Salon.com > Louise Witt

FCC commissioner Michael Copps vs. “Big Media”

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:47:00 +0000

Michael Copps doesn't want to be called a crusader. But as one of the two Democrats on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, he's not shy about sounding biblical. He says he's "blowing a loud trumpet" for a "call to battle" to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present.

Copps is trying to defeat FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin's last-minute proposal to loosen media ownership rules, which will be voted on by Dec. 18. As it stands now, a company can't own both a daily newspaper and a broadcast outlet -- a radio or TV station -- in the same market without a waiver. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on Nov. 13, Martin wrote that media companies in the 20 largest markets should be allowed to own both in the same market to bolster journalism. "If we don't act to improve the health of the ... industry," he wrote, "we will see newspapers wither and die ... and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and diversity of viewpoints."

A nation of scared sheep

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 22:09:00 +0000

The deep, almost spiritual conflict between honesty and lying is ingrained in our national psyche. Who doesn't remember as a schoolchild hearing the tale about George Washington father's discovering the young boy next to a felled cherry tree? When asked who had cut the tree, George is said to have replied, "I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet." As it turns out, that story was a lie concocted by an early 19th century biographer to embellish Washington's rather staid character.

But the story illustrates Americans' paradoxical approach to lies. Certainly most humans hold complicated and deep-seated views on deceit and candor; Americans, however, seem to have an especially bipolar one. At times, they assume a puritanical, absolutist stance on telling falsehoods: It is always bad. Other times, they're far more lenient: It's acceptable. This conflict is evident today when we look at how Americans have reacted to the fact that the Bush administration hyped, and perhaps in part fabricated, its case for invading Iraq, and that it grossly distorted who would benefit from its massive tax cuts. Americans put a premium on honesty and forthrightness, but they appear willing to forgive Bush's exaggerations and hype and the convoluted excuses his administration has offered in the aftermath of war. At one point -- in response to those who questioned the administration's assertions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- Bush accused his critics of indulging in "revisionist history."

The never ending war over slavery

Tue, 27 May 2003 21:05:00 +0000

Squeezed between Jefferson Davis' neoclassical Confederate White House and the Medical College of Virginia is a modern 1970s-era building. It is largely plain but for the banners that flank the entrance: the city flag of Richmond, Va., the state flag of Virginia, three Confederate nation flags and the quintessential Confederate flag, the Southern Cross. This is the Museum of the Confederacy, and it is the last banner, in particular, that marks the site as a flashpoint in American culture.

For years, the museum has been trying to find a comfortable position on the Civil War, one that principally would be inoffensive, one that acknowledged a shortsightedness in the South's position without alienating the hard-core partisans of the Old South who have regarded the museum and Davis' home as shrines to good days gone by. But in recent months there's been a shift. A new administration planted the Southern Cross out front, and this month the museum opened a new exhibit that is already arousing volatile passions.

The end of civilization

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 23:10:00 +0000

On Jan. 24 at the Pentagon, a small group of accomplished archaeologists and art curators met with Joseph Collins, who reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and four other Pentagon officials to talk about how the U.S. military could protect Iraq's cultural and archaeological sites from damage and destruction during the impending war in that country. McGuire Gibson, a professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, gave the officials a list of 5,000 cultural and archaeological sites. First on the list: the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

Gibson recalls he talked to the group about the importance of safeguarding the museum from bomb damage -- and from looting after the military conflict ended. "I pointed to the museum's location on a map of Baghdad and said: 'It's right here,'" he recalled in an interview. "I asked them to make assurances that they'd make efforts to prevent looting and they said they would. I thought we had assurances, but they didn't pan out."

Death trap

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 23:53:00 +0000

After a prayer meeting Friday at the Al-Khoei Islamic Center, a blocky gray building with a stubby minaret overlooking an expressway in Queens, N.Y., Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani offered a visitor a piece of sticky sweet baklava before sitting down in his wood-paneled office lined with religious books. These days Al-Sahlani, a soft-spoken man with graceful manners, finds himself an unlikely pundit on the latest war in Iraq. For those willing to listen, Al-Sahlani has a sobering analysis on Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Iraqi people are Saddam's terrified hostages and America's unwilling enemies.

