Maine governor gags the press

Maine's crackpot governor has an odd view of freedom of the press. If the local media questions his policies and priorities, LePage isn't going to talk to them at all.

AUGUSTA – Gov. Paul LePage's administration will no longer comment in stories published by the Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Bennett said MaineToday Media, the newspapers' parent company, "had made it clear that it opposed this administration."

She would not elaborate, saying that responses from the administration could be gleaned from reports by The Associated Press or through document requests using the Freedom of Access Act.

Think Progress has more about LePage's corporate coddling agenda. One has to believe Maine voters were simply swept up in Tea Party fever when they put this nutjob into office in 2010. He barely squeaked into office then. After four years of his bizarre excuse for governance, one can only hope they come to their senses and kick the kook out in 2014.

Obligatory Olbermann post

I confess I am not a Keith Olbermann fan. While I admired his work for the most part, especially during the Bush years, I've always found his style abrasive. I found his delivery as arrogant and smug as Chuck Todd. Pure nails on the blackboard. Even when I still had cable I didn't watch the show, but I did make it a point to read the transcripts of his Special Commentary segments and often linked to them.

I'm not that shocked to see he's been dumped. And contrary to some of the speculation I've seen that this was a mutual decision, I don't think that's true. It's telling that he was suspended on that bogus political contribution thing just after Comcast and NBC struck a deal to merge and now the day after the merger went through, he's suddenly out. Also, if you read the transcript of Olbermann's abrupt farewell, this line stands out:

I think the same fantasy popped into the head of everybody in my business who has ever been told what I have been told -- "this will be the last edition of your show."

Maybe he did choose to quit because the management told he had to tone it down or something, but this still looks and feels like a direct result of the merger to me.

But for whatever reason, he's gone. I won't necessarily miss his voice, in the literal sense, but I will very much miss his words and his insights. Even when I disagreed with him, he was a thoughtful analyst and a courageous commentator. So yeah, he will be missed.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

No freedom of the press in the Gulf

I get impatient with people who deride President Obama for "not doing more to stop the gusher" in the Gulf. I'm convinced that nobody knows how to stop it and Obama is clearly not ignoring it. It strikes me that people are just expressing misdirected anger out of fear and a sense of their own helplessness. However, Glenzilla finds the right target for our fury, government complicity in media suppression. This is rather stunning.

McClelland also described how BP has virtually bought entire Police Departments which now do its bidding: "One parish has 57 extra shifts per week that they are devoting entirely to, basically, BP security detail, and BP is paying the sheriff's office."

The incidents of media harrassment continue to pile up. A freelance photographer taking pictures for a joint PBS' Frontline and ProPublica on BP's other safety violations, such as their refinery in Texas that "spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies" two weeks before the company's rig in the Gulf collapsed," was detained and harrassed even though he was doing his work on public land.

The Coast Guard just issued new rules on media access that threaten to jail reporters for up to 3 years, along with imposing hefty fines for doing their job and informing the public. The justification, as always, is public safety and prevention of terrorism. I have to agree with Glenn. It smells more like a cover-up and it veers disturbingly close to police state tactics. [via QL]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Beating the press - Updated

[Updated with link to Killian's first hand account]

Literally. With the GOP in general and McCain and Palin specifically villianizing the 'liberal media' as the mortal enemy of conservatives I suppose it was only a matter of time before the physical attacks began.

And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

From my position there I saw the bottoms of a number of feet almost accidentally stomping me to death as the two political camps screamed back and forth, the music continued to blare and some of the Obama crowd moved the large bearded man and his friends away. When I was helped to my feet the bearded man was walking away quickly.

For a moment I considered running the bloated, twelve-sandwich eating prick down and beating the living hell out of him…and then I remembered that I’m a reporter, how much I enjoy being gainfully employed and how hard it would be to keep my job if I got into a fistfight with a guy at a political rally.

I happen to know Joe Killian in the cyber-sense and he's a very mild guy who would never provoke such an attack. Thankfully he wasn't injured but how long before someone gets seriously hurt?

On a metaphorical level, this from Steve Benen is in a way even more disturbing.

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank added some details.

