The Daily Caller published one article containing what it calls Brock’s “enemies list” – a phrase most famously used to describe President Nixon’s list of dissident Americans he vilified — yet the list maintained by Brock simply listed “targets” for research scrutiny including conservative media like Fox News and right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation.

What’s so surprising about that? Of course Media Matters is targeting right-wing figures for scrutiny and opposition research. That’s why it exists. Would it be surprising if the Media Research Center and Newsbusters — which act as right-wing equivalents to Media Matters — had research files on the Center for American Progress and the Nation?

Perhaps the most ominous tone in the Daily Caller articles is saved for reporting about meetings between Media Matters and Obama administration officials. The articles report about “regular contact” between administration officials like Anita Dunn and Media Matters. But this, too, is completely unsurprising. The Obama administration regularly invites progressive media figures to White House meetings, and has spearheaded the Common Purpose Project to conduct meetings with allied progressive organizations. If Media Matters was portraying itself as being stridently non-ideological, this level of coordination may indeed have been problematic. But Media Matters is openly part of the progressive umbrella.

There may indeed be a real problem that progressive groups may be too cozy to the Obama White House, muzzling themselves about Obama’s progressive failings in order to win access. Yet the Daily Caller isn’t concerned about co-optation. Rather, it is criticizing Media Matters for doing what all political groups on all parts of the ideological spectrum try to do: successfully influence policymakers and the media.

Ultimately, Media Matters is being targeted for what it has accomplished. In just the eight short years of its existence, the organization has created a powerful watchdog hub for countering right-wing misinformation and pushing the progressive message to the press and policymakers. The group is ultimately being attacked for doing the very things that it publicly set out to do, and that is likely making the right wing much angrier than David Brock’s eccentricities.

: Zaid Jilani is a Washington journalist. Follow him @zaidjilani. More Zaid Jilani

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Nancy Grace is more terrible than ever

Wild and unfounded speculation about Whitney Houston's death is a new low for the HLN host

VIDEO

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Nancy Grace (Credit: AP/Chris Pizzello)

Topics:Whitney Houston, Media Criticism, Nancy Grace, CNN

Cable news depends on colorful characters to draw eyeballs in between those reminders that there are “no new developments” in the real stories of the day. But even in a sea of distinctive jerkwads – your Erin Burnetts and Piers Morgans and Bill O’Reillys and Megyn Kellys – HLN host Nancy Grace never fails to distinguish herself. And just when you think she can’t find new depths to plumb, along comes the Whitney Houston story.

Grace, the woman who has made an entire cottage industry out of her indignation over Casey Anthony, who paints herself nightly as the avenging angel of poor dead Caylee, has never been one to trade in subtlety — or, for that matter, facts. CNN had to settle a wrongful death suit after the mother of a missing child killed herself after being browbeaten on her show. (The parties agreed that Grace “engaged in no intentional wrongdoing.”) She fearlessly championed the prosecution’s side in the Duke lacrosse team rape case, blithely referring to “the victim,” and went ballistic over the very notion that the accused might be innocent. (She then conveniently remained quiet on the subject after the case was dismissed.) This, folks, is a woman who has guilt-tripped abduction victim Elizabeth Smart for not playing along with her interview tactics. And even after a jury found Casey Anthony not guilty last summer, she has held on to the story like a dog with a bone, insisting that “I told the truth,” luxuriating in descriptions of “the backdrop of 2-year-old Caylee’s decomposing body just a few houses down from where Tot Mom put her pillow every night,” and excoriating Anthony for – rich irony alert –“generating interest in herself.”

Yet apparently there just aren’t enough kidnapped babies and alleged gang rapes out there to keep Grace satisfied. She’s turning her attention now instead to the mysterious death of a diva. Grace, who famously said last summer that she knew more than the “kooky jury” on the Anthony case, now seems to know more than the L.A. coroner’s office. Despite word that foul play is “not suspected at this time” in Saturday’s death of Whitney Houston, Grace isn’t so sure. On Monday she appeared on CNN to ponder, “Who, if anyone, gave [Houston] drugs following alcohol and drugs.” That itself isn’t a crazy question, though it is a bit of a reach – a suggestion that the story of a superstar dying alone and surrounded by prescription bottles just isn’t sexy enough. Not when surely there’s a villain on the loose for Nancy Grace to bring to justice. Cue dramatic theme music!

Medical accountability is to be considered whenever someone dies who may have had drugs administered to him or her. Just ask physician Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson. But where Grace, in her totally Nancy Grace-like way, went totally bananas was when she asked, “Who let her slip or pushed her underneath that water? … Who let Whitney Houston go under that water?” Uhhhhhmm… Whitney Houston?

The sad desperation of news networks, and their flailing competitiveness in a glut of information overload, is rarely pretty to watch. But Grace isn’t just some blowhard, saying provocative things to get a rise out of the viewership. She’s a full-on loose cannon, a disseminator of disinformation and an ego gone rogue. That CNN and its sister network HLN continue to permit her to spew her wild speculations, to proudly flaunt her flat-out contempt for the facts as they are known, and to engage in character assassination long after a not guilty verdict has been rendered in a court of law, is blatant and arrogant recklessness. Unchecked, how long before Grace decides she knows who “pushed” Houston under the water? How long before she’s on another crusade, deciding who is a victim and who is a perpetrator? How long before a real criminal investigation or trial is tainted because of her nightly yammering?

After her jaw-dropping segment Monday, CNN anchor Don Lemon had to leap into fire-dousing mode, issuing a hasty reminder that “This is not CNN’s reporting. We don’t know that to be true.” Here’s a crazy idea – you shouldn’t be talking about things you don’t know to be true on a network with the word “news” right there in the middle of it. And CNN shouldn’t continue to provide a platform to a woman whose self-interest makes a mockery of journalistic credibility.

Nancy Grace On Whitney Houston’s Death

: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams