With the close of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, much of the media was quick to declare them a total success. This goes against the mounds of journalism produced before and during the games by the Vancouver Media Co-op, the city's newly launched independent media center. Believing that their might be more than one answer regarding the success of the games, and one of those should come from the host communities, The Real News spoke to Franklin López, Video Producer with the Co-op, to find out more about the legacy of the 2010 Olympics for the people of Vancouver.

Real News Network - March 04, 2010
Olympic dream vs. Vancouver reality
Media love-in with Winter Olympics challenged by city's new journalist co-op

Franklin López is a video producer with the Vancouver Media Co-op. You can find the co-op at vancouver.mediacoop.ca. It is one of a series of similar projects getting started in Canada, currently there are also chapters in Toronto and Halifax. For the co-op's coverage of the Olympics, go to 2010.mediacoop.ca

Below the fold : Vancouver Poverty Olympics

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Bob McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their “50 visionaries who are changing the world”. He has written and edited 17 books, and his work has been translated into 21 languages. John Nichols is The Nation’s Washington correspondent, and the associated editor of the Capital Times in Wisconsin. John has covered seven presidential races and reported from two dozen countries. He is the author or coauthor of eight books on media and politics.

McChesney and Nichols are co-authors of a new book "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again", described in review by Mike Francis of The Oregonian as "a book that diagnoses the collapse of traditional, commercial journalism and, as a solution, prescribes a dramatic recasting of the incentives and rewards that make the industry work" and looks "backward at the historical business and regulatory choices made by publishers, broadcasters and their enablers in Congress"

Francis comments in his review that:

The authors are at their best when they point to critical turns during the formation of an independent press -- turns, they suggest, that could have gone in the direction of far more state support. The American people, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787, should be given "full information ... thro' the channel of public papers, and ... these papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people."

Also instructive are the sections devoted to the U.S. military's support for a climate of press freedom in the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, both of which, not coincidentally, are full of flourishing newspapers today.

Here Paul Jay of The Real News interviews McChesney and Nichols together about their book and about the journalism industry in the United States and kicks off the discussion with:

...let's start with some assumptions, 'cause we don't have too long, and I don't think they're tough assumptions, which is: American journalism, in terms of its financial model, is broken; in terms of its substantive content model is pretty broken too, especially when you look at the capitulation of most of the media around the Iraq War and since. So talk just a bit about the problem, and then talk a little bit about the solutions.


Real News Network - February 25, 2010
transcript here
The Death and Life of American Journalism Pt.1
McChesney and Nichols: The market cannot generate sufficient journalism on its own

Bob McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their “50 visionaries who are changing the world”. He has written and edited 17 books, and his work has been translated into 21 languages. John Nichols is The Nation’s Washington correspondent, and the associated editor of the Capital Times in Wisconsin. John has covered seven presidential races and reported from two dozen countries. He is the author or coauthor of eight books on media and politics.

McChesney and Nichols are co-authors of a new book "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again", described in review by Mike Francis of The Oregonian as "a book that diagnoses the collapse of traditional, commercial journalism and, as a solution, prescribes a dramatic recasting of the incentives and rewards that make the industry work" and looks "backward at the historical business and regulatory choices made by publishers, broadcasters and their enablers in Congress"

Francis comments in his review that:

The authors are at their best when they point to critical turns during the formation of an independent press -- turns, they suggest, that could have gone in the direction of far more state support. The American people, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787, should be given "full information ... thro' the channel of public papers, and ... these papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people."

Also instructive are the sections devoted to the U.S. military's support for a climate of press freedom in the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, both of which, not coincidentally, are full of flourishing newspapers today.

Here Paul Jay of The Real News interviews McChesney and Nichols together about their book and about the journalism industry in the United States and kicks off the discussion with:

...let's start with some assumptions, 'cause we don't have too long, and I don't think they're tough assumptions, which is: American journalism, in terms of its financial model, is broken; in terms of its substantive content model is pretty broken too, especially when you look at the capitulation of most of the media around the Iraq War and since. So talk just a bit about the problem, and then talk a little bit about the solutions.


Real News Network - February 25, 2010
transcript here
The Death and Life of American Journalism Pt.1
McChesney and Nichols: The market cannot generate sufficient journalism on its own

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Explain something to me.

In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn’t help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States.  State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker.  The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, “paralyzed” and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything. 

Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, “Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, “The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it.” Voters seem to agree.  Two words, “polarization” and “gridlock” -- or hyperbolic cousins like “paralyzing hyperpartisanship” -- dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism.  Foreign observers have been similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, “America’s Democracy, A Study in Paralysis.”

Washington’s incapacity to govern now evidently seems to ever more Americans at the root of many looming problems.  As the New York Times summed up one of them in a recent headline: “Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis.” When President Obama leaves the confines of Washington for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congressional “gridlock” and the “slash and burn politics” that have left the nation’s capital tied in knots.

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(From The Paragraph.)

