No Burial for Balakot
Pervez Hoodbhoy October 13, 2005
#125 Posted by mechanical on January 15, 2006 11:30:35 am
Sir!
I am a person who merely have any interest in Physics. I am a Fine Art professional but your rational talk, your courage and sincerity, you command over social issues and problems made me your life time fan. You are above all of appraisals and comments. Love you.
I am a person who merely have any interest in Physics. I am a Fine Art professional but your rational talk, your courage and sincerity, you command over social issues and problems made me your life time fan. You are above all of appraisals and comments. Love you.
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#124 Posted by alert on October 30, 2005 12:11:12 pm
Re: # 123
I am extremely disappointed after reading the posts of ZahraJ,....ZahraJ why are you so impressed by WSJ,..there is no need to suffer from inferiority complex sister!.....After all most of the Americans are absorbed in their own luxurious life styles,..and they are only interested in us due to their personal motives,....Americans don,t want to know about the real problems of Pakistani society,.....They give cash to Masters of Pakistan ,..as a political bribe,..and they don,,t care if ordinary citizens are getting any thing or not,..and if they are deprived and suffering,....we Pakistanis who live in North America always read Pakistani newspapers like Dawn and TheNews,...these Pakistani newspapers are providing wonderful information on internet...and due to these honest and straight forward journalists we are learning a lot,..and things are changing in our, rather stagnant and Mullah/feudal bitten society,.....
And this Harish,....his shameless talk is not worthy of a decent forum..his posts are not worth reading ,...and he must be ignored
I am extremely disappointed after reading the posts of ZahraJ,....ZahraJ why are you so impressed by WSJ,..there is no need to suffer from inferiority complex sister!.....After all most of the Americans are absorbed in their own luxurious life styles,..and they are only interested in us due to their personal motives,....Americans don,t want to know about the real problems of Pakistani society,.....They give cash to Masters of Pakistan ,..as a political bribe,..and they don,,t care if ordinary citizens are getting any thing or not,..and if they are deprived and suffering,....we Pakistanis who live in North America always read Pakistani newspapers like Dawn and TheNews,...these Pakistani newspapers are providing wonderful information on internet...and due to these honest and straight forward journalists we are learning a lot,..and things are changing in our, rather stagnant and Mullah/feudal bitten society,.....
And this Harish,....his shameless talk is not worthy of a decent forum..his posts are not worth reading ,...and he must be ignored
#123 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 27, 2005 12:32:14 am
hahaha -- zahra J -- i think u have a problem reading -- i never said to you to subscribe or unsubscribe to any paper -- and btw i am 33 so didnt read the article , sorry
harry potter -- the only person`s whose pants come down with great frequency is arjun himself -- of course its another story that he is your mentor -- it makes sense
harry potter -- the only person`s whose pants come down with great frequency is arjun himself -- of course its another story that he is your mentor -- it makes sense
#122 Posted by ZahraJ on October 24, 2005 9:30:48 am
Omar - Do you mind reviewing your posts #97 and #100 - #104? Did you start your concerns with the editorial page? It is simply foolish to start picking fights over any publication. On the other hand, I won`t tolerate anyone telling me to subscribe or unsubscribe based on his biases. Please do consult someone on the definition of ``personal``. I recommend following the advice from your not-so-favorite publication. You have the prerogative to digest or ignore. Prepare for the future. Happy Reading!
Prevention
Aging Well
Scientists set out to fathom medical mysteries of older men
By KELLY GREENE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 10, 2005;
Jed Diamond, a 61-year-old psychotherapist in Willits, Calif., showed no signs of depression when he and his wife filled out screening questionnaires 12 years ago as part of their effort to help their son with a drug problem.
His wife, however, scored high on the test, indicating she could be depressed. She ``got treated and, over six months or so, she was starting to feel better,`` Mr. Diamond recalls. But when his wife suggested that his snappish behavior might mean that he was depressed, too, he balked. ``I said, `I`m a therapist -- I`d know if I were depressed.` ``
Finally, after several years during which ``things were really stressful between us, I agreed to go and see somebody,`` Mr. Diamond says. ``And I started to wonder, maybe I and a lot of other men were experiencing depression in a different way. Maybe we`re measuring depression more accurately in women and not recognizing it in men.``
As a result, he designed a new depression test specifically for men -- and identified what he calls ``irritable male syndrome,`` adding up scientific studies that, taken together, suggest that many men go through changes as they grow older that are different -- in ways big and small -- than the changes women go through. And they involve changes that are both psychological and physical.
The problem, as Mr. Diamond`s experience shows, is that those changes in men sometimes go undetected or untreated. While scientists have turned their attention in recent years to more effectively recognizing and treating problems common to older women, researchers have just started to focus on the medical mysteries surrounding older men.
Rephrase That
One reason that male changes often go undetected is that men generally aren`t conditioned to get annual medical exams, as many women do with gynecologists. They often write off signs of change in their bodies or emotions as a normal part of aging.
When that happens, the result can be a grumpy old man -- or worse. Fifteen percent of the 60,622 Americans who killed themselves in 2001 were men over age 65, according to a recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. And most elderly suicide victims had been recently diagnosed with their first episode of depression, the CDC says.
In trying to better detect depression, Mr. Diamond decided that he needed to find a way to get men to open up about their emotional issues. So he came up with a list of questions different from those typically used to pinpoint depression because ``men may be depressed at higher rates than women, but [they] may express depression in different ways. That may be particularly true as we age.``
Indeed, a recent study by J. Douglas Bremner, an Emory University psychiatrist, tested a group of former depression patients by giving them a drink that blocked the brain`s ability to absorb serotonin, the neurotransmitter that lets us feel happy. The women cried and talked about their pain; the men typically didn`t want to talk and said they felt fine. Instead, they wanted to get away to a nearby bar.
Mr. Diamond says he replaced typical questions like, ``Are you sad? Do you cry more often? Are you feeling hopeless?`` with questions asking if, over the past month, the subject has felt more aggressive or irritable, has had trouble sleeping, or has ``over-consumed`` alcohol.
More Than the Mind
It`s not just men`s psychological issues that are starting to get some attention. Researchers also are trying to find better ways to recognize and deal with the physical ailments that affect older men.
The National Cancer Institute is currently trying to determine the value of certain screenings for prostate cancer. Scientists are following 38,350 men who started with no indication of cancer to see whether prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, screening and digital rectal exams decrease deaths due to prostate cancer. A high PSA concentration can indicate the existence of prostate cancer -- but the test doesn`t necessarily tell whether the cancer would be deadly. That means men with cancer that isn`t life-threatening could wind up undergoing procedures that might do more harm than good.
The National Institute on Aging, meanwhile, is gearing up for a large-scale trial on testosterone-replacement therapy. For the few men whose bodies make very little or no testosterone, such as men whose pituitary glands have been destroyed or whose testes have been damaged, supplements may help maintain strong muscles and bones, and also increase sex drive, the institute said in a recent statement. But more research is needed to determine the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy for older men with normal testosterone levels.
For men who have determined that they have psychological issues, treatment is varied.
Some take treatment into their own hands. Mike Love, a 50-year-old hospital worker in Rathdrum, Idaho, turned to antidepressants for about 10 years to help him get his anger toward his family in check. But he always worried that the drugs were doing more harm than good, he says. After reading about B-complex vitamins a few years ago, he started taking them instead, and feels that they have worked much better.
``Going into my 40s, I didn`t know what was going on inside my body,`` he says. ``I just felt like a lot of weird things were going on that I couldn`t quite explain. I was feeling uptight and depressed -- like there was some kind of chemical imbalance.``
Bob Gallagher, a 50-year-old program-administration worker at a nonprofit group in Bloomington, Ill., has found men`s retreats and a related weekly support group the most important parts of dealing with problems he experienced. In his former position as an insurance executive, he had taken on more work than he could handle -- and ended up having to leave his job.
The Value of Venting
``This [support] group...recognizes that there`s nothing wrong with going to a counselor or a psychiatrist for help,`` he says. ``If you hold in your emotions, you start having health problems and heart attacks. But if you release those emotions in a men`s group, it helps the man and your family. You don`t come home angry.``
John Upton, a 49-year-old filmmaker, turned to acupuncture after the stress of working with Romanian orphans 14 years ago sent him into a downward spiral in which he ``screwed up`` two marriages. He was opposed to taking antidepressants, so his condition largely went untreated.
Of middle-aged men dealing with depression and related problems, he says, ``It`s kind of a like a free fall where you feel like a kid who isn`t understood, isn`t heard. You seek to replace the things that are missing through externals.``
While filming a project about spinal-cord recovery, ``I was seeing people with needles in their heads`` and decided to try acupuncture, Mr. Upton says. ``It took three treatments, and I got my sense of well-being back. That`s when my turnaround really began.``
Prevention
Aging Well
Scientists set out to fathom medical mysteries of older men
By KELLY GREENE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 10, 2005;
Jed Diamond, a 61-year-old psychotherapist in Willits, Calif., showed no signs of depression when he and his wife filled out screening questionnaires 12 years ago as part of their effort to help their son with a drug problem.
His wife, however, scored high on the test, indicating she could be depressed. She ``got treated and, over six months or so, she was starting to feel better,`` Mr. Diamond recalls. But when his wife suggested that his snappish behavior might mean that he was depressed, too, he balked. ``I said, `I`m a therapist -- I`d know if I were depressed.` ``
Finally, after several years during which ``things were really stressful between us, I agreed to go and see somebody,`` Mr. Diamond says. ``And I started to wonder, maybe I and a lot of other men were experiencing depression in a different way. Maybe we`re measuring depression more accurately in women and not recognizing it in men.``
As a result, he designed a new depression test specifically for men -- and identified what he calls ``irritable male syndrome,`` adding up scientific studies that, taken together, suggest that many men go through changes as they grow older that are different -- in ways big and small -- than the changes women go through. And they involve changes that are both psychological and physical.
The problem, as Mr. Diamond`s experience shows, is that those changes in men sometimes go undetected or untreated. While scientists have turned their attention in recent years to more effectively recognizing and treating problems common to older women, researchers have just started to focus on the medical mysteries surrounding older men.
Rephrase That
One reason that male changes often go undetected is that men generally aren`t conditioned to get annual medical exams, as many women do with gynecologists. They often write off signs of change in their bodies or emotions as a normal part of aging.
When that happens, the result can be a grumpy old man -- or worse. Fifteen percent of the 60,622 Americans who killed themselves in 2001 were men over age 65, according to a recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. And most elderly suicide victims had been recently diagnosed with their first episode of depression, the CDC says.
In trying to better detect depression, Mr. Diamond decided that he needed to find a way to get men to open up about their emotional issues. So he came up with a list of questions different from those typically used to pinpoint depression because ``men may be depressed at higher rates than women, but [they] may express depression in different ways. That may be particularly true as we age.``
Indeed, a recent study by J. Douglas Bremner, an Emory University psychiatrist, tested a group of former depression patients by giving them a drink that blocked the brain`s ability to absorb serotonin, the neurotransmitter that lets us feel happy. The women cried and talked about their pain; the men typically didn`t want to talk and said they felt fine. Instead, they wanted to get away to a nearby bar.
Mr. Diamond says he replaced typical questions like, ``Are you sad? Do you cry more often? Are you feeling hopeless?`` with questions asking if, over the past month, the subject has felt more aggressive or irritable, has had trouble sleeping, or has ``over-consumed`` alcohol.
More Than the Mind
It`s not just men`s psychological issues that are starting to get some attention. Researchers also are trying to find better ways to recognize and deal with the physical ailments that affect older men.
The National Cancer Institute is currently trying to determine the value of certain screenings for prostate cancer. Scientists are following 38,350 men who started with no indication of cancer to see whether prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, screening and digital rectal exams decrease deaths due to prostate cancer. A high PSA concentration can indicate the existence of prostate cancer -- but the test doesn`t necessarily tell whether the cancer would be deadly. That means men with cancer that isn`t life-threatening could wind up undergoing procedures that might do more harm than good.
The National Institute on Aging, meanwhile, is gearing up for a large-scale trial on testosterone-replacement therapy. For the few men whose bodies make very little or no testosterone, such as men whose pituitary glands have been destroyed or whose testes have been damaged, supplements may help maintain strong muscles and bones, and also increase sex drive, the institute said in a recent statement. But more research is needed to determine the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy for older men with normal testosterone levels.
For men who have determined that they have psychological issues, treatment is varied.
Some take treatment into their own hands. Mike Love, a 50-year-old hospital worker in Rathdrum, Idaho, turned to antidepressants for about 10 years to help him get his anger toward his family in check. But he always worried that the drugs were doing more harm than good, he says. After reading about B-complex vitamins a few years ago, he started taking them instead, and feels that they have worked much better.
``Going into my 40s, I didn`t know what was going on inside my body,`` he says. ``I just felt like a lot of weird things were going on that I couldn`t quite explain. I was feeling uptight and depressed -- like there was some kind of chemical imbalance.``
Bob Gallagher, a 50-year-old program-administration worker at a nonprofit group in Bloomington, Ill., has found men`s retreats and a related weekly support group the most important parts of dealing with problems he experienced. In his former position as an insurance executive, he had taken on more work than he could handle -- and ended up having to leave his job.
The Value of Venting
``This [support] group...recognizes that there`s nothing wrong with going to a counselor or a psychiatrist for help,`` he says. ``If you hold in your emotions, you start having health problems and heart attacks. But if you release those emotions in a men`s group, it helps the man and your family. You don`t come home angry.``
John Upton, a 49-year-old filmmaker, turned to acupuncture after the stress of working with Romanian orphans 14 years ago sent him into a downward spiral in which he ``screwed up`` two marriages. He was opposed to taking antidepressants, so his condition largely went untreated.
Of middle-aged men dealing with depression and related problems, he says, ``It`s kind of a like a free fall where you feel like a kid who isn`t understood, isn`t heard. You seek to replace the things that are missing through externals.``
While filming a project about spinal-cord recovery, ``I was seeing people with needles in their heads`` and decided to try acupuncture, Mr. Upton says. ``It took three treatments, and I got my sense of well-being back. That`s when my turnaround really began.``
#121 Posted by harish_hyd on October 24, 2005 2:13:43 am
#120 by omar_r_quraishi
[-- strange that you couldnt digest that and launched into a tirade of personal attacks]
Look who`s talking! Mullah Omar, caught with his pants down by arjun_m, is now alleging that other interactors are launching personal attacks on him. Go home to momma Mullah. Like the rag you work for, logic and honesty are not exactly your forte.
[-- strange that you couldnt digest that and launched into a tirade of personal attacks]
Look who`s talking! Mullah Omar, caught with his pants down by arjun_m, is now alleging that other interactors are launching personal attacks on him. Go home to momma Mullah. Like the rag you work for, logic and honesty are not exactly your forte.
#120 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 24, 2005 12:51:44 am
zahra -- for the record -- i am none of the sort -- but i really couldnt care what you thought of my writings or my views -- as far as the WSJ goes its a rightwing very conservative paper, editorial page wise -- strange that you couldnt digest that and launched into a tirade of personal attacks
#118 Posted by ZahraJ on October 22, 2005 12:02:56 pm
Omar:
Despite the fact that I have read some well put together efforts by you in the recent past, you are a rigid and close-minded nationalist with no comprehension of anything good, bad or ugly.
Beyond that, none of your bukwas is worth the time.
Your loss!
Despite the fact that I have read some well put together efforts by you in the recent past, you are a rigid and close-minded nationalist with no comprehension of anything good, bad or ugly.
Beyond that, none of your bukwas is worth the time.
Your loss!
#117 Posted by Pardesi on October 22, 2005 5:56:21 am
#113
Zahra, I agree 100%. This discussion is not worth the time.
Regards.
Zahra, I agree 100%. This discussion is not worth the time.
Regards.
#116 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 22, 2005 3:38:47 am
zahra jee -- u need to get a grip -- nowhere did i say that u shouldnt read your beloved WSJ or that i am imposing my views on you -- if anything shitheads like arjun jee and hairy potter jee seem to have made that their raison d`etre
#115 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 22, 2005 3:36:34 am
fukface said :
#109 by arjun_m on October 21, 2005 5:33am PT
#107 by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:20am PT
goatbrain: When Dawn prints a piece saying Ivan was divine retribution for Iraq, that`s the private view of Anjum Niaz(although it was on Dawn`s website)...
So going by your goatbrain logic, all the articles you don`t like in the WSJ are the individual views of the authors and in no way impugn the credibility of the newspaper itself....
no fukface -- just showed your ignorance doesnt it - the WSJ editorials (AS OPPOSED TO ARTICLES ON THE EDITORIAL PAGES), as cited by solomon, herman, et. al, are the newspaper itself talking -- which is certainly not what anjum niaz was doing -- and by the way her article was printed in DAWN MAGAZINE and not on Dawn`s Editorial pages --
-- zahra -- stop agreeing with pathological sociopaths becuase u only end up making a bigger fool of yourself -- and yes we know that u love the WSJ -- it shows dah ling -- also if you dislike dawn and cant read its `badly formatted site` that is your right -- no one`s going to force u to read anything --
pardesi beta your not excused for the intrusion -- however going by your point, it should also be the case that moronic NRIs and NRPs in the US should not be experts on the pakistani print media -- as for you reading the WSJ for 20 years and not NYT even for free well pardesi beta should i care about that really ? it has no relation to what is being debated here -- which is that newspapers everywhere carry controversial material -- in the case of the WSJ it seems even their editorials are highly debatable -- and since u think that ed herman is `some liberal professor` i can see where your coming from
#109 by arjun_m on October 21, 2005 5:33am PT
#107 by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:20am PT
goatbrain: When Dawn prints a piece saying Ivan was divine retribution for Iraq, that`s the private view of Anjum Niaz(although it was on Dawn`s website)...
