We Need Less Junk News And More Nutritious News That Helps Build Our Understanding Of The World

We've heard of Fake News.  That's disinformation and propaganda, and, for the most part, the so called mainstream media doesn't intentionally offer Fake News.

But the the mainstream media is guilty of feeding us a steady diet of what I'm calling JUNK NEWS - the news equivalent of Twinkies and Coke.  It titillates, not with sugar, but with violence, sex, gossip, and cute.  It feeds our hunger for news, but without us actually gaining any understanding.  We end up growing facter and facter, without gaining greater understanding or knowing what to do to improve the world.  We get irritable and depressed instead of taking on the system.  (And yes, that work is left to the relative few who have figured out how to consume news in a healthy and productive way.)

We get so much trivia about the presidential candidates, for instance, and who's up this week and interviews with people who may or may not be representative of what others are thinking.  Basically it's random facts (this lady, from this town, who works in this organization, is this age, and she says this) used to create the reporter's opinion as though it had meaningful factual basis.  NPR doesn't report the news, it serves news stories, news nuggets, that make it easier for its listeners to consume.  Like fast food.  (I'm not saying that reporters shouldn't make the news accessible, but that the news, not the story telling, should be the top priority.

Trump successfully manipulates the media with his Tweets to bring attention to himself and distract from what's really important.  Our collective outrage over his thinking the Chiefs are from Kansas is totally wasted energy.  A reporter might say that it's important to show you this isn't just a single incident, but that it's a pattern, and that that matters. But Trump has done this so often that no one can any longer claim that the collective weight of his nonsense matters.  All the time we spend watching, reading, surfing the news, should actually be spent learning about how things work. How banks, treaties, arms sales, military spending, and dead  soldiers and civilians all fit together.    Only when you know how it works, can you focus on how to dismantle or repair things.

So I'd like to call attention to an article that dives a little deeper than most into how the sanctions on Iran work (or don't work.)  Esfandyar Batmanghelidj at Bloomberg News looks at the details of US sanctions on Iran, specifically a section on humanitarian aid.  Here's a brief excerpt from the article:

"But hidden in the mechanics of SHTA’s [Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement] initial 2.3 million-euro transaction is an unprecedented provision that could help address growing concerns that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign will be impossible to lift even in the aftermath of new negotiations with Iran.
The relevant provision is hidden in the jargon of a statement issued last October describing Treasury’s framework for SHTA: 'Provided that foreign financial institutions commit to implement stringent, enhanced due-diligence steps, the framework will enable them to seek written confirmation from Treasury that the proposed financial channel will not be exposed to U.S. sanctions.'”

And there are plenty of others who do this sort of in depth and breadth understanding building reporting.  Chris Hedges is one who ties lots of loose ends together. Much of his writing is too scary for most people.  Citizens Climate Lobby does a good job of explaining Climate Change.  Dahr Jamail is another.  Hasan Minhaj is another who tells the news in the Daily Show fashion.  Here's a whole gallery of people who try to offer more serious news.  Though in many cases, it doesn't come in convenient, tempting fast news wrapping.  This may mean reading books and other radical activities.

 We need more of this kind of reporting and a lot less of the junk news.  Media offer the news that sells.  There are huge corporate pressures for profits in the food industry and in the media.  But just as health food advocates have changed what corporations serve, so can healthy news advocates can do the same with the media industry.  There will always be consumers of click bait, we just need to keep increasing the proportion of people who make most of their news consumption serious news.

New Books Set Off Brain

After the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) meeting Saturday morning I went to the UAA library.  I didn't intend to but first I was reminded that the bike trail is now blocked so they can build a new parking garage.  After taking the detour, I found the rest of the bike trail full of runners and didn't think I should try to bike through them.  So I gave up and looked through the new books at the UAA library.

As I perused them a phrase from the CCL meeting repeated by the guest speaker, Rear Admiral Len Hering (ret), Adult Conversation, came to mind.  He was referring to people in the United States talking seriously about climate change.

