Huffington on the DSM

The BBC in a recent article quoted figures from a recent Arianna Huffington column, which "compares the major US news networks' focus on three stories from 1 May to 20 June: Natalee's disappearance, the Michael Jackson trial and the Downing Street Memo." According to Huffington, on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC combined, there were 56 segments dealing with the memo, 646 on Natalee and 1,490 on Jackson.

Here are the full figures she cites in her post, for "the number of news segments that mention these stories: (from a search of the main news networks’ transcripts from May 1-June 20)."

• ABC News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 42 segments; "Michael Jackson": 121 segments.
  
• CBS News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 70 segments; "Michael Jackson": 235 segments.
  
• NBC News: "Downing Street Memo": 6 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 62 segments; "Michael Jackson": 109 segments.
  
• CNN: "Downing Street Memo": 30 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 294 segments; "Michael Jackson": 633 segments.
  
• Fox News: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 148 segments; Michael Jackson": 286 segments.
  
• MSNBC: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 30 segments; "Michael Jackson": 106 segments.

So it's not as if the network news was doing any better than cable in covering the DSM story - now rapidly fading into history.

Huffington also cites some interesting comments from such media watchdog worthies as Josh Marshall and Jay Rosen. Unfortunately, Rosen's comments - posted on June 20, relating the process by which news items ignored by the MSM get fed back into the news loop by the bloggers - now seem largely irrelevant as far as the DSM is concerned. Yes, a huge blogger-inspired push (based on solid UK-originated news gathering) did seem set to push the DSM story fleetingly into the spotlight (a pretty weak spotlight, as it happens). But that spotlight quickly moved away to other, more interesting stories for the news media - such as Natalee Holloway.

I don't know if Howard Kurtz still thinks of the the DSM case study as a "coming of age" moment for the progressive blogosphere. But if this is what counts as a "bloggers' victory", I really wouldn't want to see a full-fledged defeat!

Dr Media very appropriately compares the DSM story with Greg Palast’s "expose on the disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida in the 2000 presidential election." In the DSM case, the bloggers have made a difference in propelling what should be a major news story, but - if I can use a football analogy - they've succeeded only in moving the ball down the field. The question is, how far down the field did they move "the story" this time. And how close did they come to scoring (if by "scoring" we mean the story hits some sort of critical mass to became a major defining issue that dominates politics and news coverage in the way that, say, Watergate or Monica Lewinsky dominated)? That's a tough question. Maybe the bloggers got closer to the endzone than we realize, but it's clear that the Bush administration and the MSM have now - at least for the moment - driven the ball way back to the other end of the field.

Return of The Persuaders

While Granada International/Granada America is making loadsamoney with reality show concepts repackaged for the US market (such as Hit Me Baby One More Time, Nanny 911 and Hell's Kitchen), it's not stopping there. The increasingly powerful export/production arm of ITV is trying to horn in on the action in the action-adventure drama realm. And it's doing this by bringing back The Persuaders, a classic UK 1971 drama series produced by Lew Grade's ITC. The Persuaders, starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, was an expensive flop in the US (it only lasted one season), but it achieved a sort of kitschy cult status, along with other late 1960s/early 1970s ITC productions such as The Avengers, The Saint, and The Prisoner. (And according to Jeffrey Miller's Something Completely Different, these types of shows, all of which were shown on prime-time US network television, had a significant and lasting impact on the shape of American television.)

So the news that Steve Coogan and Ben Stiller are to star in a remake of The Persuaders has generated some excitement in the film & TV world on both sides of the Atlantic (see also here and here for more information). BBC America has also been doing its best to keep these classic cult shows alive, by showing them regularly as part of its Retro Shows season on Friday evenings.

Granada America is working with DreamWorks to bring the project to life. ITC, the original producer of the series, was bought by PolyGram in the mid-90s. Granada America's ability to feed America's "renewed appetite for shows from its in-house production arm" is becoming increasingly important to ITV, which, the Guardian notes, is suffering from declining audiences in the UK.