I have to say the Secret Service is in dangerous territory here. In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they've started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty -- protecting the protectee -- and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it's unfounded because the reporters can't get close enough to identify the person.

Now, this is an important detail. I'd assumed the escorts/minders were paid campaign staffers, but Milbank explained that it's the Secret Service that's blocking reporters from chatting with voters. If that's the case, we're talking about a rather obvious First Amendment violation.

When I read the original reports, I had the same impression that the reporters were being blocked by internal staffers. If in fact the Secret Service is doing this, it is indeed a serious FA violation and yet more proof that the police state has morphed from tin foil theory into a true threat to our democracy.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]

Lara's song

by Capt. Fogg

"Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever. "

Lara Logan

I was never really conscious of Lara Logan's existence until the Daily Show had her as a guest recently. She made a well presented and credible claim that the news from Iraq was being toned down, under reported, redacted and sometimes ignored, and as someone who has been in the thick of it for years as the chief foreign correspondent for CBS, and who frequently has been in the midst of combat, she has a great deal of credibility. That network has been cutting back its staff in Baghdad and some critics say that the public perception of improvement in Iraq has a lot to do with the lack of coverage. Indeed, despite the constant emphasis on danger and terror, it's possible to sit through a very long period of broadcast news without a single story from Iraq.

“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” she said to Jon Stewart.

It might be that she pushed the wrong buttons. Headlines and weblogs have begun to bleat about scandals in her private life, led by such Liberal Media as the National Enquirer and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. Will Bunch at Philly.com has a provocative article today and a link to the Daily Show interview.

Backlashes against less than enthusiastic reportage of Bush's war began immediately after the initial enthusiasm. Networks refused to allow a reading of the names of casualties lest it be taken as criticism of George Bush or his invasion. I don't think it's far fetched at all to see this attempt to ruin a brilliant career as a continuation.

Cross posted from Human Voices

Murdoch's Ministry of Information

by Capt Fogg

What if one company owned the daily newspapers, the weekly “alternative” newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in your city -- in your country, asks John Nichols, blogger at The Nation? Is there anyone but Rupert Murdoch who thinks the public interest is served or rational democracy enabled by allowing such a thing to happen?

Yes, there is; he's FCC Chairman and Smirkmeister Kevin Martin, a product of an administration that would like to hand everything from the airwaves to the air itself over to the highest bidder, if not the highest contributor. The New York Times tells us the plan is for sweeping deregulation that would finally put to rest the idea that an information monopoly is a bad thing and that the broadcast spectrum is a natural resource, access to which requires an obligation for public service. Let the biggest dog have the only bark in town as long as they support the Republican Corporatocracy!

There seem to be no plans for the customary public hearings and we may be handed the dismemberment of yet another important public protection by December of this year. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is already the largest media empire in the world. It's only the beginning.

Under the Bush administration, the function of the venerable agency has become to apportion public resources amongst media moguls without any regard for public interest. They have, as a matter of policy, routinely refused to protect licensed spectrum users against encroachments from large corporations and has been accused by the GAO of collaborating with corporate lobbyists; using secret meetings to pass them the information they need to avoid congressional actions and others have accused them not only of stifling entrepreneurship but of stifling minority ownership of radio broadcast licenses.

The idea of a free and open internet where bloggers can at least offer opposing viewpoints and cover items deemed unworthy by Murdoch or Clear Channel may soon die a similar death. Can anything resembling democracy fare any better?

Cross posted from Human Voices

Suppression of dissent

By Libby

I almost missed this yesterday and it speaks volumes about our increasing Orwellian state of the union. U.S. Military Censors ThinkProgress.

ThinkProgress is now banned from the U.S. military network in Baghdad.

Recently, an avid ThinkProgress reader — a U.S. soldier serving his second tour in Iraq — wrote to us and said that he can no longer access ThinkProgress.org. ...

The ban began sometime shortly after Aug. 22, when Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste was our guest blogger on ThinkProgress. He posted an op-ed that was strongly critical of the President’s policies and advocated a “responsible and deliberate redeployment from Iraq.” Previously, both the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times had rejected the piece.

Not surprisingly, both the National Review and Fox News are still accessible.