But in the library's new books section, there were so many books on a variety of different topics.  What I suspect they had in common was Adult Conversation.  That is, people had spent a lot of time researching the topics before and as they wrote their books, and they were offering more than just platitudes.

One of the first books I picked up was nobody's business  by Brian M. Reed.  A book on modern poetry.  Stuff that the author says doesn't look like poetry even.

"I confess that during the first George W. Bush administration I poked fun at these assorted un-poems when talking with colleagues in private and when advising students about what they should be reading.  I was startled when the later began to push back.  The first rebels were independent-thinking upper-division undergraduates and charismatic incoming MFA's who had seen poems such as Rodney Goenke's "Pizza Kitty" on YouTube and who reverently passed around  scarce copies of books such as K. Silem Mohammad's Dear Head Nation (2003) as if they were saints' relics.  I was mystified." (p. 130)

He goes through some poems.  One is a series of lines from a computer.  He wonders how this can be poetry.  They've simply lifted part of something from the internet.  One of the poems seems to be a bit better..

  This is "Eaten by Dogs."  He writes more:

"It can be difficult to say for certain, but this passage seems to be a list of captions that originally accompanied photographs by a leftist journalist name Dahr Jamail.  One can still find photos by Jamail with the captions "Man making "Shubada' sign  . . . about to be shot" and "No comment" on the the Fifth-Estate-Online website, as well as another of his photos captioned "Iraqi insurgent partially eaten by dogs -- November 2004" on Apacheclips.com. 16  The statement "viewed X times" replicates a common format for reporting a Web page's hit count."

You might well be wondering what this is all about and why I'm pointing it out.  Well, Dahr Jamail, at one point lived in Anchorage and spoke several times here of his journalism.  I wasn't sure if I was blogging yet at that time, and apparently not.  The only post I can find that mentions him is this one.  

And then back to the question about whether this can be considered poetry:

". . . As so often happens, the question contained within itself the answers.  Certain of my best students were innately suspicious of the self-aware, erudite authors held up by cultue czars and well-meaning professors as models for them to admire and emulate.  The radical gestures of negation that most irritated me about post-9/11 anti-poetry -- its blank indifference to liteary history, its scorn for conditional markers of craft, and its disdain for politsh and perfection -- were in fact the very attributes that appealed to them.  Moreover, they read these gestures as profoundly political in inspiration, that is, as calculated attacks on institutional norms and practices that not only shape literary careers but also preside over the formation of obedient, well-disciplined neoliberal citizens-subjects.  Watching their nation plunge headlong into overseas wars on dubious pretenses, these youthful men and women were angry  They did not understand their fellow Americans who, although they might loudly express their dislike for their government, would never dare break windows, march without a parade permit, or endanger their chances for a glowing letter of recommendation.  Here at last were poets whose outrages against decorum were extreme enough to give voice . . ." 

 On the one hand, this is the kind of extensive examination of minutiae that made me leave English after I got my undergraduate degree.  Yet, it also points out what isn't obvious - to the author himself at first even.  He finds profundity in these seeming non-poems.  At least they speak profoundly to his students.  And as I looked at other books (which I'll try to cover in less detail in other posts), it was clear this was simply another example of similar topics, but in this case expressed in poetry.

Reed teaches at the University of Washington which added one more personal connection for me since one of my kids graduated from there and I've spent more time there in recent years than any other campus besides UAA. 

 [It's late.  I'm falling asleep as I write.  But I want to post and I'll check for typos in the morning.]