So going by your goatbrain logic, all the articles you don`t like in the WSJ are the individual views of the authors and in no way impugn the credibility of the newspaper itself....
no fukface -- just showed your ignorance doesnt it - the WSJ editorials (AS OPPOSED TO ARTICLES ON THE EDITORIAL PAGES), as cited by solomon, herman, et. al, are the newspaper itself talking -- which is certainly not what anjum niaz was doing -- and by the way her article was printed in DAWN MAGAZINE and not on Dawn`s Editorial pages --
-- zahra -- stop agreeing with pathological sociopaths becuase u only end up making a bigger fool of yourself -- and yes we know that u love the WSJ -- it shows dah ling -- also if you dislike dawn and cant read its `badly formatted site` that is your right -- no one`s going to force u to read anything --
pardesi beta your not excused for the intrusion -- however going by your point, it should also be the case that moronic NRIs and NRPs in the US should not be experts on the pakistani print media -- as for you reading the WSJ for 20 years and not NYT even for free well pardesi beta should i care about that really ? it has no relation to what is being debated here -- which is that newspapers everywhere carry controversial material -- in the case of the WSJ it seems even their editorials are highly debatable -- and since u think that ed herman is `some liberal professor` i can see where your coming from
#114 Posted by ZahraJ on October 21, 2005 8:17:51 pm
Re: # 103
Dr. Hoodbhoy`s article was not at all complimentary towards the mechanics of the Pakistani System. I agreed with his rationale and perspectives 100%. Musharraf`s approach towards the professional women in NY was very disgraceful. Since many had written articles and letters and posts to various local publications on the issues of human rights in Pakistan, they were advised not to raise their concerns in the international media (I hate the expression of not washing your laundry in public). This is male hypocrisy. Musharraf would never dare to advise similar nonsense to Dr. Hoodbhoy.
I never implied that Dr. Hoodbhoy`s articles were not getting published in Pakistan and that`s why he sent his email which required some customization to the Journal. Being a man with a brilliant mind, you must be drunk to assume things. Not you fault. You are a victim of your ego :)
May you gain emotional balance in the holy month of ramadhan/ramazan/ramzan. Amen!
Dr. Hoodbhoy`s article was not at all complimentary towards the mechanics of the Pakistani System. I agreed with his rationale and perspectives 100%. Musharraf`s approach towards the professional women in NY was very disgraceful. Since many had written articles and letters and posts to various local publications on the issues of human rights in Pakistan, they were advised not to raise their concerns in the international media (I hate the expression of not washing your laundry in public). This is male hypocrisy. Musharraf would never dare to advise similar nonsense to Dr. Hoodbhoy.
I never implied that Dr. Hoodbhoy`s articles were not getting published in Pakistan and that`s why he sent his email which required some customization to the Journal. Being a man with a brilliant mind, you must be drunk to assume things. Not you fault. You are a victim of your ego :)
May you gain emotional balance in the holy month of ramadhan/ramazan/ramzan. Amen!
#113 Posted by ZahraJ on October 21, 2005 7:39:20 pm
Pardesi:
I am amazed at this guy`s nerve. How can he tell someone to unsubscribe certain subscription because his holiness thinks that is what people around the world should do? Who cares what he thinks?
I rarely flip through the poorly formatted text of online Dawn (with borrowed concepts from other publications). I would never go around telling others to stop reading Dawn because I do not like it. That would be silly. I have every right to express my likes and dislikes but I cannot impose them on others. This man is either drunk or out of his mind.
Please do not encourage him to continue any interaction with the loyal readers of WSJ. There is nothing to discuss. Discussions take place where people have substance to add and they know when to write and when to read/listen. Mr. Qureshi is not gifted with the said talent. He is an unpleasant and rude(jee this and jee that) chap who loves to pick fights to soothe his angry and disturbed ego. I have no interest in interacting with such kind.
Please feel free to further educate him on the good, bad and ugly facts of WSJ. I am sure you will have far more patience and tolerance for his tantrums.
Khuda Hafiz!
I am amazed at this guy`s nerve. How can he tell someone to unsubscribe certain subscription because his holiness thinks that is what people around the world should do? Who cares what he thinks?
I rarely flip through the poorly formatted text of online Dawn (with borrowed concepts from other publications). I would never go around telling others to stop reading Dawn because I do not like it. That would be silly. I have every right to express my likes and dislikes but I cannot impose them on others. This man is either drunk or out of his mind.
Please do not encourage him to continue any interaction with the loyal readers of WSJ. There is nothing to discuss. Discussions take place where people have substance to add and they know when to write and when to read/listen. Mr. Qureshi is not gifted with the said talent. He is an unpleasant and rude(jee this and jee that) chap who loves to pick fights to soothe his angry and disturbed ego. I have no interest in interacting with such kind.
Please feel free to further educate him on the good, bad and ugly facts of WSJ. I am sure you will have far more patience and tolerance for his tantrums.
Khuda Hafiz!
#111 Posted by Pardesi on October 21, 2005 6:34:37 pm
#108 Omar, sorry for intrusion.
I have been loyal fan of WSJ for over 20 years. I gladly pay for the on-line version while I will not pay a single cent for those liberal papers like NY Times. I agree that people living in US really may not know true conditions in India or Pakistan, but then it does not make you an expert either on what value WSJ adds to business people in USA or our preferences and values.
Quoting some worthless liberal professor or Judith Miller does not in anyway reduce our respect for this great paper.
Now please continue your dialogue with Zahra, Harish and Arjun.
#110 Posted by ZahraJ on October 21, 2005 7:24:29 am
Re: # 109
Arjun:
Excellent point! Since the said interactor attacked the Journal vs pointing out his likes or dislikes therefore his point has no weight. I love the Journal. I do think that the editorial section lacks the spirit. I hardly know anyone who subscribes to the Journal for its editorials.
Arjun:
Excellent point! Since the said interactor attacked the Journal vs pointing out his likes or dislikes therefore his point has no weight. I love the Journal. I do think that the editorial section lacks the spirit. I hardly know anyone who subscribes to the Journal for its editorials.
#109 Posted by arjun_m on October 21, 2005 5:33:31 am
#107 by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:20am PT
goatbrain: When Dawn prints a piece saying Ivan was divine retribution for Iraq, that`s the private view of Anjum Niaz(although it was on Dawn`s website)...
So going by your goatbrain logic, all the articles you don`t like in the WSJ are the individual views of the authors and in no way impugn the credibility of the newspaper itself....
goatbrain: When Dawn prints a piece saying Ivan was divine retribution for Iraq, that`s the private view of Anjum Niaz(although it was on Dawn`s website)...
So going by your goatbrain logic, all the articles you don`t like in the WSJ are the individual views of the authors and in no way impugn the credibility of the newspaper itself....
#108 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:29:14 am
for zahra jee and shri hairy potter jee -- i hope you morons know who edward herman is
By Any Means Necessary
The Ultra-Relativism of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
Extra! September/October 1995
By Edward S. Herman
With the largest daily circulation of any national newspaper, 1.8 million, and with an affluent and elite audience, the Wall Street Journal is one of the most influential mainstream media organs. Its large circulation is based in substantial measure on its high-quality news offerings, which gives Journal readers a better-than-average view of reality. The paper also has an editorial page, which is under separate operating direction from the news department.
A 1993 publisher`s report to Journal readers (presented in a full-page New York Times ad, 1/25/93) pointed out that ``the Journal`s editorial views do not guide or even influence the paper`s news coverage.... The news pages exist to accurately cover and impartially analyze events and trends. The editorial page, while often doing its own reporting, filters events through its philosophic lens and expresses opinions accordingly.`` But the two sections, publisher Peter Kann claimed, do share the ``fundamental value`` of ``integrity.``
News Vs. Editorial
Indeed, the two sections of the Journal often seem to be at odds. The news department frequently presents facts incompatible with conventional political lines, whereas the editorial page regularly ignores (``filters events``) or contests facts that don`t fit its editorial position.
Thus, in a famous expose of June 8, 1981, Journal news reporter Jonathan Kwitny showed that ``Apparent Errors Cloud U.S. `White Paper` on Reds in El Salvador,`` whereas the editorial page was an unquestioning conduit for Reagan-era propaganda on El Salvador throughout the 1980s, as a matter of principle. (``We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to those resisting totalitarianism,`` the paper once acknowledged—-8/17/84.)
When U.S.-backed guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi claimed to control a third of Angola, his word was enough for the editors (12/16/81); the claim was refuted by Wall Street Journal reporter Steve Mufson the next day (12/17/81).
The news department often features articles suggesting the imperfect workings of the free market (Tony Horwitz, ``9 to Nowhere: These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous,`` 12/1/94) and the high social costs of regulatory weakness (G. Bruce Knecht, ``Houston Firms Sold Risky Toxic Waste` For Wall Street Giants,`` 12/20/94), whereas the editorial department uniformly sings the praises of the free market and the merits of deregulation.
Occasionally the two departments collide almost directly, as with reporter Kwitny`s August 1985 series detailing the shady qualities of the Italian secret services and political culture and their U.S. connections. The artictes shed unflattering light on Michael Ledeen, a neo-con propagandist with close ties to Italian intelligence who frequently appeared on the Journal`s editorial page, and undercut the papal assassination conspiracy theories that the editorial page was pushing, which were sourced largely to Italian intelligence.
However, the two sections of the paper do in fact complement one another. The news department probably has greater freedom of action by virtue of the editorial page`s aggressively reactionary support of an unfettered capitalism and each and every imperial venture abroad. And the frequently far-fetched positions staked out by the editorial page probably gain in prestige through their proximity to the high-quality news reporting.
Ultra-Relativism and Double Standards
Editor Robert L. Bartley, who has run the editorial page since 1972, has claimed (3/26/95) that the editorial page stands for a moral firmness and absolutism—``saying that some things are right and others wrong,`` in contrast with a ``liberal establishment`` that is ``seized by relativism...offering biases many now see merely as double standards.`` Bardey does acknowledge that he indulges in ``the outrageous,`` which he learned from his supply-side guru Jude Wanniski (Jerry Rosenberg, Inside the Wall Street Journal), but he implies that this is an amusing and harmless oddity.
In fact, however, even a cursory study of the editorial page indicates that its ``outrageousness`` is not innocuous, but involves relentless name-calling and bullying in the service of a rigid right-wing ideology, helping cover over frequently tendentious and superficial analyses. Furthermore, the editorial page does not hew to a single standard of right and wrong—-``relativism`` and double standards are absolutely integral to its operation, so much so that its basic practicecan be described as ``ultra-relativism.`` This entails the willingness to use any intellectual means to forward political aims; facts and claims that help are pushed without scruple, those that conflict are ignored or denied, and those who point out such inconvenient facts are attacked and smeared.
Bardey`s justification for his own incessant double standard is that he supports the forces of freedom against totalitarianism (8/17/84). But this doesn`t excuse a double standard in evaluating evidence, unless one is an ideologue who operates on the principle that the end justifies any means. (This is, of course, what the ``totalitarians`` are alleged to believe.)
Bardey`s use of ``totalitarian`` is essentially a device for labeling ideological enemies—-the elected Allende government of Chile was treated harshly because it was ``Marxist,`` hence incipiently totalitarian, whereas Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in the process of installing an actual totalitarian regime but viewed as on our side, was declared non-totalitarian by editorial fiat and received unrestrained apologetics.
The double standard is observable in word use on virtually any issue. Thus the editor castigates congressmen David Bonior and Richard Gephardt for their ``soak-the-rich demagoguery`` in proposing higher taxes on the affluent (6/15/95). But the word ``demagoguery`` was never used between 1972 and 1995 for proposed policies soaking the poor, or in connection with Reagan`s demagogic attacks on welfare mothers or the 1988 Bush campaign`s use of Willie Horton.
Bartley`s enemies are consistently given derogatory labels that are often misleading or absolutely wrong, whereas ``friends`` are free of such labels. Rebels in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the governments of Angola and Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas), were always described with epithets: ``Marxists,`` ``Marxist-Leninists,`` ``Soviet-backed`` or ``Cuban-directed.`` (e.g, 6/1/84, 12/9/83) Jonas Savimbi, trying to overthrow the government of Angola, was never referred to as ``South Africa-backed.``
Killings by enemies are ``savage episodes`` and ``atrocities,`` whereas murders by friends are ``combat`` and mentioned tersely without any snarl words. The Sandinista ``thugs`` used ``jackboot tactics`` to run their ``police state.`` (6/30/89) The words ``fear`` and ``terror`` were used freely for Nicaragua, but not El Salvador or Guatemala, which were vastly more fear-ridden. U.S.-supported dictatorships like El Salvador, Guatemala or Chile under Pinochet are never police states, nor are they puppets.
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
The editorial page double standard and ultra-relativism in judging the value of human life was dramatically illustrated by the editorial treatment of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in December 1981, in contrast with the alleged deaths of ``yellow rain`` victims in Laos in the early and mid-1980s.
When Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post reported from El Mozote that the Salvadoran army had murdered some 700 to 800 civilians there, the Wall Street Journal editors wrote a furious attack, particularly on Bonner, for alleged gullibility and revolutionary romanticism (“The Media War,” 2/10/82).
The editorial itself was a remarkable illustration of neo-con convenient gullibility, taking the official denials as credible and never hinting at any possible bias in official sources. The editors expressed not the slightest concern for over 700 peasant victims, including several hundred children. In their editorial on the victims of yellow rain in distant Laos, on the other hand, the editors left tears strewn on the page over the ``ghastiiness`` of the cruel weapons employed against ``helpless people,`` with ``children choking over their own blood.`` (9/21/81)
Editorial ultra-relativism on the value of human life is illustrated by many other cases. When the military seized power in Chile in 1973, there was not the slightest expression of sympathy for the thousands of people tortured and murdered; the editorial aim was solely to contest alleged exaggerations. ``It is amazing there has been as little bloodshed as there has,`` the editorialists marveled (11/2/73), although the understated CIA figures at the time were already 2,000 to 3,000 deaths. (Lawrence Birns in The Nation, 1/19/74, gave a compelling analysis of how the Journal editors dishonestly attacked Newsweek`s reporting on the large number of bodies found in a Santiago morgue.)
The same writer who was responsible for most of the articles playing down the human costs of the Chile coup, Everett Martin, did express worry about another group of potential ``victims``—-the leaders of the Argentine military after the restoration of democracy there in 1983. Martin was greatly concerned about retribution against the Argentine generals (1/20/84): ``Democracy means restraint,`` he wrote, and President Alfonsin`s problem is to prevent the people ``from committing their usual self-destructive excesses.``
Similarly, the editors mention that the Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua is the ``target of brutal attacks from the Marxists who run the regime`` (9/21/84); another article suggests that the Sandinistas ``may be setting the archbishop up for assassination.`` (12/9/83) But the editors never compared his treatment with that of the actually assassinated archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, by the ``anti-Communists`` who ran that country.
The editorial page`s instrumental valuation of human life was also on view in its apologetics for Renamo, the Mozambican terrorist group. Organized in the 1970s by the white Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith to destabilize Mozambique`s post-colonial government, Renamo was adopted after the fall of Smith`s government by apartheid South Africa for the same purpose.
A leading historian of Mozambique describes it as ``simply a mercenary unit of a white colonial army`` with no political program or aspirations. Its terrorism was so terrible that even the Reagan and Thatcher administrations ``refused to treat Renamo as a bona fide anti-communist movement`` despite pressure from the far right. (Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique). The U.S. State Department itself put out a report in April 1988 claiming that Renamo had no observable political program and it ``conservatively estimated that 100,000 civilians may have been murdered by Renamo`` in the years 1986-88 (Robert Gersony, ``Summary of Mozambiquan Refugee Accounts...in Mozambique``).
But for the editorial page, Renamo was bona fide anti-Communist, and thus no mention was made of these mass deaths, and Renamo was put in a benign light. Although Renamo had ``a checkered past,`` it was the ``Marxist`` and ``Soviet-backed`` regime in Maputo that is ``repressing`` and ``as bloody as ever``; no negative adjectives were used to describe Renamo, which couldn`t have done so well ``if it hadn`t tapped genuine democratic support`` (4/1/85).
A complementary op-ed column castigated Margaret Thatcher for supporting the Mozambican government against ``pro-Western`` forces (Gerald Frost, ``Why Thatcher Coddles Mozambican Marxists,`` 8/12/87). No level of devastation and mass killing is beyond eliciting the apologetics of ultra-relativism.
Propagandist of the State
The editorial page has served as a virtual propaganda arm of the state in its imperial ventures, most openly and blatantly in the Reagan era. Throughout this period the Reaganites wanted to vilify the Soviet Union and its allies(the ``Evil Empire``) and to cast all the designated ``freedom fighters`` in a good light. The editorial page provided this propaganda service with enthusiasm. The editors repeatedly expressed their approval of the Reagan Doctrine of supporting right-wing guerrilla movements (e.g., ``Savimbi`s Success,`` 6/30/89), and regularly engaged in extended propaganda campaigns geared to Reagan administration needs.
In September 1981 the Reagan administration announced that the Vietnamese military was using Soviet-supplied chemical weapons against Laotians. The evidence was a few leaf samples containing an allegedly non-native organic compound, plus claims of ``yellow rain`` dropping from the sky and subsequent medical disorders. The leaf samples, and especially the claims of rain and sickness related to it, were always of questionable authenticity.
Eventually it was established that the organic compounds in question were native to the area; and Professor Matthew Meselson also found that there had been earlier Chinese complaints of ``yellow rain`` that Chinese investigators traced to droppings of bee feces. When Meselson also disclosed that the dominant component of the leaf samples allegedly showing communist chemical warfare also was bee feces(Foreign Policy, Fall/87; Scientific American, 9/85), the case collapsed—-except in the Wall Street Journal.
The editorial page specialist in this subject, William Kucewicz, acknowledged that the Journal had responded to an appeal from administration officials to ``keep this[issue] going,`` and ``we decided to take this on as a cause.`` (Technology Review,
4/86; cited in New Yorker, 2/18/90)
The editorial page took up the Reaganite campaign immediately and put to work all its usual formulas: It accepted the official propaganda at face value, and went on to trumpet test results and experts supporting the party line, while ignoring or deriding conflicting evidence. Its gullibility was without limit in accepting data based on interviews that even U.S. Army officialscame to doubt (Foreign Policy, Fall/87). The editors never mentioned the Chinese yellow rain case, or the eventual finding that the organic compound claimed by the Reaganites to be non-indigenous to the area was in fact commonplace.