Hitchens propels the myth

While Don Rumsfeld & Co. are under attack and in full damage-control mode over the Iraq debacle today, and veteran UK war correspondent Max Hastings resurrects the spectre of Vietnam, the US media are once again doing their best to neglect the issue of how we got into this mess in the first place. Remember the Downing Street Memo?

Congratulations to professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens for propelling the US media's self-serving myth that the DSM is not and never was news because everyone in America supposedly already knew that the Bush administration was going to go to war with Iraq. In a piece in Slate.com, Hitchens argues, "I am now forced to wonder: Who is there who does not know that the Bush administration decided after September 2001 to change the balance of power in the region and to enforce the Iraq Liberation Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1998, which made it overt American policy to change the government of Iraq?" The answer is simple: The American people did not know this! Maybe Hitchens and his chattering-class peers "knew" or think they knew what Bush's Iraq policy really was, but the American people - in whose name this probably illegal invasion took place - did not know that Bush wanted a war, and would do anything to make it happen - including, of course, misrepresenting himself to the American people. And just how many Americans in July 2002 knew anything about the Iraq Liberation Act? Most Americans naturally took Bush at face value when he argued that war was a last resort. (In an Op-Ed piece in today's NY Times Paul Krugman quotes veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who apparently told an audience in November 2002, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - an then made it clear that President Bush was the first.)

So Hitchens gets himself an "Officer Barbrady award" - for what it's worth.

Look, it's clear that, following last week's brief spike in coverage commensurate with John Conyers's Capitol basement session - and in spite of the emergence of a whole clutch of incriminating UK memos and minutes - the whole DSM issue is being efficiently buried again (and this time, I'm sure the MSM hope, it'll be for good). So Hitchens is kicking the issue when it's down. Oh well. But he's still wrong, and it's necessary to clearly recognize why he's wrong because that explains so much about what's wrong with the US news media today

So again, I turn to Joe Conason, whose Salon piece (which I discussed here) provides clear contemporary evidence (from 2002) that the media did not know Bush's true intentions:

Consider Michael Kinsley, the Los Angeles Times editorial page editor and columnist, who recently [in June 2005] derided the memo's importance. According to him, "you don't need a secret memo" to know that "the administration's decision to topple Saddam Hussein by force" had been reached by then. Anybody could tell that war was "inevitable," he wrote. "Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before," he wrote, citing an opinion column by Robert Scheer and a Times story about Pentagon war planning.

But let's also look at what Kinsley himself wrote on July 12, 2002, after those war plans were leaked. On the Post's Op-Ed page, he suggested that despite all the logistical planning and bellicose rhetoric, "Bush may be bluffing ... Or he may be lying, and the leak may be part of an official strategy of threatening all-out war in the hope of avoiding it, by encouraging a coup or persuading Hussein to take early retirement or in some other way getting him gone without a massive invasion."

So Kinsley himself wasn't quite certain whether Bush had decided on war, yet now he says we all knew.

On that same [Los Angeles Times] Op-Ed page two months later, fervent hawk James Hoagland, whose views on the war closely reflect those of the paper's editorial board, wrote a column about the president's U.N. speech. Hoagland described Bush as "diligent prosecuting attorney, sorrowful statesman and reluctant potential warrior.

"Bush wisely did not base his appeals for collective action against Iraq on a doctrine of preemption ... Instead he explained how the need for such drastic steps can be avoided by concerted international action." War, that is, could still be avoided, or so Hoagland believed as of Sept. 15, 2002.

A few days earlier, an editorial in the Times had likewise lauded the president's speech: "While Mr. Bush reserved the right to act independently to restrain Iraq, he expressed a preference for working in concert with other nations and seemed willing to employ measures short of war before turning to the use of force. These are welcome and important statements." So despite what Times reporters and analysts claim today, their newspaper clearly did not consider war inevitable several weeks after July 23, 2002.

And on Oct. 8, 2002, the Times noted approvingly that in requesting a congressional war resolution, Bush had said: "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." The next day, the paper of record reported that around the world, politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens had derived hope from those words.

