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Today's
Stories
February 26, 2004
Virginia Tilly
The Deeper Meaning of the Wall
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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February
26, 2004
Janet Jackson, Bush
and No. 524
There
are No Halftime Shows in War
By WALTER BRASCH
On the day that Justin Timberlake ripped open
Janet Jackson's blouse during the half-time of the Super Bowl
to reveal a bejeweled breast and create a national firestorm
of protest, American Soldiers 523 and 524 died in Iraq. Along
with the two American soldiers, 14 were wounded. Also that day,
two suicide bombers killed more than 100 Kurds and wounded more
than 200.
Back in the United States, CBS, which
broadcast the game, MTV which produced the half-time show, and
Viacom, which owns both CBS and MTV, said they were shocked and
outraged that Timberlake and Jackson would do such a despicable
act. The NFL said it was "embarrassed." The two singers
claim the blouse-ripping was the result of a "wardrobe malfunction."
The network, of course, said little about the crotch-grabbing
rump-slapping other parts of the show.
During the week after the Super Bowl,
Americans sent more than 200,000 complaints to the FCC; it was
almost as many as all the complaints for all alleged violations
the previous year. FCC Chair Michael Powell, calling the half-time
spectacle "deplorable," quickly launched the full resources
of the FCC to investigate Jackson's breast. Congressmen and senators
groped prime time audiences to express their outrage against
indecency on television, and demanded higher fines for flashing.
The nation's newspapers gave the story its front page, ran sidebars
inside, and continued the story for days. TV news, talk, and
entertainment shows constantly rebroadcast the offending one-second
breast-baring, the flesh now pixilated or blurred. The half-time
story became the most popular search topic on the internet; the
clip, often bootlegged, became the most downloaded one in the
internet's history.
On TV network news and in fictionalized
prime-time series, we see violence and body parts on the street.
On the afternoon soaps, we have seen every violation of the Ten
Commandments, and a few violations that not even the residents
of Sodom and Gomorrah knew about. But, this didn't draw the ire
of the sanctimonious "family values" administration.
A bare breast did.
Ratings draw advertising, which is what
runs the nation's media. With 90 million Super Bowl viewers,
CBS could command $2.3 million per 30-second commercial, many
of which pre-pubescent teens would say was a combination of "cool"
and "gross." But, there isn't much return on investment
for stories of substance. Let's take a look at some other stories
that don't cause much public outrage or get even a fraction of
the coverage.
When President Bush announced he wanted
to give legal status to illegal immigrants to be able to work
in America, there weren't 200,000 written complaints that this
was a political maneuver to meet the bottom-line mentality of
corporations pining for low-wage employment. The nation's unemployment
rate is now 5.6 percent, with most of the 8.3 million unemployed
having been laid off or outsourced. Even the 8.3 million figure
presented by the Department of Labor is much lower than the reality.
By government standards, anyone working at least one hour a week
is considered to be employed. The statistics also don't consider
that thousands of companies hire workers for only 30-35 hours
a week in order to avoid having to pay benefits, or that hundreds
of thousands of jobs are filled by persons who once worked at
other companies for better benefits and higher pay before being
laid off, or that about 300,000 Americans, after months of unemployment,
have just given up and, thus, aren't counted. One thing the statistics
and projections do state_for the first time since the Great Depression,
under Bush's administration there will be a net loss of jobs.
Where is the massive national outrage?
More than 40 million Americans don't
have health coverage, and the huge Bush deficit may force a cut-back
in social security benefits. Those stories never received the
news coverage that Janet Jackson's bare breast received.
Per-pupil spending in the public schools
has declined by more than four percent in the past two years,
and the President's educational budget is about $30 billion less
than what he called for to provide less than one year's support
for his adventure in Iraq. The news media didn't focus on that,
and 200,000 people didn't write the government to protest.
In his 2004 budget, Bush lopped off seven
percent from the Environmental Protection Agency. Apparently
the only ones who seem to care might be spotted owls, people
whom the neoconservatives derisively call "tree huggers,"
and some "alarmists" who think hazardous materials
in the water and air may not be the latest fad diet. Bush has
also slashed $1.4 billion from human services budget, terminating
about three dozen programs, including those for alcohol abuse
reduction, arts in education, and several which target low-income
youth. But, the media, if they even noticed, ran only small stories
in their "B" sections.
Only in the past year has there been
any kind of public outcry about the Patriot Act, a heavy-handed
administration attempt to make Americans think it's doing something
about terrorism while doing little more than shredding the Constitution.
But, ask the average American about what the Patriot Act does
to his or her civil liberties, and you'll get mumbling silence.
Perhaps the million signatures the librarians and booksellers
are soliciting might stimulate some news reporter's sense of
what's important.
The President has taken some of the best
National Guard troops to go to Iraq, leaving the states with
fewer resources to help victims of natural disasters. But, floods
in the Midwest and hurricanes along the Atlantic coast may not
be as important to this president as his macho bravado photo-ops
on aircraft carriers. After all, who's going to protest sending
military into a war zone_until their own safety is threatened,
their homes are destroyed, or there is civil unrest and the local
sheriff can't handle it?
No government officials protested the
loss of lives from a war that may have been started by a president
who had a historical vendetta against another nation's dictator.
No administration officials complained about war-profiteering
by Halliburton, Dick Cheney's former company, which still pays
him a six-figure annual income. Not many are irate enough to
protest the administration's stonewalling of an independent committee
with a Presidential mandate to investigate the truth behind the
Iraq War. The deaths of the Americans and Kurds were blocked
from the front page banner headlines by the scandal of a semi-naked
nipple. Because of the media exploitation, because politicians
saw a chance to rant against indecency while mounting adulterous
affairs, and because 200,000 Americans protested one second on
network television, we have a crisis, and the full resources
of this administration has been mobilized to handle it.
Almost every American knows who Justin
Timberlake and Janet Jackson are. Because of the media, and a
vast ubiquitous publicity machine, we know the names and lives
of dozens of celebrities, wanna-be's, and even the "stars"
of 20 hours of "reality TV" each week. Only a few know
the names of the two Americans killed in Iraq the same afternoon
as a half-time show.
Assisting on this column were Rosemary
Brasch and Christine Varner.
Walt Brasch's
latest book is Sex
and the Single Beer Can (Feb. 2004), a witty and probing
look at the nation's media and entertainment industries. You
may contact him through www.walterbrasch.com
or at brasch@bloomu.edu.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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