For opponents of the yellow rain hypothesis, the editors employed their usual ad hominems: An outstanding critical review of the case in the Chemical and Engineering News (1/9/84) was attacked because one of its 64 cited sources was allegedly biased. Meselson, a very distinguished biologist, allegedly had a ``personal and intellectual stake in the issue.`` Meanwhile, the editors celebrated Professor Aubin Heyndrickx, a right-wing Belgian specialist in chemical warfare (but no expert in organic-biological compounds, as was Meselson). They proved that he was as objective as Robert Bartley himself by citing his statement that his only concern was ``protecting freedom and human rights from the totalitarians.`` (2/15/84)
The editorial page also pitched in vigorously in support of the claim that the May 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II had been sponsored by the Bulgarians and Soviet Union, in retaliation for the Pope`s support for the Polish Solidarity movement. Right-wing reporter Claire Sterling`s views on this subject were offered directly and indirectly, and all conflicting evidence and alternative models were ignored or caricatured. For example, the fact that the assassin Alt Agca had threatened to kill the Pope in 1979, before Solidarity existed, was unmentioned. (See Herman and Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection.)
Editorial page writer Suzanne Garment even wrote an editorial column (6/15/84) proclaiming the high credibility of Italians: ``This is the Italians—-no American hawk paranoids but instead people who live with a new government every 30 days. You simply cannot doubt their word.`` No, not if you are a propagandist building your case without scruple.
One of Sterling`s most remarkable claims was that the CIA and Reagan administration were holding back on pressing the Bulgarian Connection because of their devotion to detente!(They were trying ``to shield the Russians from public view``—-Human Events, 1/26/84.) This lunatic idea found its way into a Journal editorial (12/21/83), as did Sterling`s claim that Agca appeared crazy during his trial as a ``signal`` to the Bulgarians to get him out—-or else (3/2/86). When Agca never produced the ``or else,`` Sterling and the editors were silent.
After the 1991 confirmation hearings for CIA chief William Gates disclosed how Gates and William Casey had pushed the theory over the protests of CIA professionals, who thought the case was fraudulent, the editors still allowed Sterling the final word (11/5/91). A letter to the editor by this writer pointed out Sterling`s failure to mention CIA official Melvyn Goodman`s testimony that CIA analysts had not taken her claims seriously because they had long since penetrated the Bulgarian secret services. The letter was never published.
Editorial Page as Enforcer
An important part of the editorial page`s service to the state is its role of enforcer, bullying into quiescence any media or independent institution that puts clients of the United States in a bad light. The Bonner case is the classic example of editorial help in silencing media criticism. The long editorial ``The Media`s War`` (2/10/82) was in fact a war on the media in the guise of a concern for media improprieties, and it closely paralleled the efforts of the Reagan administration`s Office of Public Diplomacy to intimidate the media into adherence to the party line.
The editorial accused Bonner of gullibility because Bonner got his information on the El Mozote massacre from peasants in rebel territory; he was therefore alleged to be a naive victim of ``a propaganda exercise.`` The only evidence mat the first-hand peasant reports were ``propaganda`` was that they disagreed with pronouncements of the U.S. embassy and Salvadoran army.
Bonner was removed from his Central America beat soon after the government/Journal assaults, a development widely regarded as an object lesson in the cost of reportorial integrity. Bonner states in his book Weakness and Deceit that a U.S. general in El Salvador credited the editorial with having ``turned the press around.`` ``The foreign editor of one major newspaper sent copies of the editorial to his correspondents in Central America,`` Bonner wrote. ```Let`s not let this happen to us,` was the message, according to one of the paper`s reporters.``
After the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission on El Salvador vindicated Bonner`s reporting in early 1993, Bardey explained (3/18/93) that he never denied a massacre took place, only that ``neither the press nor the State Department has the power to establish conclusively what happened at El Mozote.`` This was dishonest evasion. Bartley never challenged State Department claims on this ground, and his operating principle was openly ``giving the benefit of the doubt`` to his side, a euphemism for intentional gullibility.
The other form of problematic dissent during the Reagan years came from the human rights groups, who regularly documented the mass killings of the official forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and the terrorism of the U.S.-sponsored contras attacking Nicaragua. The administration itself carried out a serious campaign of intimidation against Amnesty International, Americas Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America in the early 1980s, assailing their reporting on Guatemala as one-sided and apologetic for what Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders called the ``ferocious`` and ``terrorist attacks`` of the guerrillas.
The editorial page joined this campaign, parroting the Reagan line, accusing Amnesty International and Americas Watch of applying ``a gentler standard to U.S. adversaries in Central America than to U.S. friends,`` failing to apply ``universal standards`` and using ``ad hominem attacks`` on ``those offering conflicting evidence.`` (8/17/84) It is of course remarkable chutzpah for the editors, who never apply universal standards and use ad hominem attacks daily, to even use such words—but when they do use them in reference to others this merely tells us that others are criticizing something the editors support.
The editors criticized the Americas Watch charges of illegal mass displacement by the Salvadoran army, saying, ``Goodness, one would almost think a war is going on,`` ignoring the fact that there are rules of war on the point that can be violated (8/17/84).
In the same editorial, however, the editors were full of indignation for the Nicaraguan displacement of the Miskito Indians, failing to note that ``a war is going on`` and misstating the facts. Juan Mendez of Americas Watch pointed out in a letter to the Journal (9/21/84): ``You have it backwards: the relocation did not `happen to have caused thousands of Miskitos to take up arms against the Sandinistas.` The evacuation was ordered after the armed attacks by Miskito and non-Miskito contras had caused 60 dead in the Rio Coco villages.``
If Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte says that the rebels are using civilians as shields, that satisfies the editors, although in the very same article they savage the human rights groups for their failings on the use of evidence (9/21/84). The accusations of Americas Watch and Amnesty International gullibility by editors who were themselves gullible as a matter of principle was laughable. But these pitbull attacks, no matter how hypocritical and lacking in substance, were effective in putting the human rights groups on the defensive.
Editorial Page Vs. Democracy
Although the Journal claims to support political democracy, time and again the editors throw their weight in favor of authoritarian rule. Their true guiding principle seems to be service to the interests of the market. When this demanded a termination of democracy, as in Brazil in 1964, the Philippines in 1972, Chile in 1973 or Haiti in 1991, the editors could be counted on to lend moral support.
This is frequently put in terms of a Red threat in the old democracy, justifying its replacement with non-democracy right now, but with greater promise for the long run. AUende was allegedly mismanaging Chile`s economy, growth was slow, authoritarianism was looming, and the army understandably reacted (11/2/73). The editors` tolerance of killing and terrorizing in response to such hypothetical threats of killing and terrorizing is seemingly without limit.
Contributing Editor Robert Barro happily calls attention to the fact that democracy doesn`t necessarily maximize ``growth`` (``Pushing Democracy Is No Key to Prosperity,`` 12/14/93; ``Democracy: A Recipe for Growth?`` 12/1/94). Barro takes it for granted that growth, independent of questions about income distribution, economic security and public participation, is all we should be interested in.
Nor is the editorial page supportive of democracy at home. It does not call for its termination, but its neoconservative attacks on oppositional ideas, individuals and policies, its pitbull aggressiveness and intolerance, are subversive of the democratic spirit and, ultimately, democratic institutions. Its attacks are not merely disagreements; they are intended to silence.
The editors are not concerned with money in politics; if those who have the gold make the rules, that is the appropriate result of the free market at work and hence an area of silence. The same goes for media concentration and commercialization; after all, the ``liberal establishment`` is still ``ensconced in...much of the media`` (5/26/95), so pitiful giants like Robert Bartley, Rupert Murdoch and Newt Gingrich can barely be heard over the liberal din.
As the liberals have dominated ``large sections of the judiciary`` as well (5/26/95), the editors could sympathize with Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese`s suggestion that Supreme Court rulings are not necessarily binding on public officials (10/29/86), which American Bar Association president Eugene Thomas said would, if implemented, ``shake the foundations of our constitutional system.``
Editorial Page Vs. Free Speech
The editors have expended great energy in assailing the threats to free speech posed by ``political correctness`` and the ``liberal establishment`s`` imposition of multiculturalist materials on victimized students and alumni. But once again the double standard and selective use of evidence call into question editorial interest in free speech per se.
Pinochet`s muzzling the press, killing dissident journalists and academics, and imposing military rule and standards of correctness on Chilean universities did not bother the editors at all. Jeffrey Hart, the Dartmouth academic and long-time editorial page favorite, was much concerned with the P.C. threat, but openly enthused over Pinochet`s dictatorial rule: His office featured a photograph of himself and Pinochet exchanging pleasantries (Counterpunch, 1/15/94). For ultra-relativism, free speech is for my side alone.
At home, the vast expansion of right-wing funding for ``free enterprise chairs,`` campus think tanks, law and economics programs, and lecture series with a clear and open bias (see Larry Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower) has not bothered the editors at all. In neo-con mythology, the business community and conservatives are fighting a defensive battle against the left and the ``liberal establishment`` (``contemporary liberalism...is on the attack, forcing everything through the filter of politics``—12/13/94), so that although virtually all the money flowing to the university with an ideological bias and political agenda is right-wing, this merely serves to correct a serious imbalance.
Lee Bass`s $20 million gift to Yale to foster a Western Civilization program was considered an admirable idea by the Journal editors; no question was raised about an outside party pushing a specific program, if it was the right one. When Yale returned Bass` gift after he insisted on helping to choose the faculty as well, the editors had problems only with the intervention of faculty ``enforcers`` (12/13/94).
The Enola Gay controversy also involved the editors in a remarkable display of intolerance and totalitarian attitudes. The Smithsonian`s proposed display had tried to put the atomic bombing of Japan in a historic context, rather than as a patriotic effusion, although it was on balance supportive of President Harry Truman`s decision to bomb. Air Force historian Richard Hallion called it ``a great script.``
But the American Legion and especially the Air Force Association disapproved, and made it into a political issue, eventually succeeding in getting the contested program canceled, the program director ousted and a Senate resolution passed denouncing ``revisionist`` interpretations.
The editorial page of the Journal naturally entered this fray (1/31/95), asserting that ``the people`` had risen up to contest the ``liberal establishment`` The editors somehow confused ``the people`` with the American Legion and Air Force Association, the latter a longstanding lobby for the Air Force. Essentially the editors and AFA objected to real history; they wanted traditional uplifting, patriotic history, without the carping of the real thing. The editors thus considered the defeat of the contextualized exhibit a triumph.
The editorial statement that there was ``the well-known political correctness problem with the exhibit`` (5/3/95) demonstrates once again that for the editors P.C. simply means failure to conform to their ideological dogma. The editors did note (1/31/95) the fears of historians ``that one set of assumptions is simply going to be imposed by fiat in place of their own.... That would be unfortunate, we guess. But we don`t plan to feel very sorry for these academics.``
Free Lunch Economics
The editorial page was notable in the Reagan era for its advocacy of supply-side economics and Reagan`s economic policies—-policies that resulted in a tripling of the national debt, soaring poverty rates and, most damning to supply-side theory, falling savings rates and net investment levels.
Numerous Journal opinion pieces have been devoted to rebutting claims that inequality increased during the Reagan/Bush years—although, given the number of other pieces actually praising the virtues of inequality (e.g., Barro, ``Inequality and Its Charms,`` 2/10/93), this may have been seen by the editorial board as cause for regret.
During the Reagan era, the editorial page strenuously defended the ongoing massive deficits, claiming they were exaggerated in size, importance and potential growth: ``The real deficit story is that the deficit is shrinking away,`` the Journal reassured in 1984 (6/28/84); in 1991, when the deficit hit $269 billion, the Journal declared (10/31/91) that its ``role seems a lot bigger than it really is.``
Displaying its usual double standard, however, the Journal had consistently assailed the much smaller deficits of the Carter years; ``deficit spending`` was called the ``fundamental cause of inflation`` (3/22/78), and Carter`s low public esteem was blamed on his failure to bring deficits under control (6/1/78). But these were Democratic rather than Republican deficits, and did not serve the benevolent ends of the latter.
In his book The Seven Fat Years as well as in editorials, Bartley blamed the Reagan-era deficits on the Democrats, although Reagan`s budget proposals, if fully implemented, would have produced a total eight-year deficit of more than $1.2 trillion (New York Review of Books, 8/13/92).
The editorial page has been a proponent of deregulation, virtually without limit, and there has been a stream of editorials and guest columns proposing deregulation in environmental controls and many other spheres of activity. Guest Milton Friedman (5/16/95) proudly recalled his percipient Newsweek article of 20 years back (1/8/73) demanding the complete elimination of the Food and Drug Administration, now perhaps in the works thanks to Newt Gingrich and Robert Dole.
The great illustration of deregulation in action in the Reagan era, the loosening of the reins on the S&Ls, was greeted with enthusiasm by the editors in 1981 (6/29/81): The new authority to ``make all types of loans and enlarge the scope of their investments`` is a means of solving their problems that is ``cheap.`` When this cheap solution turned out to be quite expensive in the late 1980s, the editors characteristically placed all the blame on the Democrats, not on deregulation and not the Reagan administration`s handling of the issues.
Comics Page or Reactionary Headquarters?
Some people view the Journal editorial page as a kind of comics page complement to the news section. Indeed, its crude double standards, selective use of evidence and outright prevarication are often laughable.
On the other hand, in his analysis of the Enola Gay controversy, historian Mike Wallace refers to the page as ``the GHQ of reaction.`` This is equally valid: From their strategic position in a major media enterprise, the editors have been able to help lead the ongoing counterrevolution, with consequences observable to all. It is important to recognize, however, that leadership of this counterrevolution has been entirely incompatible with editorial ``integrity`` and support of democratic values.
Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of several books, including Corporate Control, Corporate Power; Beyond Hypocrisy; and (with Noam Chomsky) Manufacturing Consent. A longer version of this article is available from FAIR.
By Any Means Necessary
The Ultra-Relativism of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
Extra! September/October 1995
By Edward S. Herman
With the largest daily circulation of any national newspaper, 1.8 million, and with an affluent and elite audience, the Wall Street Journal is one of the most influential mainstream media organs. Its large circulation is based in substantial measure on its high-quality news offerings, which gives Journal readers a better-than-average view of reality. The paper also has an editorial page, which is under separate operating direction from the news department.
A 1993 publisher`s report to Journal readers (presented in a full-page New York Times ad, 1/25/93) pointed out that ``the Journal`s editorial views do not guide or even influence the paper`s news coverage.... The news pages exist to accurately cover and impartially analyze events and trends. The editorial page, while often doing its own reporting, filters events through its philosophic lens and expresses opinions accordingly.`` But the two sections, publisher Peter Kann claimed, do share the ``fundamental value`` of ``integrity.``
News Vs. Editorial
Indeed, the two sections of the Journal often seem to be at odds. The news department frequently presents facts incompatible with conventional political lines, whereas the editorial page regularly ignores (``filters events``) or contests facts that don`t fit its editorial position.
Thus, in a famous expose of June 8, 1981, Journal news reporter Jonathan Kwitny showed that ``Apparent Errors Cloud U.S. `White Paper` on Reds in El Salvador,`` whereas the editorial page was an unquestioning conduit for Reagan-era propaganda on El Salvador throughout the 1980s, as a matter of principle. (``We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to those resisting totalitarianism,`` the paper once acknowledged—-8/17/84.)
When U.S.-backed guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi claimed to control a third of Angola, his word was enough for the editors (12/16/81); the claim was refuted by Wall Street Journal reporter Steve Mufson the next day (12/17/81).
The news department often features articles suggesting the imperfect workings of the free market (Tony Horwitz, ``9 to Nowhere: These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous,`` 12/1/94) and the high social costs of regulatory weakness (G. Bruce Knecht, ``Houston Firms Sold Risky Toxic Waste` For Wall Street Giants,`` 12/20/94), whereas the editorial department uniformly sings the praises of the free market and the merits of deregulation.
Occasionally the two departments collide almost directly, as with reporter Kwitny`s August 1985 series detailing the shady qualities of the Italian secret services and political culture and their U.S. connections. The artictes shed unflattering light on Michael Ledeen, a neo-con propagandist with close ties to Italian intelligence who frequently appeared on the Journal`s editorial page, and undercut the papal assassination conspiracy theories that the editorial page was pushing, which were sourced largely to Italian intelligence.
However, the two sections of the paper do in fact complement one another. The news department probably has greater freedom of action by virtue of the editorial page`s aggressively reactionary support of an unfettered capitalism and each and every imperial venture abroad. And the frequently far-fetched positions staked out by the editorial page probably gain in prestige through their proximity to the high-quality news reporting.
Ultra-Relativism and Double Standards
Editor Robert L. Bartley, who has run the editorial page since 1972, has claimed (3/26/95) that the editorial page stands for a moral firmness and absolutism—``saying that some things are right and others wrong,`` in contrast with a ``liberal establishment`` that is ``seized by relativism...offering biases many now see merely as double standards.`` Bardey does acknowledge that he indulges in ``the outrageous,`` which he learned from his supply-side guru Jude Wanniski (Jerry Rosenberg, Inside the Wall Street Journal), but he implies that this is an amusing and harmless oddity.
In fact, however, even a cursory study of the editorial page indicates that its ``outrageousness`` is not innocuous, but involves relentless name-calling and bullying in the service of a rigid right-wing ideology, helping cover over frequently tendentious and superficial analyses. Furthermore, the editorial page does not hew to a single standard of right and wrong—-``relativism`` and double standards are absolutely integral to its operation, so much so that its basic practicecan be described as ``ultra-relativism.`` This entails the willingness to use any intellectual means to forward political aims; facts and claims that help are pushed without scruple, those that conflict are ignored or denied, and those who point out such inconvenient facts are attacked and smeared.
Bardey`s justification for his own incessant double standard is that he supports the forces of freedom against totalitarianism (8/17/84). But this doesn`t excuse a double standard in evaluating evidence, unless one is an ideologue who operates on the principle that the end justifies any means. (This is, of course, what the ``totalitarians`` are alleged to believe.)
Bardey`s use of ``totalitarian`` is essentially a device for labeling ideological enemies—-the elected Allende government of Chile was treated harshly because it was ``Marxist,`` hence incipiently totalitarian, whereas Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in the process of installing an actual totalitarian regime but viewed as on our side, was declared non-totalitarian by editorial fiat and received unrestrained apologetics.
The double standard is observable in word use on virtually any issue. Thus the editor castigates congressmen David Bonior and Richard Gephardt for their ``soak-the-rich demagoguery`` in proposing higher taxes on the affluent (6/15/95). But the word ``demagoguery`` was never used between 1972 and 1995 for proposed policies soaking the poor, or in connection with Reagan`s demagogic attacks on welfare mothers or the 1988 Bush campaign`s use of Willie Horton.