So what impression did all this leave in the minds of ordinary Americans? Not that war was inevitable or desirable, of that I'm sure. But no matter: A new myth is being carefully constructed by the media, and no amount of Internet or blogosphere criticism seems able to fully deconstruct it. (Btw, here's another excellent piece Joe Conason from June 10, 2005, also in Salon.)

Praising the BBC ... through gritted teeth!

Just to piggy-back on Doctor Media's fine post, if I may: I can't help but notice that the piece she refers to in the (UK-based) Economist is quite happy to describe the BBC in its first reference as "Britain's mammoth public-service broadcaster" and in the third reference as a "Britain's lumbering giant of a public-service broadcaster" [My emphases]. It makes sure to highlight the corporation's "annual £2.8 billion [$5.4 billion] public subsidy." It lauds the very market-oriented former BBC Director-General John Birt - perhaps the most hated D-G of recent times - as having had the vision to take the BBC into the web. You get the impression from reading this piece that The Economist is not exactly Auntie Beeb's best friend! And you'd be right. Make no mistake, when this influential and economically conservative magazine praises the BBC's "excellent" web sites, it's doing so through very gritted teeth! In fact, it's fair to say that The Economist is fundamentally opposed to everything the BBC as a psb stands for, and has on more than one occasion called for the abolition of the license fee and the freeing of the BBC "brand" to do battle in the marketplace. Too bad if you can't afford the product.

The tone of The Economist piece here is a little schizophrenic. Even though it rightly praises the quality of the BBC's web sites, it does not make an explicit connection with the the essential public-service value of these sites. Even though the article recognizes that most British newspapers (apart from the Guardian and maybe the FT) still don't quite "get" the web, the tone is still implicitly critical of the BBC for having had the audacity to figure out the internet first and then make it harder for the poor, suffering, commercial British press to turn it into a "nice little earner." How, you can almost hear them think, can this socialistic, "mammoth," "lumbering giant" of an entity actually do something right? Why isn't the BBC more like British Rail or British Leyland, i.e., just rubbish?

In fact, if I may be so bold, The Economist cares not a whit about public service in this case: all it sees is a market opportunity lost because of that public service. Now it'd be one thing if the BBC was providing a crummy service with all this public money (£15 million, or $27 million pa, apparently) spent on the web. But this has not been and is not the case. The BBC was and is in the best position of any media organization in the country to do what it does, and it's doing precisely what it should be doing - providing a top-quality service that the people really use and really like - and doing it well. If the BBC wasn't doing it, commercial operators (whether from the press or wherever) would step in - but the service would likely be inferior and definitely be more fragmented and would of course cost lots more. Unfortunately, something tells me The Economist would really like that!

Who's getting dumbed down?

Is British telly dumbing down America? Owen Gibson of MediaGuardian seems to think so. Once again the ghost of the Beatles in '64 is evoked as Gibson states, "America is in the grip of a second British invasion. But this time it's not our music that's proving a hit but our light entertainment television shows starring faded celebrities." He's talking about the newly repackaged versions of BBC and ITV formats being bought up by US media "in unprecedented numbers." London Calling has talked about this before (see, e.g., Format programming: UK rules and our take on The Office) but apparently it's getting worse - or better, from a UK balance-of-payments perspective.

Gibson's piece notes the particular success of Granada America, part of Granada International, ITV's export/production arm - that as of last week, "the company provided a fifth of the weekday prime time schedule for Fox and NBC, until recently a proportion that would have been unthinkable to most US TV producers."

Just to keep things straight, he runs through some of the British shows at the trailer-trash end of the spectrum, currently repacakaged for an American audience:

• Dancing With the Stars (adapted from BBC's Strictly Come Dancing, and pulling in "more than 15 million" viewers on ABC after three weeks on air).
  
