Is the Future of a Free Press in Doubt

Unless you have been sequestered from all sources of news during the past year, you know that America’s newspapers are in trouble. The New York Times was recently given a hand up by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu but everyone agrees its future is in doubt.

Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy, Sun-Times Media Group is going under, and Knight-Ridder has already sold its holdings.

It won’t be long before America’s daily newspapers will be liquidated. How will this affect how we get our news? How will we hold governments and corporations to account? TV and radio will of course survive but they are devolving into entertainment sound bites to allow for more advertising space. Bloggers are doing their part but they will not likely gain the credibility or expertise that newspaper and other media have enjoyed.

I suspect that those ‘newspapers’ that do survive will find new life on Web pages, RSS feeds, e-mails delivering customized news and advertising, and on mobile phones. But, they are already spending less on journalism and trying to reach a future, younger demographic by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics. This is more of a testament to their desire to survive than to their commitment to reporting hard news which used to be why people would pick up a newspaper. A sign of the changing times, you might say.

This business of surviving our economic times is pressing many papers large and small to sack some of their most talented, experienced and higher-paid journalists. Will they find a forum in cyberspace? Probably. New tools that are convenient for the new century’s news consumers, such as iPods, cell phones, etc will most likely get their news from web-based services and this is where journalists will find a new outlet for their talents.

But local newspaper journalism is more likely to survive because people want community news such as events from the city council meeting. Just as likely though, major newspapers could tailor their news reporting to social-networking sites, for college students, mothers, and other groups.

The bottom line is that the closed world of professional editors and journalists has opened up. While bloggers can be subject to bias and slander, as a group, bloggers offer truth and transparency that cannot be imparted by newspapers obligated to deadlines or to those who pay them. People don’t want crap journalism and any blogger or professional journalist, for that matter, who partakes in passing it off as real will soon be left without a following.

News will always find a way reach those who want it. How we choose to get it will depend on our tolerance for having to wade through advertising, entertaining presentations and BS.

Does Al Sharpton Encourage or Prevent Civil Disobedience

It’s pretty easy to empathize with Reverend Al Sharpton’s reason for wanting “to plan the day that we will close this city down” following the acquittal of three police officers involved in the 2006 shooting that claimed 23-year-old Sean Bell’s life and injured two friends on his wedding day.

We have witnessed police officers seemingly ‘get away with murder’ for many years as the result of what is apparently a carte blanche attitude towards police by our criminal justice system.

There is an underlying message here that says if police are to be held criminally negligent in any officer involved shooting, then the future safety of all police officers will be in jeopardy. This understanding is accepted as factual by the police and the court system. They believe that policemen who think twice about using their weapons are providing their suspect with enough time to shoot first. Therefore they are trained to shoot first and question later. And they are trained to shoot to kill. This leads to inevitable situations where innocent victims are shot to death.

Here we have a situation where a group of men, members of a bachelor party, celebrating one of its members good fortune of marrying the woman of his dreams. As these parties do it lasted well into the night with much celebratory drinking. Undercover police officers were at the same nightclub where this party took place due to a history of past rowdiness. They saw in this group of men a possibility that trouble could arise, based on what only they would know.

When the group left the club, undercover officers decided to follow them. Out in the street as the Bell party was getting into their car the plain clothes officers drew their weapons (again, why, only they would know) and according to witnesses did not identify themselves as police officers. From Sean Bell’s point of view they were under threat of car-jacking or robbery so naturally his first thought was to get out of there quickly, as I am sure any rational thinking individual would do.

The police immediately used the euphemism ‘vehicle as a deadly weapon’ scenario and assumed that they were about to be run over. So without any further thought one policeman opened fire. In any similar situation when one officer begins shooting they all begin shooting. It is sort of a crowd mentality. One officer even reloaded and continued firing. This is the one point that makes this scene particularly disgusting and barbaric.

All cops will justify using their weapons by saying they thought they were under attack. No cop is going to admit that they did not identify themselves. All cops will stand up for each other even when they know they are in the wrong.

The history that is mounting in the courts, that police officers do not receive criminal charges for killing someone, sets the stage for every police officer to feel complete immunity for using their weapons. Therefore they feel completely justified to shoot first and ask questions later.

Police officers who, even accidentally, shoot an unarmed, non-guilty person should not be bolstered into believing they will never be punished. Mistakes are made, certainly, but this lack of punishment, this air of complete immunity has created the idea that policemen are above the law and the public is getting fed up with it.

The media also has a hand to play in this. We read initial accounts of an officer-involved shooting reported by a media system that quite often tells a partial story, and gets the facts wrong, in the their own self-interest in publishing the story first. Follow-up reports that would more thoroughly clarify actual events are rare or buried because it is ‘old news’. A mis-informed public runs with what they first hear as fact and incorporates those ‘facts’ into opinions already compiled about the police and when the inevitable news from the courtroom is acquittal then people feel justified in their outrage all over again.

If the case involves a person of color (read black) Reverend Al Sharpton is on the scene ready to rally all outraged citizens with the kind of “massive civil disobedience” once led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. seemingly unfazed of the hatred he is fomenting in bystanders yelling “kill the police”.

I am not going to comment on whether peaceful or non-peaceful protests will do anything more than vent frustration at a system everyone knows will never change. But to see the Reverend Al Sharpton suddenly appear as the mouthpiece for every miscarriage of justice against a black that garners national coverage just seems to me to be in his own self-interest. Perhaps I am reading this wrong. Maybe if he did not show up at these demonstrations, maybe if he did not focus the energy of the demonstrators into a march after these abortions of justice, perhaps an unruly mob would turn violent. Maybe he is the one calming factor necessary in these situations.