From Climbing Mountains to Building Schools

Greg Mortenson is an American, who grew up near Mount Kilimanjaro, where his father started a teaching hospital and his mother started a school.²⁰+²¹ From that background, Mortenson became a nurse, and an avid mountain climber — but later switched to become an avid school-builder. The switch came with his try at climbing K2, the second-highest peak on Earth, so deep in the Himalayas that it had long stayed almost unseen — and nameless.²² Mortenson and his buddy gave up the climb after their exhausting rescue of an ill teammate.²³ On the way down from base camp, Mortenson made a wrong turn, and eventually staggered into the village of Korphe, Pakistan. The village welcomed him and, over time, nursed him back to health. During his stay, Mortenson saw the state of the village’s schooling:²⁶

… I walked behind the village, and I saw 84 children sitting in the dirt during their school lessons. There were five girls, 79 boys. What really struck me, though, was that there was no teacher there. And I said, where’s your teacher? And they said, Master Hussein is in the next village because we can’t afford his daily one dollar salary. So that day in ’93 I made a promise to try and get a school built there.

After working at it for three years, Mortenson fulfilled his promise. Since then, his Central Asia Institute (CAI) has built 131 schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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(From The Paragraph.)

From Climbing Mountains to Building Schools

Greg Mortenson is an American, who grew up near Mount Kilimanjaro, where his father started a teaching hospital and his mother started a school.²⁰+²¹ From that background, Mortenson became a nurse, and an avid mountain climber — but later switched to become an avid school-builder. The switch came with his try at climbing K2, the second-highest peak on Earth, so deep in the Himalayas that it had long stayed almost unseen — and nameless.²² Mortenson and his buddy gave up the climb after their exhausting rescue of an ill teammate.²³ On the way down from base camp, Mortenson made a wrong turn, and eventually staggered into the village of Korphe, Pakistan. The village welcomed him and, over time, nursed him back to health. During his stay, Mortenson saw the state of the village’s schooling:²⁶

… I walked behind the village, and I saw 84 children sitting in the dirt during their school lessons. There were five girls, 79 boys. What really struck me, though, was that there was no teacher there. And I said, where’s your teacher? And they said, Master Hussein is in the next village because we can’t afford his daily one dollar salary. So that day in ’93 I made a promise to try and get a school built there.

After working at it for three years, Mortenson fulfilled his promise. Since then, his Central Asia Institute (CAI) has built 131 schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

           Read more... 

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Hold Onto Your Underwear
This Is Not a National Emergency

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

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This is the last episode of Paul Jay's interview of journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.

In the previous episode Cohen talked about the struggle for power and direction within the Democratic Party from the days of the Viet Nam War to the present, and wound up with "Frankly... I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he's up for re-election... Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you'll never get anywhere."

Here in the conclusion of the interview Cohen expands on those ideas and fills in some of the outlines to draw a rough set of guidelines or roadmap of how to get from where things stand now with the Democrats as out and out corporatists to a world of the kind of progressive populism they have been well known for at various points in history, and how it is going to take a no more Mr. Nice Guy approach from progressives and a lot of very hardnosed and fearless aggressiveness, of the kind that I think Muhammad Ali meant when he noted so many years ago "He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."


Real News Network - February 6, 2010
Cohen: Far right Republicans are dangerous, but also need to primary against corporate Democrats

This is the last episode of Paul Jay's interview of journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.

In the previous episode Cohen talked about the struggle for power and direction within the Democratic Party from the days of the Viet Nam War to the present, and wound up with "Frankly... I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he's up for re-election... Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you'll never get anywhere."

Here in the conclusion of the interview Cohen expands on those ideas and fills in some of the outlines to draw a rough set of guidelines or roadmap of how to get from where things stand now with the Democrats as out and out corporatists to a world of the kind of progressive populism they have been well known for at various points in history, and how it is going to take a no more Mr. Nice Guy approach from progressives and a lot of very hardnosed and fearless aggressiveness, of the kind that I think Muhammad Ali meant when he noted so many years ago "He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."


Real News Network - February 6, 2010
Cohen: Far right Republicans are dangerous, but also need to primary against corporate Democrats

By David Swanson

What it would have cost us to publicly fund independent media that would have prevented the invasion of Iraq wouldn't amount, in a year, to what we spend on a month of occupying that country.

Diverting the cost of a month of war to a year of giving substance to our "freedom of the press" would mean that the last time someone asked you about the Teabaggers' genius in being smart enough to talk dumb enough to persuade everyone to be racists would, in fact, be the LAST time anyone would ask you how a creation of the corporate media manages to get coverage from the corporate media.

But what do I mean by government-funded independent media? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Aren’t we better off with a completely worthless and counterproductive corporate media system than with government-controlled media? Maybe, but I said publicly FUNDED, not government CONTROLLED. And the choice is between that sort of communications system or nothing. Corporate news rooms, journalism, and investigative reporting are dying out as surely as if a plague were spreading among reporters; and they were already dying out before the internet came onto the scene. We need to take a lesson from current European or early American history and begin treating the press as the public good that Jefferson and Madison considered it, or give up on the accountability imposed on government officials in the United States just a few decades ago.

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