• Hit Me Baby One More Time (Granada America, ITV's export/production arm, now on NBC)
  
• Nanny 911 (Granada America, now on Fox)
  
• Hell's Kitchen (Granada America)
  
• Fire Me Please (based on BBC3's The Sack Race)
  

The piece reminds us that for many years "it tended to be mostly one-way traffic" from the US to the UK, "with Anglophiles restricted to watching imports" on cable channels "and the big four US networks selling their best comedies and dramas to the BBC and Channel 4." Of course, "The long list of hit US imports, from Dallas to The Sopranos, and game show formats wasn't matched by a reciprocal flow of programme ideas the other way." (He's actually thinking back to the 1970s in particular, when US programming often dominated UK prime-time schedules; US imports are still huge, but for years even the top US imports to Britain, such as Friends and The Sopranos, have been pushed off to "minority" channels - such as C4 or Sky - and lesser timeslots.)

Anyway, Gibson's piece paraphrases Mike Phillips, deputy chief executive of BBC Worldwide (the Beeb's commercial arm), noting "the success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Pop Idol changed the game."
Phillips say he overcame network skepticism and convinced ABC chief Andrea Wong to take a risk with Strictly Come Dancing, drawing on the experience of the show's huge sucess in Britain and Australia (where the link to Baz Luhman's Strictly Ballroom undoubtedly helped).

Paul Jackson, CEO of Granada America, says another reason for the current US opening is the vacuum in American broadcasting as networks cast around desperately for Big Hit replacements for their now-defunct moneyspinners such as Friends and Frasier. Says Jackson: "America is a much more faddish market than over here. While entertainment shows have remained a staple of the British market, that Saturday night type of entertainment show hadn't been seen in America for 20 years. . . . This summer, they've latched onto the British entertainment market and decided to take a risk on it."

So is this a case of the Brits dumbing down American TV? Britain, the land of The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs Downstairs, and David Attenborough's Life on Earth? You betcha. This is the other side of British television, the side that Americans never used to see. It's similar in many ways to Britain's two-tier, high-low class, contrapuntal press system (whose influence is also being felt in the US). Now we're seeing a similar two-tier, high-low class, contrapuntal TV system spreading its influence across the Atlantic.

A tale of two Curtises

It seems that not all Curtises are treated equally in US media-land.

While Richard Curtis is making his own kind of transAtlantic "New Labour Agitprop"(!) splash with "The Girl in the cafe," another British Curtis - Adam, no relation, I think - is having less success State-side.

Adam Curtis is responsible for a somewhat less Blair-friendly media project on the political scene, thanks to his three-part BBC documentary series, The Power of Nightmares - described by Peter Bergen in The Nation as "arguably the most important film about the 'war on terrorism' since the events of September 11. It is more intellectually engaging, more historically probing and more provocative than any of its rivals, including Fahrenheit 9/11."

Curtis is described by Andy Beckett of The Guardian as "perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with something more modern and sceptical: 'I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about in a new way.'"

Perhaps that's why we haven't yet seen it in the States. Although it was aired in the UK (on BBC 2) last October 20, and, as Bergen notes, has been shown "at Cannes and at a few film festivals in the United States, it has yet to find an American distributor, and for understandable reasons." Such as?

The documentary asserts that Al Qaeda is largely a phantom of the imagination of the US national security apparatus. Indeed, The Power of Nightmares seeks nothing less than to reframe the past several decades of American foreign policy, from the Soviet menace of the 1970s to the Al Qaeda threat of today, to argue that neoconservatives in the American foreign policy establishment have vastly exaggerated those threats in their quest to remake the world in the image of the United States.

There are good reviews of the documentary in the UK press, e.g., at The Times of London and The Guardian. Yet interestingly, Bergen is more skeptical of Curtis than the aforementioned UK reviewers. While Bergen notes that "The fact that the film has not been widely shown here [in the U.S.] is our loss, since it raises important questions about the political manipulation of fear," he also thinks the documentary series is "troubling for reasons other than the ones Curtis supposes. For the thesis he advances--that the war on terrorism is driven by nightmares rather than nightmarish potentialities--is one that merits considerable skepticism." Bergen goes on to pick holes in the narrative - unable, perhaps, to accept the true power of Curtis's thesis (although I'll have to wait to see the film myself to make sure). Yet he still concludes that The Power of Nightmares

is a richly rewarding film because it treats its audience as adults capable of following complex arguments." This is a vision of the audience that has been almost entirely abandoned in the executive suites of American television networks. It would be refreshing if one of those executives took a chance on The Power of Nightmares. After all, its American counterpart, Fahrenheit 9/11, earned more money than any documentary in history. And what Curtis has to say is a helluva lot more interesting than what Michael Moore had to say.