Time was this would be both surprising and disturbing enough to generate public outrage. Think Progress is no Tokyo Rose. It's a legitimate website with well researched and meticulously documented posts that just happen to refute the White House propaganda.

I think we don't have to worry about the impending police state anymore. We're already living in it.

David Brooks invents the facts

Busy day today at work so I only have time for this quick hit and run. Hot on the heels of admitting he doesn't have a clue about Iraq, (scroll down to media bytes, serious pundit David Brooks admits he just makes shit up to justify his talking points.

Yesterday, Media Matters observed that on this week’s Meet the Press, New York Times columnist David Brooks admitted to using a made-up statistic in order to argue against withdrawal from Iraq.

Specifically, Brooks rehashed the right-wing talking point that withdrawal in Iraq would certainly lead to “genocide,” alleging that 10,000 Iraqis a month would die after redeployment. But Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward quickly forced Brooks’ to admit his statistics were baseless:

BOB WOODWARD: I mean, you cite numbers which you have pulled out of the air of 10,000 dying. I mean, that’s–that–where does that come from? […]

DAVID BROOKS: So I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.

And they call me unserious? Brooks has been wrong about everything for five years and now he admits he lies. So how come this guy is getting the big bucks for punditry? In a just world, Brooks and all these idiots like himself and Kristol would have been laughed off the airwaves by now.

The day journalism died

By Libby

Digby posts a reflective piece about Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC, who emerged from the coverage of 9/11 as something of a hero and a media star. She led the way on embedded journalists in Afghanistan but she made a fatal mistake. Two really.

First she reported the whole story, interviewing parties from both sides of the conflict. That wounded her career but the fatal blow came when she told the truth in a speech at Kansas State University shortly after the invasion of Iraq. She criticized the embedding process and its santized coverage designed to glorify the war without showing its real life consequences.

You really should read the whole post, but here's a key quote.

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there's nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it's dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It's a dangerous thing to propagate.

She was demoted immediately and fired a few months later and the rest of the journalists got the message loud and clear. The path to success was in wrapping oneself in the flag and uncritically delivering the White House press releases. Truthiness was the new order of the day and anyone who dared to offer the bare facts in any public forum, no matter how obscure, would find themselves banished to the Siberia of TV's wasteland.

Banfield lost a promising career. The rest of us lost our only access to televised truth when Fox "News" was anointed as standard bearer for the White House and chief cheerleader of the GOP.

Things are not always what they seem

By Libby

Lukery at Wot Is It Good4 sees a previously unremarked danger in The White House prosecution of the two members of AIPAC for passing state secrets.

The object of this exercise has been broadly misunderstood by many who have followed it—and particularly by Iraq War critics who delight in a perceived slap-down of AIPAC. But this is tragically short-sighted. If the prosecution succeeds, the Bush Administration will have converted the Espionage Act of 1917 into something it was never intended to be: an American copy of the British Official Secrets Act. It is likely to lead quickly to efforts to criminalize journalists dealing with sensitive information in the national security sector, as well as their sources.

Let's imagine America with the Gonzales-McNulty contortion of the law in effect. We'd never know how the Bush Administration came to embrace torture as a tactic in the war on terror. We'd know nothing about the torture-by-proxy system developed with key administration allies such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—not to mention the system of “blacksites” established by the CIA in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We wouldn't know that the administration was violating the FISA statute with a massive surveillance program. And to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, that's just the known unknowns.

This would be a dream world for Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales. And a nightmare for the rest of us. And the AIPAC case could, if it succeeds, bring the nation much closer to its realization.

As the author Lukery cited notes, "It seems clear that Franklin and the two AIPAC employees had a common object, which was to invite critical public attention to U.S. policy towards Iran." Attention that is badly needed to clear away the smokescreen around Bush's propaganda blitz to pave the way to his heart's desire for yet another war.

And speaking of Iran, Cernig has the must read of the day -- an on the ground account of Peter Hitchens recent trip there. As Cernig reminds us Hitchens is no leftie - he is to the Right of his brother Christopher on most social issues so his agenda is not an issue and his observations should not be taken lightly. Hitchens paints a much different picture than one gets from the White House pressers.