Al-Sahlani, imam of the Al-Khoei mosque since 1989, knows this because he grew up in Basra and has family and friends who still live in the Shiite-dominated southern city of 1.3 million. Over the years, the 50-year-old religious leader has heard how Saddam has gradually tightened his stranglehold over the populace, so no one dares rise up against him. That's why he isn't surprised civilians haven't rebelled and embraced American and British troops as their liberators. They can't.

Scud Stud lobs a missile at Bush

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:52:00 +0000

Arthur Kent is pessimistic. A few weeks ago, Kent, an independent documentary filmmaker and journalist based in London, thought another war with Iraq could be avoided and a negotiated settlement could be reached with Saddam Hussein. Not anymore. He fears "dark forces" will unleash a conflict that will kill and maim thousands of innocent civilians, give rise to virulent anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism and plunge the world into strife for years to come.

This isn't idle speculation. Kent first reported on Afghanistan in 1980, soon after Soviet forces invaded the country to subdue mujahedin guerillas. A decade later, NBC News sent him to Dharan, Saudi Arabia, to cover the impending war with Iraq. That's where Kent became an instant celebrity when, in January 1991, he reported live on an Iraqi Scud missile attack. With his dashing good looks, as well as his stylish Italian leather jacket, the media dubbed him the "Scud Stud." After the Gulf War, Kent continued to report on the Middle East and Afghanistan. In June 2001, three months before Sept. 11, PBS aired his film on the Taliban's brutal rule, "Captives of the Warlords." A few weeks ago, his show on the History Channel, "History Undercover," interviewed U.N. weapon inspectors about Saddam's arsenal.

Onward, Christian soldiers

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 22:13:00 +0000

An ice and snow storm forced Jerry Falwell's school, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., to shut down for a day in early December, but even that act of God didn't keep him from his life's missions. While most employees, teachers and students at the fundamentalist Christian school stayed home and didn't venture out on the roads, Falwell slid behind the wheel of his Chevy Suburban to pick up his wife at the hairdresser's. One can't blame him for feeling invincible these days. Religious conservatives fasted and prayed that antiabortion candidates would win in November; Falwell believes their prayers were answered when the Republicans won control of the 108th Congress.

Christian conservatives believe they tipped the close Senate elections to the GOP in Georgia, Minnesota and Missouri (though they lost a heated run-off in Louisiana). And Falwell gives much of the credit to fierce campaigning by President Bush, himself a born-again Christian, in the final days before the election. "His work brought out the religious conservative vote, which elected the people we want to have in office," Falwell says. "No one in the world would deny that the religious conservatives certainly played a major role in regaining Republican control of the Senate. It's encouraging to think that if we get people out, we can make a difference every time, just like in the election of Ronald Reagan."

Bush’s reefer madness

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 17:31:00 +0000

The new front in the nation's drug war came into sharp focus at 7 a.m. on Sept. 5, when loud shouts and stomping woke Valerie Corral at her home north of Santa Cruz, Calif. Suspecting that the intruders weren't ordinary burglars, she snuck out a back entrance and walked around to her front door to tell them to leave. When she opened the door, stunned federal agents in flak jackets trained M-16s on the 50-year-old homeowner. When she asked to see a search warrant, the officers screamed at her to get down. They pushed her to her knees, then forced her to lie face down on the floor. With her hands handcuffed behind her back, an officer pressed his rifle muzzle to the back of her head.

Valerie Corral tried explaining to the agents (there were about 30) that she and her husband, Michael, 53, ran Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a legal cooperative in California that has grown the drug for 250 terminally ill and sick patients, many with cancer or AIDS, for almost nine years. Twenty-two of their clients have died in the past 12 months -- but to the officers from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, that didn't matter. The DEA took Valerie, still in green silk pajamas, and Michael to a federal detention center in San Jose. Under the Federal Controlled Substances Act, marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug -- dangerous and with no possible medicinal value -- right up there with heroin. Not only did they uproot and seize 167 marijuana plants, but they also confiscated the co-op's patient list.