As promised in my review of Seymour Hersh’s excellent memoir Reporter, here is an excerpt that describes how he found out about Paul Meadlo, one of the people in the platoon that committed the My Lai massacre. Hersh had seen a small news item about a young journalist named Ron Ridenhour who had heard about the massacre and sent reports to the army top brass about what he had heard and been frustrated by the lack of action and feared a cover-up. After talking with Ridenhour, Hersh got the name of Michael Terry, a soldier in that same platoon, and went to see him.
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One of the biggest criticisms I had of the Barack Obama administration was that it was completely in the pockets of the big financial sector institutions, such as the major banks on Wall Street. Especially guilty of this were Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, who were the top two in the Justice Department and never prosecuted the executives of those firms. They both came into government from the law firm Covington and Burling that had those banks as clients, and they then returned to that same law firm after leaving government office, to reap the big rewards of their acts of obeisance to Wall Street. The other major figure in the sell-out to the banks was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
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In a previous post, I lamented the fact that much of the media jump straight from a glib interpretation of an actual news event to mindless speculations about the future and what actions are indicated. The main problem with that is wrong analysis leads to wrong actions, just like a wrong medical diagnosis leads to wrong treatment.
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The scourge of false rumors circulating widely and rapidly via social media is now well known, with Facebook in the US being blamed for much of it. But in India, another vehicle is being used to spread rumors with deadly results. That medium is WhatsApp, a phone and chat application that uses the internet. It is used widely in developing countries because if you have access to free wifi, you can make free phone calls to anywhere in the world.
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Yesterday’s elections in Mexico resulted in an easy victory for Andrés Manuel López Obrador (often referred to as just ‘Amlo’) for the presidency, gaining 53% of the vote. The two significant features are that he is a leftist and that the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) that has ruled the country for most of the last century came in third with just 16% of the vote. Amlo is a friend of Jeremy Corbyn and is likely to make fighting poverty the centerpiece of his policies.
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We know that the Trump administration, so quick to callously separate children from their parents at the border, is dragging its feet on reuniting the children with their parents now that the policy has been suspended. Some observers are charging that the process of reuniting families is more poorly organized than reuniting families separated by the war in Syria. On June 27, a federal judge, fed up with the foot-dragging, ordered the government to reunite all families within 30 days (i.e., by July 27) and children under five years must be reunited within 14 days (i.e., by July 11).
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Here are the main points from a scathing document issued in April 2018 titled Human Rights Record of the United States in 2017. While the report is quite accurate in its description of the state of affairs, what is noteworthy is that it was issued by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. The report explains in its introduction why it was issued.
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Political news coverage consists of roughly three parts. First there is the reporting of an actual event that occurred (i.e., what makes up the ‘new’ in news). Second, there is an explanation of the context in which the event occurred that consists of the history and background that led to the event and the people involved, plus any actual consequences, such as how a new law that has been passed will be implemented in practice and how it will affect people. And finally there is the question of What It All Means, which consists of drawing broader conclusions and predicting future events based on the news event.
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