Bartley`s enemies are consistently given derogatory labels that are often misleading or absolutely wrong, whereas ``friends`` are free of such labels. Rebels in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the governments of Angola and Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas), were always described with epithets: ``Marxists,`` ``Marxist-Leninists,`` ``Soviet-backed`` or ``Cuban-directed.`` (e.g, 6/1/84, 12/9/83) Jonas Savimbi, trying to overthrow the government of Angola, was never referred to as ``South Africa-backed.``
Killings by enemies are ``savage episodes`` and ``atrocities,`` whereas murders by friends are ``combat`` and mentioned tersely without any snarl words. The Sandinista ``thugs`` used ``jackboot tactics`` to run their ``police state.`` (6/30/89) The words ``fear`` and ``terror`` were used freely for Nicaragua, but not El Salvador or Guatemala, which were vastly more fear-ridden. U.S.-supported dictatorships like El Salvador, Guatemala or Chile under Pinochet are never police states, nor are they puppets.
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
The editorial page double standard and ultra-relativism in judging the value of human life was dramatically illustrated by the editorial treatment of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in December 1981, in contrast with the alleged deaths of ``yellow rain`` victims in Laos in the early and mid-1980s.
When Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post reported from El Mozote that the Salvadoran army had murdered some 700 to 800 civilians there, the Wall Street Journal editors wrote a furious attack, particularly on Bonner, for alleged gullibility and revolutionary romanticism (“The Media War,” 2/10/82).
The editorial itself was a remarkable illustration of neo-con convenient gullibility, taking the official denials as credible and never hinting at any possible bias in official sources. The editors expressed not the slightest concern for over 700 peasant victims, including several hundred children. In their editorial on the victims of yellow rain in distant Laos, on the other hand, the editors left tears strewn on the page over the ``ghastiiness`` of the cruel weapons employed against ``helpless people,`` with ``children choking over their own blood.`` (9/21/81)
Editorial ultra-relativism on the value of human life is illustrated by many other cases. When the military seized power in Chile in 1973, there was not the slightest expression of sympathy for the thousands of people tortured and murdered; the editorial aim was solely to contest alleged exaggerations. ``It is amazing there has been as little bloodshed as there has,`` the editorialists marveled (11/2/73), although the understated CIA figures at the time were already 2,000 to 3,000 deaths. (Lawrence Birns in The Nation, 1/19/74, gave a compelling analysis of how the Journal editors dishonestly attacked Newsweek`s reporting on the large number of bodies found in a Santiago morgue.)
The same writer who was responsible for most of the articles playing down the human costs of the Chile coup, Everett Martin, did express worry about another group of potential ``victims``—-the leaders of the Argentine military after the restoration of democracy there in 1983. Martin was greatly concerned about retribution against the Argentine generals (1/20/84): ``Democracy means restraint,`` he wrote, and President Alfonsin`s problem is to prevent the people ``from committing their usual self-destructive excesses.``
Similarly, the editors mention that the Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua is the ``target of brutal attacks from the Marxists who run the regime`` (9/21/84); another article suggests that the Sandinistas ``may be setting the archbishop up for assassination.`` (12/9/83) But the editors never compared his treatment with that of the actually assassinated archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, by the ``anti-Communists`` who ran that country.
The editorial page`s instrumental valuation of human life was also on view in its apologetics for Renamo, the Mozambican terrorist group. Organized in the 1970s by the white Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith to destabilize Mozambique`s post-colonial government, Renamo was adopted after the fall of Smith`s government by apartheid South Africa for the same purpose.
A leading historian of Mozambique describes it as ``simply a mercenary unit of a white colonial army`` with no political program or aspirations. Its terrorism was so terrible that even the Reagan and Thatcher administrations ``refused to treat Renamo as a bona fide anti-communist movement`` despite pressure from the far right. (Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique). The U.S. State Department itself put out a report in April 1988 claiming that Renamo had no observable political program and it ``conservatively estimated that 100,000 civilians may have been murdered by Renamo`` in the years 1986-88 (Robert Gersony, ``Summary of Mozambiquan Refugee Accounts...in Mozambique``).
But for the editorial page, Renamo was bona fide anti-Communist, and thus no mention was made of these mass deaths, and Renamo was put in a benign light. Although Renamo had ``a checkered past,`` it was the ``Marxist`` and ``Soviet-backed`` regime in Maputo that is ``repressing`` and ``as bloody as ever``; no negative adjectives were used to describe Renamo, which couldn`t have done so well ``if it hadn`t tapped genuine democratic support`` (4/1/85).
A complementary op-ed column castigated Margaret Thatcher for supporting the Mozambican government against ``pro-Western`` forces (Gerald Frost, ``Why Thatcher Coddles Mozambican Marxists,`` 8/12/87). No level of devastation and mass killing is beyond eliciting the apologetics of ultra-relativism.
Propagandist of the State
The editorial page has served as a virtual propaganda arm of the state in its imperial ventures, most openly and blatantly in the Reagan era. Throughout this period the Reaganites wanted to vilify the Soviet Union and its allies(the ``Evil Empire``) and to cast all the designated ``freedom fighters`` in a good light. The editorial page provided this propaganda service with enthusiasm. The editors repeatedly expressed their approval of the Reagan Doctrine of supporting right-wing guerrilla movements (e.g., ``Savimbi`s Success,`` 6/30/89), and regularly engaged in extended propaganda campaigns geared to Reagan administration needs.
In September 1981 the Reagan administration announced that the Vietnamese military was using Soviet-supplied chemical weapons against Laotians. The evidence was a few leaf samples containing an allegedly non-native organic compound, plus claims of ``yellow rain`` dropping from the sky and subsequent medical disorders. The leaf samples, and especially the claims of rain and sickness related to it, were always of questionable authenticity.
Eventually it was established that the organic compounds in question were native to the area; and Professor Matthew Meselson also found that there had been earlier Chinese complaints of ``yellow rain`` that Chinese investigators traced to droppings of bee feces. When Meselson also disclosed that the dominant component of the leaf samples allegedly showing communist chemical warfare also was bee feces(Foreign Policy, Fall/87; Scientific American, 9/85), the case collapsed—-except in the Wall Street Journal.
The editorial page specialist in this subject, William Kucewicz, acknowledged that the Journal had responded to an appeal from administration officials to ``keep this[issue] going,`` and ``we decided to take this on as a cause.`` (Technology Review,
4/86; cited in New Yorker, 2/18/90)
The editorial page took up the Reaganite campaign immediately and put to work all its usual formulas: It accepted the official propaganda at face value, and went on to trumpet test results and experts supporting the party line, while ignoring or deriding conflicting evidence. Its gullibility was without limit in accepting data based on interviews that even U.S. Army officialscame to doubt (Foreign Policy, Fall/87). The editors never mentioned the Chinese yellow rain case, or the eventual finding that the organic compound claimed by the Reaganites to be non-indigenous to the area was in fact commonplace.
For opponents of the yellow rain hypothesis, the editors employed their usual ad hominems: An outstanding critical review of the case in the Chemical and Engineering News (1/9/84) was attacked because one of its 64 cited sources was allegedly biased. Meselson, a very distinguished biologist, allegedly had a ``personal and intellectual stake in the issue.`` Meanwhile, the editors celebrated Professor Aubin Heyndrickx, a right-wing Belgian specialist in chemical warfare (but no expert in organic-biological compounds, as was Meselson). They proved that he was as objective as Robert Bartley himself by citing his statement that his only concern was ``protecting freedom and human rights from the totalitarians.`` (2/15/84)
The editorial page also pitched in vigorously in support of the claim that the May 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II had been sponsored by the Bulgarians and Soviet Union, in retaliation for the Pope`s support for the Polish Solidarity movement. Right-wing reporter Claire Sterling`s views on this subject were offered directly and indirectly, and all conflicting evidence and alternative models were ignored or caricatured. For example, the fact that the assassin Alt Agca had threatened to kill the Pope in 1979, before Solidarity existed, was unmentioned. (See Herman and Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection.)
Editorial page writer Suzanne Garment even wrote an editorial column (6/15/84) proclaiming the high credibility of Italians: ``This is the Italians—-no American hawk paranoids but instead people who live with a new government every 30 days. You simply cannot doubt their word.`` No, not if you are a propagandist building your case without scruple.
One of Sterling`s most remarkable claims was that the CIA and Reagan administration were holding back on pressing the Bulgarian Connection because of their devotion to detente!(They were trying ``to shield the Russians from public view``—-Human Events, 1/26/84.) This lunatic idea found its way into a Journal editorial (12/21/83), as did Sterling`s claim that Agca appeared crazy during his trial as a ``signal`` to the Bulgarians to get him out—-or else (3/2/86). When Agca never produced the ``or else,`` Sterling and the editors were silent.
After the 1991 confirmation hearings for CIA chief William Gates disclosed how Gates and William Casey had pushed the theory over the protests of CIA professionals, who thought the case was fraudulent, the editors still allowed Sterling the final word (11/5/91). A letter to the editor by this writer pointed out Sterling`s failure to mention CIA official Melvyn Goodman`s testimony that CIA analysts had not taken her claims seriously because they had long since penetrated the Bulgarian secret services. The letter was never published.
Editorial Page as Enforcer
An important part of the editorial page`s service to the state is its role of enforcer, bullying into quiescence any media or independent institution that puts clients of the United States in a bad light. The Bonner case is the classic example of editorial help in silencing media criticism. The long editorial ``The Media`s War`` (2/10/82) was in fact a war on the media in the guise of a concern for media improprieties, and it closely paralleled the efforts of the Reagan administration`s Office of Public Diplomacy to intimidate the media into adherence to the party line.
The editorial accused Bonner of gullibility because Bonner got his information on the El Mozote massacre from peasants in rebel territory; he was therefore alleged to be a naive victim of ``a propaganda exercise.`` The only evidence mat the first-hand peasant reports were ``propaganda`` was that they disagreed with pronouncements of the U.S. embassy and Salvadoran army.
Bonner was removed from his Central America beat soon after the government/Journal assaults, a development widely regarded as an object lesson in the cost of reportorial integrity. Bonner states in his book Weakness and Deceit that a U.S. general in El Salvador credited the editorial with having ``turned the press around.`` ``The foreign editor of one major newspaper sent copies of the editorial to his correspondents in Central America,`` Bonner wrote. ```Let`s not let this happen to us,` was the message, according to one of the paper`s reporters.``
After the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission on El Salvador vindicated Bonner`s reporting in early 1993, Bardey explained (3/18/93) that he never denied a massacre took place, only that ``neither the press nor the State Department has the power to establish conclusively what happened at El Mozote.`` This was dishonest evasion. Bartley never challenged State Department claims on this ground, and his operating principle was openly ``giving the benefit of the doubt`` to his side, a euphemism for intentional gullibility.
The other form of problematic dissent during the Reagan years came from the human rights groups, who regularly documented the mass killings of the official forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and the terrorism of the U.S.-sponsored contras attacking Nicaragua. The administration itself carried out a serious campaign of intimidation against Amnesty International, Americas Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America in the early 1980s, assailing their reporting on Guatemala as one-sided and apologetic for what Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders called the ``ferocious`` and ``terrorist attacks`` of the guerrillas.
The editorial page joined this campaign, parroting the Reagan line, accusing Amnesty International and Americas Watch of applying ``a gentler standard to U.S. adversaries in Central America than to U.S. friends,`` failing to apply ``universal standards`` and using ``ad hominem attacks`` on ``those offering conflicting evidence.`` (8/17/84) It is of course remarkable chutzpah for the editors, who never apply universal standards and use ad hominem attacks daily, to even use such words—but when they do use them in reference to others this merely tells us that others are criticizing something the editors support.
The editors criticized the Americas Watch charges of illegal mass displacement by the Salvadoran army, saying, ``Goodness, one would almost think a war is going on,`` ignoring the fact that there are rules of war on the point that can be violated (8/17/84).
In the same editorial, however, the editors were full of indignation for the Nicaraguan displacement of the Miskito Indians, failing to note that ``a war is going on`` and misstating the facts. Juan Mendez of Americas Watch pointed out in a letter to the Journal (9/21/84): ``You have it backwards: the relocation did not `happen to have caused thousands of Miskitos to take up arms against the Sandinistas.` The evacuation was ordered after the armed attacks by Miskito and non-Miskito contras had caused 60 dead in the Rio Coco villages.``
If Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte says that the rebels are using civilians as shields, that satisfies the editors, although in the very same article they savage the human rights groups for their failings on the use of evidence (9/21/84). The accusations of Americas Watch and Amnesty International gullibility by editors who were themselves gullible as a matter of principle was laughable. But these pitbull attacks, no matter how hypocritical and lacking in substance, were effective in putting the human rights groups on the defensive.
Editorial Page Vs. Democracy
Although the Journal claims to support political democracy, time and again the editors throw their weight in favor of authoritarian rule. Their true guiding principle seems to be service to the interests of the market. When this demanded a termination of democracy, as in Brazil in 1964, the Philippines in 1972, Chile in 1973 or Haiti in 1991, the editors could be counted on to lend moral support.
This is frequently put in terms of a Red threat in the old democracy, justifying its replacement with non-democracy right now, but with greater promise for the long run. AUende was allegedly mismanaging Chile`s economy, growth was slow, authoritarianism was looming, and the army understandably reacted (11/2/73). The editors` tolerance of killing and terrorizing in response to such hypothetical threats of killing and terrorizing is seemingly without limit.
Contributing Editor Robert Barro happily calls attention to the fact that democracy doesn`t necessarily maximize ``growth`` (``Pushing Democracy Is No Key to Prosperity,`` 12/14/93; ``Democracy: A Recipe for Growth?`` 12/1/94). Barro takes it for granted that growth, independent of questions about income distribution, economic security and public participation, is all we should be interested in.
Nor is the editorial page supportive of democracy at home. It does not call for its termination, but its neoconservative attacks on oppositional ideas, individuals and policies, its pitbull aggressiveness and intolerance, are subversive of the democratic spirit and, ultimately, democratic institutions. Its attacks are not merely disagreements; they are intended to silence.
The editors are not concerned with money in politics; if those who have the gold make the rules, that is the appropriate result of the free market at work and hence an area of silence. The same goes for media concentration and commercialization; after all, the ``liberal establishment`` is still ``ensconced in...much of the media`` (5/26/95), so pitiful giants like Robert Bartley, Rupert Murdoch and Newt Gingrich can barely be heard over the liberal din.
As the liberals have dominated ``large sections of the judiciary`` as well (5/26/95), the editors could sympathize with Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese`s suggestion that Supreme Court rulings are not necessarily binding on public officials (10/29/86), which American Bar Association president Eugene Thomas said would, if implemented, ``shake the foundations of our constitutional system.``
Editorial Page Vs. Free Speech
The editors have expended great energy in assailing the threats to free speech posed by ``political correctness`` and the ``liberal establishment`s`` imposition of multiculturalist materials on victimized students and alumni. But once again the double standard and selective use of evidence call into question editorial interest in free speech per se.
Pinochet`s muzzling the press, killing dissident journalists and academics, and imposing military rule and standards of correctness on Chilean universities did not bother the editors at all. Jeffrey Hart, the Dartmouth academic and long-time editorial page favorite, was much concerned with the P.C. threat, but openly enthused over Pinochet`s dictatorial rule: His office featured a photograph of himself and Pinochet exchanging pleasantries (Counterpunch, 1/15/94). For ultra-relativism, free speech is for my side alone.
At home, the vast expansion of right-wing funding for ``free enterprise chairs,`` campus think tanks, law and economics programs, and lecture series with a clear and open bias (see Larry Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower) has not bothered the editors at all. In neo-con mythology, the business community and conservatives are fighting a defensive battle against the left and the ``liberal establishment`` (``contemporary liberalism...is on the attack, forcing everything through the filter of politics``—12/13/94), so that although virtually all the money flowing to the university with an ideological bias and political agenda is right-wing, this merely serves to correct a serious imbalance.
Lee Bass`s $20 million gift to Yale to foster a Western Civilization program was considered an admirable idea by the Journal editors; no question was raised about an outside party pushing a specific program, if it was the right one. When Yale returned Bass` gift after he insisted on helping to choose the faculty as well, the editors had problems only with the intervention of faculty ``enforcers`` (12/13/94).
The Enola Gay controversy also involved the editors in a remarkable display of intolerance and totalitarian attitudes. The Smithsonian`s proposed display had tried to put the atomic bombing of Japan in a historic context, rather than as a patriotic effusion, although it was on balance supportive of President Harry Truman`s decision to bomb. Air Force historian Richard Hallion called it ``a great script.``
But the American Legion and especially the Air Force Association disapproved, and made it into a political issue, eventually succeeding in getting the contested program canceled, the program director ousted and a Senate resolution passed denouncing ``revisionist`` interpretations.
The editorial page of the Journal naturally entered this fray (1/31/95), asserting that ``the people`` had risen up to contest the ``liberal establishment`` The editors somehow confused ``the people`` with the American Legion and Air Force Association, the latter a longstanding lobby for the Air Force. Essentially the editors and AFA objected to real history; they wanted traditional uplifting, patriotic history, without the carping of the real thing. The editors thus considered the defeat of the contextualized exhibit a triumph.
The editorial statement that there was ``the well-known political correctness problem with the exhibit`` (5/3/95) demonstrates once again that for the editors P.C. simply means failure to conform to their ideological dogma. The editors did note (1/31/95) the fears of historians ``that one set of assumptions is simply going to be imposed by fiat in place of their own.... That would be unfortunate, we guess. But we don`t plan to feel very sorry for these academics.``
Free Lunch Economics
The editorial page was notable in the Reagan era for its advocacy of supply-side economics and Reagan`s economic policies—-policies that resulted in a tripling of the national debt, soaring poverty rates and, most damning to supply-side theory, falling savings rates and net investment levels.
Numerous Journal opinion pieces have been devoted to rebutting claims that inequality increased during the Reagan/Bush years—although, given the number of other pieces actually praising the virtues of inequality (e.g., Barro, ``Inequality and Its Charms,`` 2/10/93), this may have been seen by the editorial board as cause for regret.
During the Reagan era, the editorial page strenuously defended the ongoing massive deficits, claiming they were exaggerated in size, importance and potential growth: ``The real deficit story is that the deficit is shrinking away,`` the Journal reassured in 1984 (6/28/84); in 1991, when the deficit hit $269 billion, the Journal declared (10/31/91) that its ``role seems a lot bigger than it really is.``
Displaying its usual double standard, however, the Journal had consistently assailed the much smaller deficits of the Carter years; ``deficit spending`` was called the ``fundamental cause of inflation`` (3/22/78), and Carter`s low public esteem was blamed on his failure to bring deficits under control (6/1/78). But these were Democratic rather than Republican deficits, and did not serve the benevolent ends of the latter.