Bush thinks threat is the only answer

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski likened U.S. officials' saber rattling about Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions to similar statements made before the start of the Iraq war.

"I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq," Brzezinski told CNN's "Late Edition" on Sunday.

Do not let these paranoid fools get away with this again. Their irrational reasoning goes like this: if Iran is building nuclear reactors that can produce cheap energy and the residue from that production can be used to make bombs then they must be planning to make bombs. This creates an atmosphere in which Dick Cheney’s special brand of paranoia thrives. It has been proven that he believes it is best to do a ‘pre-emptive’ strike against any perceived threat against us instead of waiting for proof. George W. Bush has proven that he will allow himself to be led down any path by anyone close to him even if that path leads the U.S. to an illegal war. Together, this pair of weak-minded, warmongering, paranoid fools is the absolute worst thing to ever happen to this country. Cheney’s paranoia and mistrust only serves to illustrate that he himself is not trustworthy. You cannot trust someone who does not trust anyone. They are loose cannons. And as such should never have been allowed into this position of power.

Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, does not doubt Iran's alleged ambitions. "I believe they are building a capability to build a nuclear bomb," Kissinger told CNN. "I don't think they're yet in a position to build a nuclear bomb, but they may be two or three years away from it."

Sure they are building a ‘capacity’ to build a nuclear bomb. That same capacity is required to build a cleaner source of energy, too.

Earlier this month during a televised speech asserting that U.S. troops should not be immediately withdrawn from Iraq, President Bush said, "Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region."

This statement is an insight to Bush’s paranoia and for what he has planned for the future of that region. His real fear of Iran dominating the region is that they will get to it before the U.S. does.

George W. Bush, and his puppet masters, want that region to be controlled by the U.S. because of its strategic ability to protect access to oil reserves.

These scheming old men believe that if the American people can be made to believe that Iran has nefarious reasons for building nuclear power plants then the U.S. will have the backing of the American people to build military bases in the region to ostensibly repress Iran’s military when the real reason is to allow the U.S. to have some control over that oil.

We have no proof that Iran is striving to make nuclear weapons. We have only the paranoid fear of a couple of zealous old men sitting in the Presidents office conspiring about how to get the American public behind their own nefarious schemes.

Rest assured Iran wants more weapons and they want to beef up their military. Who wouldn’t with the most powerful nation in the world breathing down their necks threatening them with their military?

George W. Bush, and his cohorts, does not have a clue about what to do after Iran stood up against the International Atomic Energy Agency and refused to stop building nuclear reactors. Bush takes this resistance to bow down as an act of aggression against him personally. So his cowboy mentality causes him to react in the only comfortable way he knows and that is with more threats of violence. He is too blind to see that this makes him an even bigger fool.

Iran does not want war with the American people. Bush and Cheney need to keep rattling their sabers in order to force their way into a position of controlling that area. If war with Iran will put the U.S. in that position sooner then I have no doubt that the cowboy and his sidekick will go for it.

We cannot believe what these guys tell us about the war in Iraq. We can’t even belief the main stream media about what is going on in Iraq. The media is being manipulated to paint a rosier picture of what is truly taking place there and we need to remain vigilant about reaching out to alternative media sources to get the full picture.

If we don’t have the guts to impeach these lunatics then we can at least turn our backs to their lies and let them know we cannot be blindly led into yet another war.

Film footage of police chase.

Do we really need to watch the police chasing a ‘suspect’? Are we really that starved for the possibility of carnage resulting from a traffic accident that these bozos will more than likely cause?

Is this what is passing for ‘hard’ news these days?

Do we really ‘need’ six helicopters filming the same chase?

The NTSB is investigating why two news helicopters crashed into each other in Phoenix AZ and tragically (senselessly) killed four individuals while filming a car chase, of all things. Okay, let’s see if we can help. Six helicopters crowded the sky trying to get ‘exclusive’ film footage of some blockheaded, ‘no-class’, fool thinking he can outrun police radios, so that a violence-desensitized, gore-hungry public can be ‘thrilled’ when this dirt bag causes injury and possible death to some innocent person who just happened to be in the way.

Wow. That sentence is just brimming over with topics to blog about. Thank-you, one and all.

To make things a little simpler, let’s put the blame on ‘human error’. Yeah, that’s it. Hey, NTSB it was a freaking traffic jam in the sky and the humans were not paying attention to what they were doing.

How about all of you news outlets, that own or lease helicopters and are not afraid to waste fuel on this oh so excellent pursuit of ‘news’, put your collective heads together and come up with a plan to have just one helicopter up there feeding the footage, as it happens, to all the stations in your market at the same time? Believe me when I say, nobody cares about ‘exclusivity’ but you.

This way the media gets what it wants and those individuals who have nothing better to do get what they want. Plus we get the added bonus of not senselessly loosing any more lives in the name of ‘bringing the news to you first’.

I am not an insensitive person, I think losing these four individuals in this manner was tragic. They were just doing their jobs. Their families have 'senselessly' suffered a great loss that will never leave them.

I have a problem with the individuals sitting back at the news stations who think this is a credible pursuit of news. The individuals who sent these news crews out to get the footage of this chase. They think they have to show it just because it is happening now. They think they have to show it because someone else is showing it and if they don't show it too then they might 'lose' some viewers to their 'competitors'.

I also have a problem with the police participating in these chases. Most cities these days have helicopters to chase these guys and they can radio to the ground units on where to go after the 'suspect' stops running. Perhaps they can use the news helicopters. Chasing these fools in this manner would at least prevent the police from directly causing an accident.

And of course, the idiot who thinks he can outrun the police. Hey fool, they have radios. There are more of them than you. You cannot get away. If you really want to escape paying for your crime then shoot yourself and save the rest of us the time and expense of having to deal with your worthless ass.