American Soldiers Abducted by Group Disguised as Americans

Story of soldiers' slayings revealed slowly
Correspondent's tenacity helped unearth the truth
By RICHARD MAUER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: January 28, 2007
Last Modified: January 28, 2007 at 03:34 AM

BAGHDAD -- I was nearly done eating today when Hussam Ali, our stringer from Karbala, buzzed the gate to our floor and charged into the room.
Hussam is thin like a runner. His cheekbones look sculpted and his skin is darker than olive. He has a thin mustache. And he was excited like any reporter with a big, big story.
Hussam had been up well past 2 a.m., talking on the phone to bureau chief Leila Fadel about the events of a week ago Saturday in his town. That's when four American soldiers, most likely all from Fort Richardson, were abducted and executed, still handcuffed, following a brazen raid on a provincial government compound.
Army officials finally acknowledged the abductions last night in a press release e-mailed to media 11 p.m. Iraq time. Prior to that, the official story made it sound like the soldiers had died in battle, not murdered in, or just outside, the Chevy Suburbans abandoned by the attackers miles from the compound.
But Hussam began discovering the truth earlier this week, having heard from the police in the neighboring town of Hilla, where the Suburbans -- and the slain Americans -- were found. But the U.S. Army refused to confirm or deny the account until The Associated Press sent a report over its wire last night. . . .

At dusk on Saturday, Jan. 20, Hussam was in his house, a few hundred yards from the compound, when he heard a huge explosion. He raced out the door and headed toward the sound of gunfire. Early-arriving pilgrims in the streets were scattering. Hussam thought a mortar had landed in their midst. Then he saw smoke rising from the compound. Was it a car bomb, he wondered?
With snipers on the roofs, he didn't want to get too close to the walls. He took cover beside a police car abandoned in the middle of the street. He was on the opposite site of the compound from the gate. He could see military vehicles burning inside but not the Suburbans roaring off with their captives.
Women and children were racing out of a small door in the wall to his left. They had been visiting their men in jail. Hussam asked what they had seen, but they wouldn't talk to him.
It grew very dark. The power was cut. The gunfire had stopped. Hussam made his way to the gate. The guards were still jumpy and excited. He asked them who the attackers were.
"Americans! It was the Americans!" they shouted.
As surreal as Iraq can be, that still made no sense to Hussam. But the attackers came up in a half-dozen or more Suburbans, just like Americans travel. They had U.S. documents and wore U.S. uniforms. At least one was very light-skinned and spoke in English. {Get the whole Anchorage Daily News story clicking here.]

Think about what this means. Iraqi insurgents or maybe Al-Qaida, or Iranians got US vehicles, or US looking vehicles, dressed in US uniforms, with US papers, breeze past the checkpoint, attack, and kidnap four American soldiers. One of the reasons I thought our invasion of Iraq was a mistake from the beginning was that I knew we were sending young American troops into a culture they knew nothing about, where people speak a language they don't understand. As a former Peace Corps volunteer who lived as the only American in a small Northern Thai provincial capital for a year (a second volunteer showed up the second year) I understand a little bit about living in a foreign culture. And we had enough intensive Thai language training before we left that I could get by in Thai (emphasis on 'get by') when I arrived. That was good because my Thai was better than the English of most of the people I met. I know how totally ignorant I was - despite our language and cultural training - when I arrived. And the more language and culture I learned, the more I realized how much more there was that I would never comprehend.

So our troops were going to be dependent on Arabic speaking interpreters. But how do you know which interpreters are on 'our' side? So we are in a country, where, for the most part, we are dependent on bi-lingual Iraqis for communication. Yes, I know there are some American soldiers trained in Arabic, just like I was trained in Thai. I could get by, but I certainly didn't understand everything they were saying, or the nuances, or even the irony.

And the war is in their home territory. Where they know when things feel abnormal. Where they have relatives and friends. Where they know the shortcuts between the houses, between the towns. Where they had secret hiding places as kids. US soldiers know none of this.