In his book The Seven Fat Years as well as in editorials, Bartley blamed the Reagan-era deficits on the Democrats, although Reagan`s budget proposals, if fully implemented, would have produced a total eight-year deficit of more than $1.2 trillion (New York Review of Books, 8/13/92).
The editorial page has been a proponent of deregulation, virtually without limit, and there has been a stream of editorials and guest columns proposing deregulation in environmental controls and many other spheres of activity. Guest Milton Friedman (5/16/95) proudly recalled his percipient Newsweek article of 20 years back (1/8/73) demanding the complete elimination of the Food and Drug Administration, now perhaps in the works thanks to Newt Gingrich and Robert Dole.
The great illustration of deregulation in action in the Reagan era, the loosening of the reins on the S&Ls, was greeted with enthusiasm by the editors in 1981 (6/29/81): The new authority to ``make all types of loans and enlarge the scope of their investments`` is a means of solving their problems that is ``cheap.`` When this cheap solution turned out to be quite expensive in the late 1980s, the editors characteristically placed all the blame on the Democrats, not on deregulation and not the Reagan administration`s handling of the issues.
Comics Page or Reactionary Headquarters?
Some people view the Journal editorial page as a kind of comics page complement to the news section. Indeed, its crude double standards, selective use of evidence and outright prevarication are often laughable.
On the other hand, in his analysis of the Enola Gay controversy, historian Mike Wallace refers to the page as ``the GHQ of reaction.`` This is equally valid: From their strategic position in a major media enterprise, the editors have been able to help lead the ongoing counterrevolution, with consequences observable to all. It is important to recognize, however, that leadership of this counterrevolution has been entirely incompatible with editorial ``integrity`` and support of democratic values.
Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of several books, including Corporate Control, Corporate Power; Beyond Hypocrisy; and (with Noam Chomsky) Manufacturing Consent. A longer version of this article is available from FAIR.
#107 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:20:58 am
the WSJ is a good paper indeed -- no wonder zahra jee and harry potter jee like it so much -- by the way hairy potter jee, hope u will email the WSJ editor at the email given at the end and ask him for an apology
Action Alert
Wall Street Journal claims sex is secret of young businesswomen`s success
2/16/00
A recent front-page story of the Wall Street Journal cheerily announced, ``InToday`s Workplace, Women Feel Freer To Be, Well, Women`` (2/7/00). The firstof two subheadings explained what the Journal thinks being, well, women isall about: ``Floppy Bow Ties Give Way To More-Alluring Attire; Sex Banter HasIts Place.`` (When the story jumped to its continuing page, the headlinereferred to ``The Feminization of the Workplace`` -- as if the essence offemininity can be reduced to fashion and innuendo.)
The second subhead wonders about the effects of feminine expression in theoffice: ``Flirting -- or Good Business?`` The article suggests that -- likemen who have supplemented their business skills with their golf games --ambitious young women are using their looks, their charm, and even``unabashed flirting`` to advance professionally.
But how does the Journal define women`s workplace flirtations? ``Teasing,bantering, a direct look in the eye.`` One perpetrator described in the piece``jokes and makes lighthearted comments in the office, smiles and sometimesuses sarcasm.``
This dubious definition of flirting aside, the Journal doesn`t muster anyevidence to support the idea that young businesswomen are ushering in themillennium by flirting their way to the top. It`s a trend the Journal claimsto observe but makes little effort to document, aside from a few anecdotesfrom some 20-somethings who say that ``playing the attractiveness card`` helpsget their foot in the door with established businessmen who won`t talk tothem unless they smile pretty. The piece includes no countervailing quotesfrom young women who deny efforts to play up their sexuality in pursuit ofincreased success.
Ostensibly seeking the feminist point of view, Journal reporter EllenPollock interviewed Gloria Steinem and NOW president Patricia Ireland. Butwhile they described office flirting as potentially confusing and contestedits productivity, it is unclear if Steinem or Ireland were ever askedwhether they think large numbers of women are actually using it as abusiness strategy.
Then there was the opinion of a male engineer who says that these femaleflirters are the professional equivalents of teasing cheerleaders, who tauntand manipulate male coworkers with ``a smile and a promise of more,`` and endup ``on the fast track to promotions.`` This is what men`s anger in theworkplace is all about, the engineer fumed: ``[Men] realize that when allthings are equal, that females have the advantage. If you have an advantageyou shouldn`t be allowed to use it.``
The Journal does not mention that since there are still only three femaleCEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and since women still make only approximately75 cents for every dollar men earn, all things are certainly not equal incorporate America. So much for women`s ``advantage.``
For expert commentary on this supposed new trend, the Journal turned toanti-feminist author Warren Farrell, who they describe impartially as a``write[r] about men and their relationships with women.`` Farrell claims thatwhen young, attractive women interact casually with male coworkers, menbecome ``confused`` about their intentions and may react innocently, therebybecoming ``vulnerable`` to sexual harassment charges.
Furthering the media`s continued misrepresentation of sexual harassment as amisinterpreted but innocently intended one-time event, the Journal featuresFarrell`s charge that ``It only takes one mistake in a man`s life to have apotential for ending his career.`` For men who seek to suppress their sexdrives in the office, Farrell insists, working with engaging young women is``like being an alcoholic and seeing drinks all around him.``
The implication: The mere presence of young women in a business settingcreates a hardship for men who seek to resist temptation, and for olderwomen considered too far past their prime to leverage their looks for aboost up the corporate ladder.
Under the newly-coined phrase ``the deportment gap,`` the Journal identifiesonly two roles for women in the workplace: the ``stern,`` ``somber,`` humorlessand supposedly asexual women of ``about a decade ago`` who refuse to trade ontheir sexuality for success, pitted against the ``far more relaxed,````feminine`` 20-somethings who are ``using the personal tools at their disposalto get ahead professionally``-- tools such as Capri pants and tank tops.
``Does this represent the triumph, or the betrayal, of the feministmovement?`` the Journal asked. They call it a ``hard question,`` but theJournal`s query doesn`t seem ``difficult``--it seems disingenuous in a storythat implies young women are succeeding not based on their intelligence buton their willingness to exploit their sexuality -- even when there is noevidence for this claim. (Most of the behaviors described are as innocuousas maintaining eye contact and expressing a sense of humor.) Since the onlyplace the ``deportment gap`` seems to be popping up is in the pages of theJournal, the better question might be, ``Does this WSJ article representignorance of, or hostility to, the real experiences of professional women?``
ACTION: Think the Journal`s idea of young women trading sexuality forsuccess was based more on stereotypes than on any hard evidence? Let theJournal know.
CONTACT:
Journal staff writer Ellen Pollockellen.pollack@wsj.comFax: 212-416-2350
Pollack`s editor, Carol Hymowitzcarol.hymowitz@wsj.com
Letters can be sent to Pollock and Hymowitz at:The Wall Street Journal200 Liberty StreetNew York, NY 10281.
Please ``cc`` letters to Jenn Pozner.
Action Alert
Wall Street Journal claims sex is secret of young businesswomen`s success
2/16/00
A recent front-page story of the Wall Street Journal cheerily announced, ``InToday`s Workplace, Women Feel Freer To Be, Well, Women`` (2/7/00). The firstof two subheadings explained what the Journal thinks being, well, women isall about: ``Floppy Bow Ties Give Way To More-Alluring Attire; Sex Banter HasIts Place.`` (When the story jumped to its continuing page, the headlinereferred to ``The Feminization of the Workplace`` -- as if the essence offemininity can be reduced to fashion and innuendo.)
The second subhead wonders about the effects of feminine expression in theoffice: ``Flirting -- or Good Business?`` The article suggests that -- likemen who have supplemented their business skills with their golf games --ambitious young women are using their looks, their charm, and even``unabashed flirting`` to advance professionally.
But how does the Journal define women`s workplace flirtations? ``Teasing,bantering, a direct look in the eye.`` One perpetrator described in the piece``jokes and makes lighthearted comments in the office, smiles and sometimesuses sarcasm.``
This dubious definition of flirting aside, the Journal doesn`t muster anyevidence to support the idea that young businesswomen are ushering in themillennium by flirting their way to the top. It`s a trend the Journal claimsto observe but makes little effort to document, aside from a few anecdotesfrom some 20-somethings who say that ``playing the attractiveness card`` helpsget their foot in the door with established businessmen who won`t talk tothem unless they smile pretty. The piece includes no countervailing quotesfrom young women who deny efforts to play up their sexuality in pursuit ofincreased success.
Ostensibly seeking the feminist point of view, Journal reporter EllenPollock interviewed Gloria Steinem and NOW president Patricia Ireland. Butwhile they described office flirting as potentially confusing and contestedits productivity, it is unclear if Steinem or Ireland were ever askedwhether they think large numbers of women are actually using it as abusiness strategy.
Then there was the opinion of a male engineer who says that these femaleflirters are the professional equivalents of teasing cheerleaders, who tauntand manipulate male coworkers with ``a smile and a promise of more,`` and endup ``on the fast track to promotions.`` This is what men`s anger in theworkplace is all about, the engineer fumed: ``[Men] realize that when allthings are equal, that females have the advantage. If you have an advantageyou shouldn`t be allowed to use it.``
The Journal does not mention that since there are still only three femaleCEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and since women still make only approximately75 cents for every dollar men earn, all things are certainly not equal incorporate America. So much for women`s ``advantage.``
For expert commentary on this supposed new trend, the Journal turned toanti-feminist author Warren Farrell, who they describe impartially as a``write[r] about men and their relationships with women.`` Farrell claims thatwhen young, attractive women interact casually with male coworkers, menbecome ``confused`` about their intentions and may react innocently, therebybecoming ``vulnerable`` to sexual harassment charges.
Furthering the media`s continued misrepresentation of sexual harassment as amisinterpreted but innocently intended one-time event, the Journal featuresFarrell`s charge that ``It only takes one mistake in a man`s life to have apotential for ending his career.`` For men who seek to suppress their sexdrives in the office, Farrell insists, working with engaging young women is``like being an alcoholic and seeing drinks all around him.``
The implication: The mere presence of young women in a business settingcreates a hardship for men who seek to resist temptation, and for olderwomen considered too far past their prime to leverage their looks for aboost up the corporate ladder.
Under the newly-coined phrase ``the deportment gap,`` the Journal identifiesonly two roles for women in the workplace: the ``stern,`` ``somber,`` humorlessand supposedly asexual women of ``about a decade ago`` who refuse to trade ontheir sexuality for success, pitted against the ``far more relaxed,````feminine`` 20-somethings who are ``using the personal tools at their disposalto get ahead professionally``-- tools such as Capri pants and tank tops.
``Does this represent the triumph, or the betrayal, of the feministmovement?`` the Journal asked. They call it a ``hard question,`` but theJournal`s query doesn`t seem ``difficult``--it seems disingenuous in a storythat implies young women are succeeding not based on their intelligence buton their willingness to exploit their sexuality -- even when there is noevidence for this claim. (Most of the behaviors described are as innocuousas maintaining eye contact and expressing a sense of humor.) Since the onlyplace the ``deportment gap`` seems to be popping up is in the pages of theJournal, the better question might be, ``Does this WSJ article representignorance of, or hostility to, the real experiences of professional women?``
ACTION: Think the Journal`s idea of young women trading sexuality forsuccess was based more on stereotypes than on any hard evidence? Let theJournal know.
CONTACT:
Journal staff writer Ellen Pollockellen.pollack@wsj.comFax: 212-416-2350
Pollack`s editor, Carol Hymowitzcarol.hymowitz@wsj.com
Letters can be sent to Pollock and Hymowitz at:The Wall Street Journal200 Liberty StreetNew York, NY 10281.
Please ``cc`` letters to Jenn Pozner.
#106 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:18:55 am
shri hairy potter jee -- you should know i hope that lying is the last refuge of a scoundrel --
what you say ``Ha, big deal!! Of course, for a Paki reporter who by his own admission took to his heels when confronted by a sleuth with a gun, talking about journalistic integrity is akin to a whore preaching the virtues of virginity. `` -- is a lie -- have never said this anywhere but i do remember veeresh interpreting this to be the case when i told him that after murtaza bhutto was gunned down in 1996 when i arrived on the scene with another reporter the policemen present were asked by their commanding officer to point their guns at us and to make sure we did not proceed any further -- he also made a directive which basically said that if need be they should shoot the reporters --i am afraid this does not mean that i ``took to my heels when confronted by a sleuth with a gun`` -- i am afraid you will have to do better than that -- yes im sure zahra J will be able todo that and more -- esp given that going by from what i have read on this site, a fair proportion of its users think her to be a whacko of the highest order -- or at best quite confused --
well considering that i am partially looking after letters myself these days hairy potter jee i think i do have a fair idea how they are printed -- i also know that those who indulge in such things should be, at the very least, accused of hypocrisy -- as for the `deafening silence` hairy potter jee -- i think paki haters like you conveniently choose to ignore things when they want -- the views of a freelance columnist do not reflect the views of the newspaper itself -- just like the rantings and ravings of an indian express or HT columnist against muslims or pakistanis or both may not necessarily reflect the views of those newspapers
what you say ``Ha, big deal!! Of course, for a Paki reporter who by his own admission took to his heels when confronted by a sleuth with a gun, talking about journalistic integrity is akin to a whore preaching the virtues of virginity. `` -- is a lie -- have never said this anywhere but i do remember veeresh interpreting this to be the case when i told him that after murtaza bhutto was gunned down in 1996 when i arrived on the scene with another reporter the policemen present were asked by their commanding officer to point their guns at us and to make sure we did not proceed any further -- he also made a directive which basically said that if need be they should shoot the reporters --i am afraid this does not mean that i ``took to my heels when confronted by a sleuth with a gun`` -- i am afraid you will have to do better than that -- yes im sure zahra J will be able todo that and more -- esp given that going by from what i have read on this site, a fair proportion of its users think her to be a whacko of the highest order -- or at best quite confused --
well considering that i am partially looking after letters myself these days hairy potter jee i think i do have a fair idea how they are printed -- i also know that those who indulge in such things should be, at the very least, accused of hypocrisy -- as for the `deafening silence` hairy potter jee -- i think paki haters like you conveniently choose to ignore things when they want -- the views of a freelance columnist do not reflect the views of the newspaper itself -- just like the rantings and ravings of an indian express or HT columnist against muslims or pakistanis or both may not necessarily reflect the views of those newspapers
#105 Posted by harish_hyd on October 21, 2005 2:10:01 am
#101 by omar_r_quraishi
I won`t speak for Zahra because she can do it herself, much better than the purported journalists who nitpick on grammar because they aren`t capable of doing much else.
[those who are surprised by the political views of the WSJ, and who live in the US, need to wake up]
Ha, big deal!! Of course, for a Paki reporter who by his own admission took to his heels when confronted by a sleuth with a gun, talking about journalistic integrity is akin to a whore preaching the virtues of virginity.
#100 by omar_r_quraishi
[(including shri harry potter jee -- harish iyer if im not wrong -- and who is very civil when he wants his letters printed in pakistani newspapers)]
Just because the Dawn is a two-bit rag doesn`t mean the absolute garbage printed in its pages goes unchallenged. As to being civil, being an ``Ass``istant Editor, surely you know that is how letters to the editor are addressed? Or are you such a moron that this simple fact escapes your pea-sized brain?
BTW, why the deafening silence over the commentary that claimed Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for Iraq? Or is it that the ``Ass``istant Editor doesn`t like answering uncomfortable questions?
I won`t speak for Zahra because she can do it herself, much better than the purported journalists who nitpick on grammar because they aren`t capable of doing much else.
[those who are surprised by the political views of the WSJ, and who live in the US, need to wake up]
Ha, big deal!! Of course, for a Paki reporter who by his own admission took to his heels when confronted by a sleuth with a gun, talking about journalistic integrity is akin to a whore preaching the virtues of virginity.
#100 by omar_r_quraishi
[(including shri harry potter jee -- harish iyer if im not wrong -- and who is very civil when he wants his letters printed in pakistani newspapers)]
Just because the Dawn is a two-bit rag doesn`t mean the absolute garbage printed in its pages goes unchallenged. As to being civil, being an ``Ass``istant Editor, surely you know that is how letters to the editor are addressed? Or are you such a moron that this simple fact escapes your pea-sized brain?
BTW, why the deafening silence over the commentary that claimed Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for Iraq? Or is it that the ``Ass``istant Editor doesn`t like answering uncomfortable questions?
#104 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:09:09 am
makes you wonder about the NYT doesnt it -- oh but how can the assistant editor of a two bit rag from pakistan say this hain na hairy potter jee?
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
Media Beat (10/17/05)
Norman Solomon
More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: “During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment ‘embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.”
Let’s replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she’s given “clearance” by the Pentagon “to see secret information” -- which she “was not permitted to discuss” with Times editors.
There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she’s supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.
Notably, the front-page story about Miller in the Times on Sunday bypassed Miller’s “clearance” status and merely reported: “In the spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war in Iraq, where she had been embedded with an American military team searching unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.”
In effect, during the propaganda buildup for the invasion of Iraq, while Miller was the paper’s lead reporter on weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times news department served as a key asset of the warfare state.
“WMD -- I got it totally wrong,” the Times quoted Miller as saying in a Friday interview. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong.”
But analysts, experts and journalists were not “all wrong.” Some very experienced weapons inspectors -- including Mohamed ElBaradei, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter -- challenged key assertions from the White House. Well before the invasion, many other analysts also disputed various aspects of the U.S. government’s claims about WMDs in Iraq. (For examples, see archived news releases put out by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy in 2002 and early 2003.) Meanwhile journalists at some British newspapers, including the Independent and the Guardian, raised tough questions that were virtually ignored by mainstream U.S. reporters in the Washington press corps.
Reporters select sources -- and the unnamed ones that Miller chose to rely on, like the Pentagon’s pet Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, were predictably eager to spin tales about WMDs in order to fuel momentum for an invasion. Yet the official line at the New York Times has been that its news department was fooled with the rest of the media best.
On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq -- the Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two top editors, including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece contended that the Times, along with policy makers in Washington, were victims rather than perpetrators: “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.”