But is it possible that what Curtis has to say is also more interesting than what the other Curtis (Richard) has to say? And could HBO's resident Brit Colin Callender be "one of those executives" who might take a chance on this other film in America? I'm not so sure. HBO might like to think of itself as a bit edgy, but I don't think it's ready for that kind of heat. What about BBC America, which in May 2003 rebroadcast “War Spin: Saving Private Lynch”, which embarrassed the US in its attempts to mytholigize Private Jessica Lynch. Well, as far as I know, BBC America hasn't taken it up, and I doubt that it will.

So who will show The Power of Nightmares in the US? Will anyone? I'd guess that if anyone could really tackle this subject and get it aired in the US, it's probably the Brits. There's something about doumentaries and authoritative British accents that allows US audiences to negotiate meaning from such texts at a greater cultural distance - just far enough but not too far - than would be the case with a domestic attempt. But even so . . .

Perhaps the trouble is, while Richard Curtis's project has the backing of Blair (and, perhaps covertly, even the Bush administration), Adam Curtis's project is still well beyond the Washington pale. The Power of Nightmares is the sort of project that can still get funding and screening on a (British) public service system that still displays some independence from political and commercial forces. But it deals with a subject that's more sensitive in the US than the UK (which has had a lot longer to deal with terrorism and its impact on the national psyche). In the '70s and '80s British broadcasters were able to tackle the issue of Irish Republicanism and terrorism in ways inconceivable to present-day US MSM. Perhaps the time is just not yet right. And perhaps the "tale of two Curtises" shows the limits of British media's ability to push a new political agenda onto a jaded US audience. And, to be just a little facetious, it's a subject that doesn't have a cute entertainment lead-in! Yes, it will be a long time before we see a two-hour movie about a love affair between a naive Scottish girl and a grizzled senior Al Qaeda veteran who's off to negotiate a lasting peace with the United States.

PS. The Power of Nightmares apparently is not yet available yet on DVD or video.

UK-US critiques of "The Girl"

While on the subject of "The Girl in the Cafe," it might be fun in the coming days and weeks to compare the critical responses to the film on both sides of the Atlantic. Here's a flavor of what might be coming down the pike. Stateside we've got the New York Times quoting Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's international editor, saying in a recent column, "that a romantic comedy about global poverty might sound 'sleep inducing' but that 'The Girl in the Café' was actually 'a pleasure to watch.'" Kristin Hohenadel in the LAT Kelly Macdonald interview noted by Doctor Media below, calls the film "surprisingly affecting" as it "tries to call attention to the need to end extreme poverty."

Compare this with the initial critical reception to the film - premiering June 25 on BBC and HBO - on BBC's Newsnight Review last week.

Every Friday night on Newsnight three rather pompous cultural critics take up the last third of the show to pontificate on the latest play or movie or TV show or whatever. Last Friday, leftie author John Harris, academic Sarah Churchwell, and (right-wing) Times commentator Michael Gove got a chance to discuss "The Girl in the Cafe." None of them were hugely impressed with the film, it must be said.

Interestingly it was Churchwell (a lecturer at the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia and the only American in the group) who was the most complimentary of the three - and even she only really liked the first hour of the film, dealing with the "love story" (she thinks the second half, dealing with the polemical side, becomes unbelievable). Michael Gove derided what he described as "the traditional Richard Curtis schtick" and called the film patronising "propaganda," simplistic, and "morally empty." John Harris, easily the most bolshie of the three, totally rips into the film, calling it "West London New Labour Agitprop with a distinct smell of of Princess Diana around it" (I love that imagery), and "garbage". By the end they were all mercilessly slagging off the film. But Churchwell does come back to make perhaps the most astute point that she noticed "as an American": the film's "shameless sucking up to the British government," i.e., that everyone - the French, the Germans, the Americans - is ready to sell out the poor old Africans, and only the noble, self-righteous British ministers are ready to stand up for Africa. (If you've followed the UK news on G8/Live8 you might also have noticed some serious "sucking up" to Blair and Brown by Bono and Bob Geldof.) Anyway, Churchwell's comment gives an opening to John Harris to exclaim, "This is getting dangerously close ... [to] what you'd see if you lived in a benign, Brownite [as in Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown] one-party state." Harris seems to have a knack of sounding like he's talking bollocks but actually making a compelling point!