And many of them speak English. Certainly far more Iraqis speak pretty good English than American troops speak even the most basic Arabic. I know about translators, because a person in my town took English lessons from me because she wanted to deal directly with the foreigners building the road in our area when she negotiated with them to lease the dump trucks she owned. The Thai translator the foreigners had was shaking down all the would-be contractors for kickbacks. In the end, she woke me up one morning at 6am insisting I had to come as her translator because her English wasn't good enough yet. And afterward the foreigners offered me the job as translator, because they knew theirs wasn't conveying everything honestly. (I didn't take the job, I had my classes to teach.) And I know about translators because of a research trip to Beijing with my Hong Kong college students. My students quietly told me what was actually being said as opposed to what the translator had conveyed. This wasn't about bribes, but about Chinese ideas of what is appropriate and inappropriate to say. So that my questions sometimes were rephrased, which explained why the answers made little sense sometimes. Also, because direct translations from one language to another are very difficult to make. The translations are literally accurate, but the words in English don't mean what they mean in the original language.

So already, just the problems of going into a different country, without knowing the culture, without having historical links and personal connections, put us in a real disadvantage. In this newsreport, it is the Iraqi reporter who lives in the neighborhood, was there when the kidnapping took place, and could go around and ask the soldiers and others what happened, who got the story. Not the American journalists trapped in the green zone. [after reading the blog I need to correct this, he isn't in the Green Zone, but he has been, so far, trapped in his hotel.] So even the journalists are relying on the word of Iraqis who may well be accurate reporters of what happened, or could even be plants for the opposition. It takes a while to develop the kind of relationship and cultural sensitivity to know the difference.

Aside from my own overseas experience, the film, Battle of Algiers, about the uprising in Algiers that eventually got the French out and gained Algeria's independence, taught me long ago how difficult it is to fight an urban war in a foreign land against a united people. I was glad to see the film was on the must-see list in Washington, DC a couple of years ago. Apparently the right people didn't see it, or if they did, thought like the French, that they knew better. Given our involvement in Iraq and Afganistan, I think all Americans ought to slip down to their video rental store and check it out. Even if they have to read the subtitles.

But all of those comments are just background for the real importance of this story. First, note that in the story "At least one was very light-skinned and spoke in English." There is an assumption that Americans are 'very light skinned." Or that Iraqis are not. Of course, we know that the US military is made up of soldiers of every shade of skin.

Second, whoever conducted this raid, understood the Americans far better than the Americans understand them. They were able to disguise themselves as Americans. These are people every bit as smart as the smartest Americans over there, but they have the advantage of knowing the home culture and language, as well as knowing enough of the American culture and language to pull pretending to be Americans.

This report suggests that up to now soldiers riding in US looking vehicles and wearing US uniforms and carrying US papers and speaking at least some English, have been assumed to be Americans and they pretty much get waved through the checkpoints. If that is true, and this news story is true, then American soldiers are no longer going to be able to trust American soldiers. Not only will they be fighting the 'enemy,' they now have to be very careful of their own troops, who may actually be the enemy.

And given that many of our troops are brown skinned and have accents, what is going to happen to the morale in our troops? Are American soldiers who look like they could be 'them' and don't speak accent-free American English going to be suspect? I would guess that might have been one of the objectives of the raid - to sow doubt among American soldiers about who is actually American.

After I wrote this, I went back to the Anchorage Daily News website and began reading Rich Mauer's blog. I know Rich and talked to him a couple weeks ago because he'd written such a good piece on the FBI investigation of Alaskan politicians. That's when I learned he was headed for Iraq. Reading his blog reinforces all the stuff I've said above about knowing the language and the culture. So far Rich is locked up in a dark hotel room getting news from Iraqi reporters and news wires. You can read his blog yourself. But reporting is different from running a military campaign. We need lots of eyes and ears. As someone who's just been plucked off the streets of Anchorage (he's got good reporting skills, but his experience in Iraq is not much different from most others in Anchorage) he will see and hear things that are different from what more experienced Iraq hands will see. All is new and different and his eye is more like the average Alaskan's, so perhaps his reporting will connect to them more. His blog reports are certainly interesting. In addition to checking out Rich's blog, you might also want to check out the website and blog of Dahr Jamail, another person from Anchorage who has been covering Iraq as an independent reporter for several years now. When wandering around the streets of Bagdad got too dangerous, he pulled out of Iraq, and is now reporting about the mideast more generally.