But the Times did not “fall for misinformation” as much as jump for it. The newspaper eagerly helped the administration portray deceptions as facts.
The carnage set loose by those deceptions is continuing every day. But the Times’ extensive Sunday coverage of its own machinations, with Judith Miller at the center of the intrigue, had nothing to say about the human consequences in Iraq.
In elite medialand, the careers of journalists at the New York Times loom large. In contrast, the lives of American soldiers -- and especially the lives of Iraqis -- are more like abstractions while the breathless accounts of press palace intrigues unfold.
The apex of the Times hierarchy has provided no indication of personal remorse or institutional accountability. And the next time agenda-setting for U.S. military action -- against Iran or Syria or wherever -- shifts into high gear, it’s very unlikely that the New York Times or other top-tier U.S. media outlets will present major roadblocks.
On June 14, 2003, shortly before he was promoted to the job of executive editor at the New York Times, the newspaper published an essay by Bill Keller that explained why the U.S. government should strive to improve the quality of its intelligence. “The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted,” he wrote. “To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.”
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
Media Beat (10/17/05)
Norman Solomon
More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: “During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment ‘embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.”
Let’s replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she’s given “clearance” by the Pentagon “to see secret information” -- which she “was not permitted to discuss” with Times editors.
There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she’s supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.
Notably, the front-page story about Miller in the Times on Sunday bypassed Miller’s “clearance” status and merely reported: “In the spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war in Iraq, where she had been embedded with an American military team searching unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.”
In effect, during the propaganda buildup for the invasion of Iraq, while Miller was the paper’s lead reporter on weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times news department served as a key asset of the warfare state.
“WMD -- I got it totally wrong,” the Times quoted Miller as saying in a Friday interview. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong.”
But analysts, experts and journalists were not “all wrong.” Some very experienced weapons inspectors -- including Mohamed ElBaradei, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter -- challenged key assertions from the White House. Well before the invasion, many other analysts also disputed various aspects of the U.S. government’s claims about WMDs in Iraq. (For examples, see archived news releases put out by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy in 2002 and early 2003.) Meanwhile journalists at some British newspapers, including the Independent and the Guardian, raised tough questions that were virtually ignored by mainstream U.S. reporters in the Washington press corps.
Reporters select sources -- and the unnamed ones that Miller chose to rely on, like the Pentagon’s pet Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, were predictably eager to spin tales about WMDs in order to fuel momentum for an invasion. Yet the official line at the New York Times has been that its news department was fooled with the rest of the media best.
On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq -- the Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two top editors, including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece contended that the Times, along with policy makers in Washington, were victims rather than perpetrators: “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.”
But the Times did not “fall for misinformation” as much as jump for it. The newspaper eagerly helped the administration portray deceptions as facts.
The carnage set loose by those deceptions is continuing every day. But the Times’ extensive Sunday coverage of its own machinations, with Judith Miller at the center of the intrigue, had nothing to say about the human consequences in Iraq.
In elite medialand, the careers of journalists at the New York Times loom large. In contrast, the lives of American soldiers -- and especially the lives of Iraqis -- are more like abstractions while the breathless accounts of press palace intrigues unfold.
The apex of the Times hierarchy has provided no indication of personal remorse or institutional accountability. And the next time agenda-setting for U.S. military action -- against Iran or Syria or wherever -- shifts into high gear, it’s very unlikely that the New York Times or other top-tier U.S. media outlets will present major roadblocks.
On June 14, 2003, shortly before he was promoted to the job of executive editor at the New York Times, the newspaper published an essay by Bill Keller that explained why the U.S. government should strive to improve the quality of its intelligence. “The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted,” he wrote. “To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.”
#103 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:05:22 am
zahra my advice for people like you who live overseas and think they know everything going on `back home` is shut up and stop pretending that you know how it is back home -- a call to an uncle in isloo doesnt do that by the way -- as for mushy not giving pervez hoodbhoy a chance to say any of this, you obviously havent seen or read the coverage of the quake -- a lot of which has been scathing -- in some more so than this `email` article
#102 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 2:01:38 am
for shri harry potter jee and zahra jee -- esp the former moron
something that a `two bit rag` from pakistan would not do
Action Alert
Top Papers Agree to Exclude Critics in Exchange for ``Scoop``
6/2/00
In accepting a deal to tell only one side of an important story in exchange for a ``scoop,`` editors of the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal violated fundamental principles of journalism and betrayed their readers` trust.
According to Howard Kurtz, media reporter for the Washington Post (5/29/00),``a publicist hired by United Airlines and US Airways offered three major newspapers a deal that none of them could refuse. The pitch: We`ll give you the exclusive details of a $5 billion merger if you promise not to call any outsiders for comment.`` All three papers agreed to this censorious arrangement, which only fell apart because the Financial Times website broke the story early, negating the agreement.
It`s disturbing that a newspaper would agree to report a major story by relying entirely on one party in the story for information and comment. But the editors` explanations only made things worse. The Wall Street Journal`s managing editor, Paul Steiger, claimed to ``hate those kind of arrangements`` (which implies that this is not the first), but explained that ``if the news is big enough, we`d rather give it to our readers with whatever caveats are appropriate.`` But is a corporate press release without any outsider comment really ``news``? And wouldn`t a ``big`` story call for even more caution and balance, rather than a ``caveat`` saying that normal journalistic procedures weren`t followed?
Washington Post financial editor Jill Dutt also put doing the story quickly ahead of balance: ``It does a better job for readers to have the story on the first day than not to have the story,`` she contended. As a matter of fact, Dutt said, the Post doesn`t really need outside experts: ``The Washington Post, regardless if no one is called, can give much better background and context for the significant issues involved in the deal.``
And she understands why corporate executives would want ``a clear shot at giving investors your side of the deal before you get all the naysayers.`` It should go without saying that it is not a newspaper`s role to facilitate companies` corporate strategy, or to protect them from ``naysayers.``
Dutt`s bottom-line rationale for accepting the airlines` ``scoop`` under their restrictions was: ``I don`t want to get beat.``
New York Times business editor Glenn Kramon likewise accepted this kind of deal-making as the price for being a major player in business journalism: ``We`ve been serious about business news for too long to be cut out of big stories like this, and it`s about time we were included.`` But it`s no honor to be included in a race to the bottom where newspapers compete to be first through abandoning journalistic values like balance, depth and accuracy.
Howard Kurtz is to be commended for bringing this breach of journalistic standards at major news outlets, including his own, to the public`s attention. But his assessment--that the story underscores ``the degree to which corporate executives, like politicians, are increasingly determined to shape coverage of their exploits``--is incomplete. Surely it`s also a devastating indictment of the media outlets that accept and abet such manipulation.
ACTION: A coalition of leading media critics and groups, including FAIR, has written to the editors of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, asking for an explanation of their policy on secret exclusionary deals like that proposed by United Airlines/US Airways(http://www.essential.org/alert/releases/secretletrel.html). Please contact one or more of these papers and let them know that agreements to tell only one side of a story are not acceptable journalism.
CONTACTS:
New York Times, letters@nytimes.com
Washington Post, E.R. Shipp, Ombudsman, ombudsman@washpost.com
Wall Street Journal, letter.editor@wsj.com
something that a `two bit rag` from pakistan would not do
Action Alert
Top Papers Agree to Exclude Critics in Exchange for ``Scoop``
6/2/00
In accepting a deal to tell only one side of an important story in exchange for a ``scoop,`` editors of the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal violated fundamental principles of journalism and betrayed their readers` trust.
According to Howard Kurtz, media reporter for the Washington Post (5/29/00),``a publicist hired by United Airlines and US Airways offered three major newspapers a deal that none of them could refuse. The pitch: We`ll give you the exclusive details of a $5 billion merger if you promise not to call any outsiders for comment.`` All three papers agreed to this censorious arrangement, which only fell apart because the Financial Times website broke the story early, negating the agreement.
It`s disturbing that a newspaper would agree to report a major story by relying entirely on one party in the story for information and comment. But the editors` explanations only made things worse. The Wall Street Journal`s managing editor, Paul Steiger, claimed to ``hate those kind of arrangements`` (which implies that this is not the first), but explained that ``if the news is big enough, we`d rather give it to our readers with whatever caveats are appropriate.`` But is a corporate press release without any outsider comment really ``news``? And wouldn`t a ``big`` story call for even more caution and balance, rather than a ``caveat`` saying that normal journalistic procedures weren`t followed?
Washington Post financial editor Jill Dutt also put doing the story quickly ahead of balance: ``It does a better job for readers to have the story on the first day than not to have the story,`` she contended. As a matter of fact, Dutt said, the Post doesn`t really need outside experts: ``The Washington Post, regardless if no one is called, can give much better background and context for the significant issues involved in the deal.``
And she understands why corporate executives would want ``a clear shot at giving investors your side of the deal before you get all the naysayers.`` It should go without saying that it is not a newspaper`s role to facilitate companies` corporate strategy, or to protect them from ``naysayers.``
Dutt`s bottom-line rationale for accepting the airlines` ``scoop`` under their restrictions was: ``I don`t want to get beat.``
New York Times business editor Glenn Kramon likewise accepted this kind of deal-making as the price for being a major player in business journalism: ``We`ve been serious about business news for too long to be cut out of big stories like this, and it`s about time we were included.`` But it`s no honor to be included in a race to the bottom where newspapers compete to be first through abandoning journalistic values like balance, depth and accuracy.
Howard Kurtz is to be commended for bringing this breach of journalistic standards at major news outlets, including his own, to the public`s attention. But his assessment--that the story underscores ``the degree to which corporate executives, like politicians, are increasingly determined to shape coverage of their exploits``--is incomplete. Surely it`s also a devastating indictment of the media outlets that accept and abet such manipulation.
ACTION: A coalition of leading media critics and groups, including FAIR, has written to the editors of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, asking for an explanation of their policy on secret exclusionary deals like that proposed by United Airlines/US Airways(http://www.essential.org/alert/releases/secretletrel.html). Please contact one or more of these papers and let them know that agreements to tell only one side of a story are not acceptable journalism.
CONTACTS:
New York Times, letters@nytimes.com
Washington Post, E.R. Shipp, Ombudsman, ombudsman@washpost.com
Wall Street Journal, letter.editor@wsj.com
#101 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 1:47:13 am
for harry potter jee and zahra jee -- avid fans of WSJ
those who are surprised by the political views of the WSJ, and who live in the US, need to wake up
20 Reasons Not to Trust the Journal Editorial Page
Extra! September/October 1995
By Steve Rendall and Jim Naureckas
1. When Anita Hill took a polygraph test to try to substantiate her charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, the
Wall Street Journal attacked her in an editorial (10/15/91) titled ``Credibility Gulch``: ``Lie detector tests are so unreliable they are rarely allowed as evidence in court.``
But just eight months later (6/9/92), when the Journal argued against an Iran-Contra perjury indictment of former Secretary of
Defense (and editorial page contributor) Caspar Weinberger, this was its main evidence for Weinberger`s innocence: ``Mr. Weinberger has taken and passed a lie-detector test on the matter.``
2. Referring to the investigation into the BCCI takeover of the First American Bank, the Journal asked (10/28/94): ``The
particular U.S. concern is discerning how a pack of Arab crooks got control of the biggest bank in Washington, D.C.``
Besides the blatant racism--it`s unimaginable in any context that the Journal would write of ``a pack of Jewish crooks``--BCCI
was not run by Arabs. BCCI`s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, and Swaleh Naqvi, its chief executive officer, are Pakistani. The Gokal family, which received the largest defaulted loans, are Indian. The biggest loser in the scandal was the ruler of Abu Dhabi, an Arab country.
Deception Overseas
3. George Melloan, then deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
(2/19/82) to explain why the Journal had vilified the New York Times` Raymond Bonner for reporting on a massacre of
civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador. Melloan insinuated that Bonner had a ``political orientation that is Marxist in nature.``
Pressed for evidence, Melloan said Bonner ``was covering the guerrilla movement in El Salvador without ever telling anyone,
any of his readers, that he was being conducted around the country on a tour by the guerrillas themselves.``
As Newsday`s Sydney Schanberg pointed out (10/27/92), each of the four articles that Bonner wrote when he was travelling
with the rebels pointed this out; the first article in the series (1/26/82) was headlined ``With Salvador`s Rebels in Combat
Zone.``
4. In a letter to the New York Times (4/12/88), Journal editorial page contributor and former editorial writer Jude Wanniski
claimed there was no evidence linking Salvadoran military officer/politician Roberto D`Aubuisson to death squads, labeling reports to the contrary as ``McCarthyist`` and ``one of the most successful propaganda hoaxes of the decade.``
D`Aubuisson`s well-publicized ties to death squads have been confirmed by internal Reagan administration memos. A March
18, 1981 CIA report to then-Vice President Bush read: ``D`Aubuisson has served as principal henchman for the wealthy
landowners and as a coordinator of the right-wing death squads that have murdered several thousand suspected leftists and
leftist sympathizers during the past year.`` A July 31, 1985 State Department cable stated that D`Aubuisson led a meeting in
which lots were drawn to decide who would ``win`` the opportunity to assassinate Archbishop Oscar Romero, the head of El
Salvador`s Catholic Church (Washington Post, 1/4/94).
5. Journal editorials referred to Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi as ``a veteran of the struggle against Portugal`` (11/8/79;
6/30/89) and claimed (12/21/88) that his ``UNITA rebels have been fighting for Angola`s freedom for 23 years.``
According to correspondence discovered after the Portuguese military government fell in 1978, Savimbi was on the
Portuguese military payroll as an agent fighting against genuine anti-colonial forces (Ray et al., Dirty Work 2; Johnson and
Martin, Frontline Southern Africa)
6. The Journal recently seemed to encourage France to use violence against Greenpeace in its attempt to blockade French nuclear testing in the South Pacific: ``When confronted by fanatics spouting irrational demands, there is often no alternative to using force,`` an editorial declared (7/12/95).
Greenpeace`s ``irrational demands``--that the French cease testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific--are echoed by the ``fanatic`` prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the heads of state of virtually every Pacific Island country.
Crime and Punishment
7. In an editorial on crime (2/11/94), the Wall Street Journal claimed ``it is very nearly routine procedure for criminals to kill
their victims during a robbery to get rid of the evidence.``
According to FBI statistics, there were 672,480 robberies in 1992, and 2,254 murders associated with robberies--so about 99.7 percent of the time, robbers did not kill their victims.
8. An editorial page ``Notable & Quotable`` column (11/13/92) compared ``top problems in the public schools as identified by
teachers`` in 1940 (``Talking Out of Turn, Chewing Gum, Making Noise...``) and in 1990 (``Suicide, Rape, Robbery...``).
The Journal got caught by a hoax which compared two totally dissimilar lists: One was based on the questions (not the
responses) from a 1974-75 poll asking principals about crime in their schools, while the other was derived from a 1943 list of the most common classroom problems. (The phony comparison was debunked in the New York Times Magazine, 3/6/94.) In
reprinting the lists (from Congressional Quarterly Researcher, 9/11/92), the Journal added an error of its own--moving the
date of the ``modern`` problems from 1980 to 1990.
Tree Muggers
9. In two editorials (11/18/92, 1/15/93) urging a pardon for Bill Ellen, convicted in a federal court of violating federal wetlands
regulations, the Journal claimed Ellen had merely been building a ``wildlife sanctuary...to attract migrating waterfowl,`` and was
prosecuted because he had ``allowed two loads of dirt`` to be dumped ``on land that someone representing the U.S. said was a wetland,`` in an area that ``the Soil Conservation Service had previously deemed non-wetland.`` Ellen, the Journal argued, had been unfairly charged with ``violating a [1989] regulatory standard that didn`t exist at the time of his actions.``
Bill Ellen`s ``wildlife sanctuary`` was actually a hunting reserve. He was not charged for violating new regulations, but rather on five counts of violating the Clean Water Act of 1972. Ellen was convicted of filling some 86 acres of clearly wet areas, including part of a tidal creek, a violation of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1898 (Washington Post, 2/20/93). Ellen had
already received three warnings to stop in 1988--a year before the 1989 regulations were added. According to journalist Bill Gifford in the Washington Monthly(11/93), ``Ellen had filled or altered close to 1,000 acres, though the prosecution focused
on areas that were indisputedly wet; the new wetland definition wasn`t even an issue.``
10. ``Violating the Endangered Species Act just might be the best thing Michael Rowe ever did,`` wrote Ike C. Sugg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in an editorial-page column (11/10/93) titled ``Losing Houses, Saving Rats.`` Rowe saved his
house from California`s October 1993 wildfires, wrote Sugg, ``by clearing a fire-break`` around his property on land designated as a protected habitat for the Stephens kangaroo rat. Arguing that 29 other homes within the ``77,000 acres of private property`` designated as a kangaroo rat study area could have been saved if their residents had likewise broken the law, Sugg lamented, ``most of Mr. Rowe`s law-abiding neighbors lost their homes.``
Nothing prevented the cutting of brush on private land in the kangaroo rat`s protected habitat, since the animal (a relative of the squirrel) lives underground. Nevertheless, the U.S. General Accounting Office studied whether houses could have been saved
if homeowners had been allowed to plow under their land. ``Overall, county officials and other fire experts believe that weed abatement by any means would have made little difference in whether or not a home was destroyed in the California fire,`` the GAO concluded (7/94), noting that the fire, whipped by 80-mile-per-hour winds, jumped over two highways and a canal.
11. The Journal launched yet another assault on the tiny kangaroo rat this year, charging overzealous enforcement of the
Endangered Species Act. Columnist Gideon Kanner (``The Rule of Law,`` 5/24/95), a southern California law professor, wrote that Southern California farmer Tuang Ming-Lin was arrested in February 1994 because he had ``run over five rats with a plow.`` ``Since Mr. Lin speaks no English,`` Kanner continued, ``there is at best a serious question as to whether he even knew about these regulations, though the Feds insisted that they had sent letters advising of their existence.``
According to The Recorder(6/14/95), a law publication, Lin was arrested not for running over rats, but for destroying the
protected habitat of three different endangered species: the Tipton kangaroo rat, the kit fox and the leopard lizard. According to the Recorder, Lin was sent the first letter warning him about the protected species in December 1992; the last of several warnings was conveyed in person, one week before his arrest, by a game warden who told Lin, his son and the farm foreman
that they needed a permit to continue to cultivate the land. Besides the factual errors, it`s ironic that the Journal would have a law professor--in a column titled ``Rule of Law``--argue that ignorance of the law is an excuse.
Atomic Bombast
12. The Journal (8/29/94) blasted the Smithsonian museum`s proposed exhibit on the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, citing the draft script: ``It is especially curious to note the oozing romanticism with which the Enola show`s writers describe the Kamikaze pilots.... These were, the script elegaically relates, `Youths, their bodies overflowing with life.```
The kamikaze quote was not written by the show`s curators but--as was clearly spelled out in the script--by Yukiteru
Sugiyama, a surviving kamikaze pilot. According to the Smithsonian script, it was ``included to give viewer`s insight into [the kamikazes`] suicidal fanaticism, which many American`s would otherwise find incomprehensible.``
13. As evidence of the supposedly soft-on-Japan ``mindset`` of the Smithsonian scriptwriters, the Journal editorial (8/29/94) cited this quote: ``For most Americans, this war...was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.``
Here`s the full context of the Smithsonian quote--hardly soft on Japan:
Japanese expansionism was marked by naked aggression and extreme brutality. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanking in 1937 shocked the world. Atrocities by Japanese troops included brutal mistreatment of civilians, forced laborers and prisoners of war, and biological experiments on human victims.
In December 1941, Japan attacked U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and launched other surprise assaults against Allied territories in the Pacific. Thus began a wider conflict marked by extreme bitterness. For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy--it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism. As the war approached its end in 1945, it appeared to both sides that it was a fight to the finish.
14. In defending the use of the atom bomb, the Journal editorial (8/29/94) claimed that a U.S. invasion ``would by all estimates
have resulted in more than a million American casualties.``
``By all estimates``? Official reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June of 1945 estimated total U.S. casualties (including injuries) as between 132,500 and 220,000. Gen. Douglas MacArthur argued in June 1945 that an estimate of 110,000 casualties was too high. Historians have been unable to provide documentation for anything close to the ``one million`` figure (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 6-7/86; Diplomatic History, Winter/93).
Arcane Reporting
15. In an editorial (2/5/93) attacking efforts to increase media coverage of domestic violence, the Journal claimed that FAIR`s report that domestic violence increases on Super Bowl Sunday was ``received as sacred writ by an entirely credulous army of journalists.`` The Journal praised one reporter, the Washington Post`s Ken Ringle, who wrote an article dismissing any link between violent sports and domestic violence (Washington Post, 1/31/93): ``He pursued an arcane reporting technique that has apparently slipped from favor: Mr. Ringle called up the source of the original story to ask if it were true.``
In fact, Ringle never did call up the source of the story--FAIR`s national office--to ask if it were true. If he had, we would have told him that our information about the Super Bowl came from first-hand reports from women who work in domestic violence shelters, and from articles written by journalists who used the ``arcane reporting technique`` of interviewing battered women. One of the reporters specifically cited as part of the ``credulous army`` duped by FAIR, Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times, had actually been reporting about the Super Bowl`s link to battering as early as 1987 (NBC Nightly News, 1/18/87).
In writing an editorial whose whole point was that journalists should be skeptical and check their sources, the Journal editors didn`t bother to check the Post`s story out by calling FAIR. If they had, they might not have repeated Ringle`s errors, and could have avoided making new errors of their own--like referring to the public relations firm Dobisky Associates as ``FAIR`s publicists,`` a firm we`d never heard of until the Journal`s editorial appeared. The Journal refused to publish a letter from FAIR pointing out these and other mistakes.
Economic Nonsense
16. Journal editor Robert Bartley`s book, The Seven Fat Years, gets its title from the idea that the Reagan years were a time of great prosperity compared to the Carter years. Bartley derives this by measuring from the trough of the early `80s recession in 1982 to the peak of the recovery in 1989--finding a growth rate of 3.8 percent for the ``Reagan years``--while measuring the ``Carter years`` from the 1973 growth peak to the 1982 trough (1.6 percent).
This fundamentally dishonest comparison assigns two recessions--neither of which occurred during his presidency--to Carter, while counting no recessions for Reagan. You could find a 3.5 percent growth rate for Carter by playing a similar game and counting from 1975 to 1980. An honest economist will tell you that you have to compare similar phases of the business cycle: From the 1973 peak to the 1979 peak, there was a growth rate of 2.8 percent; from the 1979 peak to the 1989 peak, there was a growth rate of 2.5 percent. So much for the ``seven fat years.``
17. The Journal praised the 1981 deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry (6/29/81), saying, ``The beauty of these solutions is that they are cheap because they depend on the market and not on the federal till.``
The federal till has so far paid more than $150 billion to cover the costs of this ``cheap`` solution.
18. Editor Robert Bartley has stated that in the U.S., ``there aren`t any poor people, just a few hermits or something like that`` (Washington Post, 7/11/82).
The Limbaugh Connection
19. Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund was the ghostwriter of Rush Limbaugh`s first book, The Way Things Ought to Be.
The book is wildly inaccurate, as demonstrated in FAIR`s book, The Way Things Aren`t.
20. Republican strategist William Kristol referred to Rush Limbaugh as ``almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves.``
those who are surprised by the political views of the WSJ, and who live in the US, need to wake up
20 Reasons Not to Trust the Journal Editorial Page
Extra! September/October 1995
By Steve Rendall and Jim Naureckas
1. When Anita Hill took a polygraph test to try to substantiate her charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, the
Wall Street Journal attacked her in an editorial (10/15/91) titled ``Credibility Gulch``: ``Lie detector tests are so unreliable they are rarely allowed as evidence in court.``
But just eight months later (6/9/92), when the Journal argued against an Iran-Contra perjury indictment of former Secretary of
Defense (and editorial page contributor) Caspar Weinberger, this was its main evidence for Weinberger`s innocence: ``Mr. Weinberger has taken and passed a lie-detector test on the matter.``
2. Referring to the investigation into the BCCI takeover of the First American Bank, the Journal asked (10/28/94): ``The
particular U.S. concern is discerning how a pack of Arab crooks got control of the biggest bank in Washington, D.C.``
Besides the blatant racism--it`s unimaginable in any context that the Journal would write of ``a pack of Jewish crooks``--BCCI
was not run by Arabs. BCCI`s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, and Swaleh Naqvi, its chief executive officer, are Pakistani. The Gokal family, which received the largest defaulted loans, are Indian. The biggest loser in the scandal was the ruler of Abu Dhabi, an Arab country.
Deception Overseas
3. George Melloan, then deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
(2/19/82) to explain why the Journal had vilified the New York Times` Raymond Bonner for reporting on a massacre of
civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador. Melloan insinuated that Bonner had a ``political orientation that is Marxist in nature.``
Pressed for evidence, Melloan said Bonner ``was covering the guerrilla movement in El Salvador without ever telling anyone,
any of his readers, that he was being conducted around the country on a tour by the guerrillas themselves.``
As Newsday`s Sydney Schanberg pointed out (10/27/92), each of the four articles that Bonner wrote when he was travelling
with the rebels pointed this out; the first article in the series (1/26/82) was headlined ``With Salvador`s Rebels in Combat
Zone.``
4. In a letter to the New York Times (4/12/88), Journal editorial page contributor and former editorial writer Jude Wanniski
claimed there was no evidence linking Salvadoran military officer/politician Roberto D`Aubuisson to death squads, labeling reports to the contrary as ``McCarthyist`` and ``one of the most successful propaganda hoaxes of the decade.``
D`Aubuisson`s well-publicized ties to death squads have been confirmed by internal Reagan administration memos. A March
18, 1981 CIA report to then-Vice President Bush read: ``D`Aubuisson has served as principal henchman for the wealthy
landowners and as a coordinator of the right-wing death squads that have murdered several thousand suspected leftists and
leftist sympathizers during the past year.`` A July 31, 1985 State Department cable stated that D`Aubuisson led a meeting in
which lots were drawn to decide who would ``win`` the opportunity to assassinate Archbishop Oscar Romero, the head of El
Salvador`s Catholic Church (Washington Post, 1/4/94).
5. Journal editorials referred to Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi as ``a veteran of the struggle against Portugal`` (11/8/79;
6/30/89) and claimed (12/21/88) that his ``UNITA rebels have been fighting for Angola`s freedom for 23 years.``
According to correspondence discovered after the Portuguese military government fell in 1978, Savimbi was on the
Portuguese military payroll as an agent fighting against genuine anti-colonial forces (Ray et al., Dirty Work 2; Johnson and
Martin, Frontline Southern Africa)
6. The Journal recently seemed to encourage France to use violence against Greenpeace in its attempt to blockade French nuclear testing in the South Pacific: ``When confronted by fanatics spouting irrational demands, there is often no alternative to using force,`` an editorial declared (7/12/95).
Greenpeace`s ``irrational demands``--that the French cease testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific--are echoed by the ``fanatic`` prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the heads of state of virtually every Pacific Island country.
Crime and Punishment
7. In an editorial on crime (2/11/94), the Wall Street Journal claimed ``it is very nearly routine procedure for criminals to kill
their victims during a robbery to get rid of the evidence.``
According to FBI statistics, there were 672,480 robberies in 1992, and 2,254 murders associated with robberies--so about 99.7 percent of the time, robbers did not kill their victims.
8. An editorial page ``Notable & Quotable`` column (11/13/92) compared ``top problems in the public schools as identified by
teachers`` in 1940 (``Talking Out of Turn, Chewing Gum, Making Noise...``) and in 1990 (``Suicide, Rape, Robbery...``).
The Journal got caught by a hoax which compared two totally dissimilar lists: One was based on the questions (not the
responses) from a 1974-75 poll asking principals about crime in their schools, while the other was derived from a 1943 list of the most common classroom problems. (The phony comparison was debunked in the New York Times Magazine, 3/6/94.) In
reprinting the lists (from Congressional Quarterly Researcher, 9/11/92), the Journal added an error of its own--moving the
date of the ``modern`` problems from 1980 to 1990.
Tree Muggers
9. In two editorials (11/18/92, 1/15/93) urging a pardon for Bill Ellen, convicted in a federal court of violating federal wetlands
regulations, the Journal claimed Ellen had merely been building a ``wildlife sanctuary...to attract migrating waterfowl,`` and was
prosecuted because he had ``allowed two loads of dirt`` to be dumped ``on land that someone representing the U.S. said was a wetland,`` in an area that ``the Soil Conservation Service had previously deemed non-wetland.`` Ellen, the Journal argued, had been unfairly charged with ``violating a [1989] regulatory standard that didn`t exist at the time of his actions.``
Bill Ellen`s ``wildlife sanctuary`` was actually a hunting reserve. He was not charged for violating new regulations, but rather on five counts of violating the Clean Water Act of 1972. Ellen was convicted of filling some 86 acres of clearly wet areas, including part of a tidal creek, a violation of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1898 (Washington Post, 2/20/93). Ellen had
already received three warnings to stop in 1988--a year before the 1989 regulations were added. According to journalist Bill Gifford in the Washington Monthly(11/93), ``Ellen had filled or altered close to 1,000 acres, though the prosecution focused
on areas that were indisputedly wet; the new wetland definition wasn`t even an issue.``
10. ``Violating the Endangered Species Act just might be the best thing Michael Rowe ever did,`` wrote Ike C. Sugg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in an editorial-page column (11/10/93) titled ``Losing Houses, Saving Rats.`` Rowe saved his
house from California`s October 1993 wildfires, wrote Sugg, ``by clearing a fire-break`` around his property on land designated as a protected habitat for the Stephens kangaroo rat. Arguing that 29 other homes within the ``77,000 acres of private property`` designated as a kangaroo rat study area could have been saved if their residents had likewise broken the law, Sugg lamented, ``most of Mr. Rowe`s law-abiding neighbors lost their homes.``
Nothing prevented the cutting of brush on private land in the kangaroo rat`s protected habitat, since the animal (a relative of the squirrel) lives underground. Nevertheless, the U.S. General Accounting Office studied whether houses could have been saved
if homeowners had been allowed to plow under their land. ``Overall, county officials and other fire experts believe that weed abatement by any means would have made little difference in whether or not a home was destroyed in the California fire,`` the GAO concluded (7/94), noting that the fire, whipped by 80-mile-per-hour winds, jumped over two highways and a canal.
11. The Journal launched yet another assault on the tiny kangaroo rat this year, charging overzealous enforcement of the
Endangered Species Act. Columnist Gideon Kanner (``The Rule of Law,`` 5/24/95), a southern California law professor, wrote that Southern California farmer Tuang Ming-Lin was arrested in February 1994 because he had ``run over five rats with a plow.`` ``Since Mr. Lin speaks no English,`` Kanner continued, ``there is at best a serious question as to whether he even knew about these regulations, though the Feds insisted that they had sent letters advising of their existence.``
According to The Recorder(6/14/95), a law publication, Lin was arrested not for running over rats, but for destroying the
protected habitat of three different endangered species: the Tipton kangaroo rat, the kit fox and the leopard lizard. According to the Recorder, Lin was sent the first letter warning him about the protected species in December 1992; the last of several warnings was conveyed in person, one week before his arrest, by a game warden who told Lin, his son and the farm foreman
that they needed a permit to continue to cultivate the land. Besides the factual errors, it`s ironic that the Journal would have a law professor--in a column titled ``Rule of Law``--argue that ignorance of the law is an excuse.
Atomic Bombast
12. The Journal (8/29/94) blasted the Smithsonian museum`s proposed exhibit on the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, citing the draft script: ``It is especially curious to note the oozing romanticism with which the Enola show`s writers describe the Kamikaze pilots.... These were, the script elegaically relates, `Youths, their bodies overflowing with life.```
The kamikaze quote was not written by the show`s curators but--as was clearly spelled out in the script--by Yukiteru
Sugiyama, a surviving kamikaze pilot. According to the Smithsonian script, it was ``included to give viewer`s insight into [the kamikazes`] suicidal fanaticism, which many American`s would otherwise find incomprehensible.``
13. As evidence of the supposedly soft-on-Japan ``mindset`` of the Smithsonian scriptwriters, the Journal editorial (8/29/94) cited this quote: ``For most Americans, this war...was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.``
Here`s the full context of the Smithsonian quote--hardly soft on Japan:
Japanese expansionism was marked by naked aggression and extreme brutality. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanking in 1937 shocked the world. Atrocities by Japanese troops included brutal mistreatment of civilians, forced laborers and prisoners of war, and biological experiments on human victims.
In December 1941, Japan attacked U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and launched other surprise assaults against Allied territories in the Pacific. Thus began a wider conflict marked by extreme bitterness. For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy--it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism. As the war approached its end in 1945, it appeared to both sides that it was a fight to the finish.
14. In defending the use of the atom bomb, the Journal editorial (8/29/94) claimed that a U.S. invasion ``would by all estimates
have resulted in more than a million American casualties.``
``By all estimates``? Official reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June of 1945 estimated total U.S. casualties (including injuries) as between 132,500 and 220,000. Gen. Douglas MacArthur argued in June 1945 that an estimate of 110,000 casualties was too high. Historians have been unable to provide documentation for anything close to the ``one million`` figure (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 6-7/86; Diplomatic History, Winter/93).
Arcane Reporting
15. In an editorial (2/5/93) attacking efforts to increase media coverage of domestic violence, the Journal claimed that FAIR`s report that domestic violence increases on Super Bowl Sunday was ``received as sacred writ by an entirely credulous army of journalists.`` The Journal praised one reporter, the Washington Post`s Ken Ringle, who wrote an article dismissing any link between violent sports and domestic violence (Washington Post, 1/31/93): ``He pursued an arcane reporting technique that has apparently slipped from favor: Mr. Ringle called up the source of the original story to ask if it were true.``
In fact, Ringle never did call up the source of the story--FAIR`s national office--to ask if it were true. If he had, we would have told him that our information about the Super Bowl came from first-hand reports from women who work in domestic violence shelters, and from articles written by journalists who used the ``arcane reporting technique`` of interviewing battered women. One of the reporters specifically cited as part of the ``credulous army`` duped by FAIR, Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times, had actually been reporting about the Super Bowl`s link to battering as early as 1987 (NBC Nightly News, 1/18/87).
In writing an editorial whose whole point was that journalists should be skeptical and check their sources, the Journal editors didn`t bother to check the Post`s story out by calling FAIR. If they had, they might not have repeated Ringle`s errors, and could have avoided making new errors of their own--like referring to the public relations firm Dobisky Associates as ``FAIR`s publicists,`` a firm we`d never heard of until the Journal`s editorial appeared. The Journal refused to publish a letter from FAIR pointing out these and other mistakes.
Economic Nonsense
16. Journal editor Robert Bartley`s book, The Seven Fat Years, gets its title from the idea that the Reagan years were a time of great prosperity compared to the Carter years. Bartley derives this by measuring from the trough of the early `80s recession in 1982 to the peak of the recovery in 1989--finding a growth rate of 3.8 percent for the ``Reagan years``--while measuring the ``Carter years`` from the 1973 growth peak to the 1982 trough (1.6 percent).
This fundamentally dishonest comparison assigns two recessions--neither of which occurred during his presidency--to Carter, while counting no recessions for Reagan. You could find a 3.5 percent growth rate for Carter by playing a similar game and counting from 1975 to 1980. An honest economist will tell you that you have to compare similar phases of the business cycle: From the 1973 peak to the 1979 peak, there was a growth rate of 2.8 percent; from the 1979 peak to the 1989 peak, there was a growth rate of 2.5 percent. So much for the ``seven fat years.``
17. The Journal praised the 1981 deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry (6/29/81), saying, ``The beauty of these solutions is that they are cheap because they depend on the market and not on the federal till.``
The federal till has so far paid more than $150 billion to cover the costs of this ``cheap`` solution.
18. Editor Robert Bartley has stated that in the U.S., ``there aren`t any poor people, just a few hermits or something like that`` (Washington Post, 7/11/82).
The Limbaugh Connection
19. Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund was the ghostwriter of Rush Limbaugh`s first book, The Way Things Ought to Be.
The book is wildly inaccurate, as demonstrated in FAIR`s book, The Way Things Aren`t.
20. Republican strategist William Kristol referred to Rush Limbaugh as ``almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves.``
#100 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 21, 2005 1:44:23 am
zahra jee I am quite aware of what features of WSJ stand out but the editorial page is not one of them -- i doubt it that this piece appeared in the marketplace section -- in any case, someone like you (including shri harry potter jee -- harish iyer if im not wrong -- and who is very civil when he wants his letters printed in pakistani newspapers) is too beholden to things american and capitalistic to understand what i am saying -- and by the way thanks for expanding my vocabulary today -- did not know `stagnance` was a word -- my OED says it isnt but since zahra jee, avid fan of WSJ says it is, it must be --
harry potter jee -- trust a certified paki hater like you to step in when no one is addressing you -- actually the editorial pages of some pakistani newspapers as well as indian papers are probably better than many mainstream US papers which bend over backwards to please dubya and his corporate cronies -- but i doubt it that a moron like you would be able to see that --
harry potter jee -- trust a certified paki hater like you to step in when no one is addressing you -- actually the editorial pages of some pakistani newspapers as well as indian papers are probably better than many mainstream US papers which bend over backwards to please dubya and his corporate cronies -- but i doubt it that a moron like you would be able to see that --
#99 Posted by harish_hyd on October 20, 2005 11:40:35 pm
#97 by omar_r_quraishi
[trust zahraJ to read a rightwing Bush-loving paper like the wall street journal -- whose op-ed pages r probably more right wing than fox]
The ``Ass``istant Editor of a two-bit rag (whose entire circulation does not exceed the circulation of the WSJ in the city of NY alone) commenting on the WSJ?
Now that is what I would call hilarious!!!!
Isn`t Dawn the same rag where one commentator wrote that Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for American action for Iraq?
[trust zahraJ to read a rightwing Bush-loving paper like the wall street journal -- whose op-ed pages r probably more right wing than fox]
The ``Ass``istant Editor of a two-bit rag (whose entire circulation does not exceed the circulation of the WSJ in the city of NY alone) commenting on the WSJ?
Now that is what I would call hilarious!!!!
Isn`t Dawn the same rag where one commentator wrote that Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for American action for Iraq?
#98 Posted by ZahraJ on October 20, 2005 7:05:30 am
Omar:
I understand that you lack the open mindedness of reading anything that provides substantive information or challenges your limited knowledge. The Journal is still the best business information source among many others. All the well thought out sections: Market Place, Money and Investing and Personal Journal speak for themselves. I understand that we are talking about personal preferences - only a narrow-minded idiot would have issues with the Journal or anyother subscription that gives another perspective.
I do believe that Dr. Hoodbhoy`s article was not 100% well suited for the Journal. It jumped into a particluar scenario assuming the readers knew the background. Some background about the massive disaster would have helped the reader who knew nothing about Pakistan. Despite that, the best part about his article was raising the issue of checks and balances in the international media. I am sure Musharraf would never give him a sermon to wash the dirty laundry within the boundaries of Pakistan and not expose it to the rest of the world, unlike what he told some Pakistani women in NY.
I understand it is not everyone`s cup of tea to plan for the future. Some ``enlightened minds`` love stagnance.
I understand that you lack the open mindedness of reading anything that provides substantive information or challenges your limited knowledge. The Journal is still the best business information source among many others. All the well thought out sections: Market Place, Money and Investing and Personal Journal speak for themselves. I understand that we are talking about personal preferences - only a narrow-minded idiot would have issues with the Journal or anyother subscription that gives another perspective.
I do believe that Dr. Hoodbhoy`s article was not 100% well suited for the Journal. It jumped into a particluar scenario assuming the readers knew the background. Some background about the massive disaster would have helped the reader who knew nothing about Pakistan. Despite that, the best part about his article was raising the issue of checks and balances in the international media. I am sure Musharraf would never give him a sermon to wash the dirty laundry within the boundaries of Pakistan and not expose it to the rest of the world, unlike what he told some Pakistani women in NY.
I understand it is not everyone`s cup of tea to plan for the future. Some ``enlightened minds`` love stagnance.
#97 Posted by omar_r_quraishi on October 20, 2005 4:16:03 am
trust zahraJ to read a rightwing Bush-loving paper like the wall street journal -- whose op-ed pages r probably more right wing than fox -- dear zara jee this article was written almost a week before it found its way on the editorial page of your favourite newspaper -- the problem with that is -- something that im suprised the WSJ editorial page editor -- prob chose to ignore is that by the time it would appear in print things would have changed considerably - in that context it may actually be quite misleading since it presents an outdated pictrue to readers -- i suggest you cancel your WSJ subscription pronto
#96 Posted by ZahraJ on October 19, 2005 6:58:01 pm
I did not read the article under discussion but I did read something interesting in today`s WSJ. Since I had read the paper version and was shocked to read the conversion from $ to Rs. and vice versa, I am glad it was fixed on the online version. Thank God.
Some good points are brought up on the aid and its disbursement. Somehow, the request for aid was not very clear inspite of the emphasis on the earthquake aftermath.
Wanted: 10,000 Houses
At Only $833 Each
By PERVEZ HOODBHOY
October 19, 2005; Page A12
See corrections & amplifications item below.
This is adapted from an email sent to friends by Mr. Hoodbhoy on Oct. 12, four days after an earthquake hit northern Pakistan and Kashmir.
* * *
BALAKOT, Pakistan-administered Kashmir -- They are still not even trying to extricate the dead. From under the rubble of collapsed buildings, a gut-wrenching smell of decaying corpses now fills the town. The rats have it good; the one I accidentally stepped upon was already fat. If there is indeed a plan to clear the concrete rubble in and around the town, nobody seems to have any clue. But the Balakotis are taking it in their stride -- nose masks are everywhere.
There is good news. The Mansehra-to-Balakot road stretch, finally forced open by huge army bulldozers and earth-moving machinery, is now available to relief trucks. Goods donated across the country are piled to the truck-roofs. If there ever was a time when the people of Pakistan moved together, this is it. Even the armed bandits who waylay relief supplies -- to guard against whom soldiers with automatic weapons stand at alert every few hundred yards -- cannot destroy the euphoria of having this solitary moment of unspoiled national unity.
Aid from across the world is making its way, and the U.S. is here too. Double-bladed Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, weave their way through the mountains. They fly over the heartland of jihad and the militant training camps in Mansehra to drop food and tents a few miles beyond. Temporarily birds of peace instead of war, they do immensely more to soothe the highly Islamic, highly conservative, bearded mountain people than the reams of silly propaganda on glossy paper put out by the U.S. information services in Pakistan.
Visibility makes relief choppers terrific propaganda, for good or for worse. This is undoubtedly why the Pakistani government refused an Indian offer to send in helicopters for relief work in and around Muzaffarabad, the flattened capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In spite of a much-celebrated peace process, Pakistan has also not issued visas to Indian peace groups and activists that seek participation in the relief effort. Indian activists are very frustrated.
Islamic groups from across the country have arrived in vast numbers. Some bring relief supplies, others simply harangue poor goat-herders and simple tillers of the soil to tell them that their misdeeds brought about this catastrophe. None seem to have an explanation for why God`s wrath was especially directed to mosques, madrassas and schools -- all of which have collapsed in huge numbers. And none say why thousands of the faithful have been buried alive in this sacred month of fasting.
Bad news: The aid is still too little, often of the wrong kind, and is not getting to those most affected. Hundreds of destroyed communities lie scattered deep in the mountains. We saw helicopters attempt aerial drops; landing is impossible in most places. But people told us that they often miss and the supplies land up thousands of feet below or in deep forests.
Distribution is haphazard and uncoordinated, done with little thought. In Balakot we saw relief workers simply throw packets of food and clothes from the top of trucks, and a subsequent riot. Hustlers thrive, the weak watch passively. Tons of clothes, lovingly donated and packed by citizens around Pakistan, but mostly useless because of specific cultural and climatic conditions, are mixed and scattered with garbage and rubble throughout the town.
I have mixed feelings about the army role. I did not see enough to validate a previous observation that they were shirking. But certainly, I did not see senior officers anywhere.
For me personally, there was a sense of déjà vu. Nearly 31 years ago, on Dec. 25, 1974, a powerful earthquake had flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway killing nearly 10,000 people. I had traveled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had made a passionate appeal for funds around the world, taken a token helicopter trip to the destroyed town of Besham, and made fantastic promises for rehabilitation. But then hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan`s secret nuclear program.
Shall the present government do better? This will only be if citizens, and international donors, demand transparency and accounts are available for public audit.
The clock is ticking. In barely two months from now, the mountains will get their first snowfall and temperatures will plummet below zero. There are simply not enough tents, blankets and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies, facing rain and hail, and with dread in their hearts. These families have lost everything but the tattered clothes on their backs. Some even lost the land they had lived upon for generations -- the top soil simply slid away, leaving behind hard rock and rubble. Those without shelter will die. From a special university fund we have pledged a dozen families to rebuild their houses. This number can be pushed up to 50 with the amount others have pledged so far (assuming 50,000 Rupees per house [$833], where the cost is for wood and stone mostly). But 10,000 houses or more will be needed in the Mansehra-Balakot-Kaghan area alone, not to speak of adjoining Kashmir.
Mr. Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is on the board of the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation Earthquake Relief Fund (P.O. Box 222, Princeton, NJ).
Corrections & Amplifications: 50,000 rupees is equivalent to about $833. The initial version of this article and its headline said 50,000 rupees is equivalent to $83.
Some good points are brought up on the aid and its disbursement. Somehow, the request for aid was not very clear inspite of the emphasis on the earthquake aftermath.
Wanted: 10,000 Houses
At Only $833 Each
By PERVEZ HOODBHOY
October 19, 2005; Page A12
See corrections & amplifications item below.
This is adapted from an email sent to friends by Mr. Hoodbhoy on Oct. 12, four days after an earthquake hit northern Pakistan and Kashmir.
* * *
BALAKOT, Pakistan-administered Kashmir -- They are still not even trying to extricate the dead. From under the rubble of collapsed buildings, a gut-wrenching smell of decaying corpses now fills the town. The rats have it good; the one I accidentally stepped upon was already fat. If there is indeed a plan to clear the concrete rubble in and around the town, nobody seems to have any clue. But the Balakotis are taking it in their stride -- nose masks are everywhere.
There is good news. The Mansehra-to-Balakot road stretch, finally forced open by huge army bulldozers and earth-moving machinery, is now available to relief trucks. Goods donated across the country are piled to the truck-roofs. If there ever was a time when the people of Pakistan moved together, this is it. Even the armed bandits who waylay relief supplies -- to guard against whom soldiers with automatic weapons stand at alert every few hundred yards -- cannot destroy the euphoria of having this solitary moment of unspoiled national unity.
Aid from across the world is making its way, and the U.S. is here too. Double-bladed Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, weave their way through the mountains. They fly over the heartland of jihad and the militant training camps in Mansehra to drop food and tents a few miles beyond. Temporarily birds of peace instead of war, they do immensely more to soothe the highly Islamic, highly conservative, bearded mountain people than the reams of silly propaganda on glossy paper put out by the U.S. information services in Pakistan.
Visibility makes relief choppers terrific propaganda, for good or for worse. This is undoubtedly why the Pakistani government refused an Indian offer to send in helicopters for relief work in and around Muzaffarabad, the flattened capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In spite of a much-celebrated peace process, Pakistan has also not issued visas to Indian peace groups and activists that seek participation in the relief effort. Indian activists are very frustrated.
Islamic groups from across the country have arrived in vast numbers. Some bring relief supplies, others simply harangue poor goat-herders and simple tillers of the soil to tell them that their misdeeds brought about this catastrophe. None seem to have an explanation for why God`s wrath was especially directed to mosques, madrassas and schools -- all of which have collapsed in huge numbers. And none say why thousands of the faithful have been buried alive in this sacred month of fasting.
Bad news: The aid is still too little, often of the wrong kind, and is not getting to those most affected. Hundreds of destroyed communities lie scattered deep in the mountains. We saw helicopters attempt aerial drops; landing is impossible in most places. But people told us that they often miss and the supplies land up thousands of feet below or in deep forests.
Distribution is haphazard and uncoordinated, done with little thought. In Balakot we saw relief workers simply throw packets of food and clothes from the top of trucks, and a subsequent riot. Hustlers thrive, the weak watch passively. Tons of clothes, lovingly donated and packed by citizens around Pakistan, but mostly useless because of specific cultural and climatic conditions, are mixed and scattered with garbage and rubble throughout the town.
I have mixed feelings about the army role. I did not see enough to validate a previous observation that they were shirking. But certainly, I did not see senior officers anywhere.
For me personally, there was a sense of déjà vu. Nearly 31 years ago, on Dec. 25, 1974, a powerful earthquake had flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway killing nearly 10,000 people. I had traveled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had made a passionate appeal for funds around the world, taken a token helicopter trip to the destroyed town of Besham, and made fantastic promises for rehabilitation. But then hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan`s secret nuclear program.
Shall the present government do better? This will only be if citizens, and international donors, demand transparency and accounts are available for public audit.
The clock is ticking. In barely two months from now, the mountains will get their first snowfall and temperatures will plummet below zero. There are simply not enough tents, blankets and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies, facing rain and hail, and with dread in their hearts. These families have lost everything but the tattered clothes on their backs. Some even lost the land they had lived upon for generations -- the top soil simply slid away, leaving behind hard rock and rubble. Those without shelter will die. From a special university fund we have pledged a dozen families to rebuild their houses. This number can be pushed up to 50 with the amount others have pledged so far (assuming 50,000 Rupees per house [$833], where the cost is for wood and stone mostly). But 10,000 houses or more will be needed in the Mansehra-Balakot-Kaghan area alone, not to speak of adjoining Kashmir.
Mr. Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is on the board of the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation Earthquake Relief Fund (P.O. Box 222, Princeton, NJ).
Corrections & Amplifications: 50,000 rupees is equivalent to about $833. The initial version of this article and its headline said 50,000 rupees is equivalent to $83.
#95 Posted by jang on October 19, 2005 2:54:12 pm
#94, #95
the calamity of this size shows-up in india at least once every year, its flood in bihar, cyclones in andhra and orissa, cloudburst of garhwal or recently, even the Bombay floods killed 1000-2000 people and made large numbers homeless. this quake being in kashmir we have hightened sensitivities and internatinal media coverage under the heading of politics. in other cases, internatinal media merely mentioned this in page 6 in a small paragraph, and maybe an ugly picture with a caption. in short, the tamasha value in this case is higher.
the calamity of this size shows-up in india at least once every year, its flood in bihar, cyclones in andhra and orissa, cloudburst of garhwal or recently, even the Bombay floods killed 1000-2000 people and made large numbers homeless. this quake being in kashmir we have hightened sensitivities and internatinal media coverage under the heading of politics. in other cases, internatinal media merely mentioned this in page 6 in a small paragraph, and maybe an ugly picture with a caption. in short, the tamasha value in this case is higher.
#94 Posted by bbabu on October 19, 2005 11:06:46 am
hindvi #93
The position of Indian government baffles me. They are consistent. But they held the same position for the Tsunami victims. They have refused offers of foreign aid for general development save a select few states.
The position of Indian government baffles me. They are consistent. But they held the same position for the Tsunami victims. They have refused offers of foreign aid for general development save a select few states.
#93 Posted by hindvi on October 18, 2005 10:46:37 pm
Will the Indians please request their government to allow any foreign aid? not necessarily from Pakistan but any at all?
NY Times
October 19, 2005
Letter From Asia
Pride and Politics: India Rejects Quake Aid
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI, Oct. 18 - Calamities of nature do not just test the capacity of a state. They can also offer unexpected opportunities for political craftsmanship.
Take India. The government has announced that it needs no international aid to recover from the Oct. 8 earthquake that leveled villages in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, killed an estimated 1,300 people there and displaced roughly 30,000 families.
As temperatures fall to near freezing in the hilltop hamlets of Kashmir, the most liberal estimates suggest that fewer than half of the surviving families have tents to sleep in. Yet a full nine days and nights after the quake, Indian officials say they have no need for the United Nations, nor foreign aid agencies, to bring tents from abroad.
Indian officials say that they are able to care for their own, and that tents are coming from private producers and the Indian military. What is more, India has sent aid, including 620 tents, to its neighbor and archrival, Pakistan. ``We ourselves are taking care of our victims,`` said Navtej Sarna, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. ``When there are offers by friendly countries and anything is needed, these offers are considered.``
It is too early to tell whether India, which seeks a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, can go it alone. Certainly there is anger in Indian-administered Kashmir among people who have been forced to build their own tents out of the wooden beams and tin sheets retrieved from the rubble of their homes. Even so, India`s posture says a great deal about the politics of disaster aid, and about India`s own ambitions to assert itself as a world power.
India also refused international aid in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, though it later allowed United Nations and private agencies to help. Three years ago, it rebuffed development aid from a number of foreign donors, saying it was no longer necessary. In short, India has been anxious to portray itself as a giver, rather than a receiver. ``What we can manage on our own, we do,`` said Hamid Ansari, a retired Indian diplomat. ``There`s a certain sense of self-confidence that we can manage it and, let me say, a desire to signal that you are capable of managing things on your own.``
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the director of a private research group here called the Center for Policy Research, saw reflected in India`s rejection of foreign aid so far a desire to be seen as an emerging global power, or one of what he called ``the big boys.``
``The risk really is that in our refusal to accept aid I don`t think we are keeping people to whom aid might go as central,`` Mr. Mehta said. ``We are playing politics with aid, using aid to make a statement.``
Pakistan`s approach has been exactly the opposite. Hit a whole lot harder by the Oct. 8 quake - its official death toll stood at 42,000 on Tuesday- Pakistan has appealed for worldwide help and allowed foreigners to travel to its side of Kashmir and to the traditionally well-guarded pockets of North-West Frontier Province, the two areas that suffered the greatest damage.
Pakistan is the world`s largest manufacturer of tents, but still cannot produce nearly enough. The United Nations said Tuesday that 350,000 additional tents were urgently needed and that 500,000 earthquake survivors had still not received any medical care, food or other assistance.
There is no agreement on whether India has sufficient tents to care for its own. The Foreign Ministry spokesman said the Indian Army would be able to help make up the shortfall. The army spokesman in Kashmir, Lt. Col. S. K. Batra, cautioned that the military, itself badly hit in the earthquake, could not entirely deplete its own stock. The government`s joint secretary of disaster management, Aseem Khurana, vowed that enough tents would be sent within a week. So far, roughly 13,000 of the 30,000 tents required have been distributed, he said, slightly less than half sent by the Indian Army.
State government officials in Kashmir said they were puzzled about the dearth of tents. ``It is really eye-opening for us, that in this country with such a