This could get very interesting indeed.

An Oz view of UK TV

Media Guardian provides a fascinating insight into the British TV from an Australian perspective. Former BSkyB chief Sam Chisholm - actually a New Zealander - has returned Down Under, and it seems he's missing the Old Country.

Half a world away in Australia, Sam Chisholm is missing London. He misses his Hyde Park apartment, his local boozer, the Enterprise, and Langan's Brasserie. He misses Tottenham Hotspur football club, of which he was a director. The TV executive misses English humour and manners. Not least, he misses the broadcasting. "British broadcasting is amazing," he sighs.

Chisholm has returned to Oz to run Kerry Packer's Nine Network in Australia. The last time he was in charge of Nine he created a winning culture at Nine - making it Australia's leading network - and then, in 1990, moved to the UK to turn BSkyB into a money-spinner for Murdoch.

Chisholm is described as "an admirer of the 'brilliant' branding of British channels" - he had a major role to play in successfully "branding" Sky - and on that basis is "scrutinising Nine's promos and marketing."

Interestingly, Chisholm is also an archetype of the international media-cultural axis linking Britain and the Antipodes (and, by extension, the US). He has close links with Australia's two best-known media magnates: Rupert Murdoch - at Britain's BSkyB and its Ausralian equivalent, Foxtel - and Kerry Packer, who owns the Nine Network in Australia. Although he doesn't have much direct experience in the United States, Chisholm does exemplify the type of player prominent in the new, post-colonial, global network in English-language news and entertainment media - a network that clearly includes the US, especially through the links provided by Murdoch's News Corporation.

US press's new self-serving myth

Hats off to Joe Conason in Salon for once again bursting the US mainstream news media's self-inflated myth about the Iraq war. Conason's target is the media myth that "The memo wasn't news because Americans already knew that the Bush administration was 'fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy,' rather than making policy that reflected the intelligence and the facts about Iraq [Emphasis added]." (I heard this myth expressed again even by USA Today's Mark Memmott - who finally reported on the DSM for his paper - on last week's On the Media, and then again by Susan Page, USA Today's Washington bureau chief on today's Diane Rehm Friday roundup). The myth is as pervasive as it is instant. And it's wrong, argues Conason, whose piece (reprinted in Truthout) argues for clear duplicity on the part of the MSM.

Of the journalists at the Times and even the Post, Conason states:

Only a very special brand of arrogance would permit any employee of the New York Times, which brought us the mythmaking of Judith Miller, to insist that new documentary evidence of "intelligence fixing" about Saddam's arsenal is no longer news. The same goes for the Washington Post, which featured phony administration claims about Iraq's weapons on Page 1 while burying the skeptical stories that proved correct.

This refers - quite correctly - to these papers' mea culpas about their desultory performance reporting fully on the run-up to the war. This brings Conason to the new media myth. Conason notes comments by the Times's and the Post's - as well as by Michael Kinsley - that show that what they're saying now about the inevitability of war is not what they were saying in 2002. He concludes, "Instead of pretending that we all knew what we know now, the Washington press corps should stop spinning excuses, stop redefining what constitutes news and start doing its job."

WP and Kurtz on the DSM

Some more recent coverage of the DSM in the Washington Post - from Terry M. Neal ("Democrats Looking for a Road Map to Downing Street"); Jefferson Morley ("World Opinion Roundup: Britain's Deep Throat", a weekly discussion); and, from today Howard Kurtz ("News Media Give Overlooked Memo on Iraq Second Glance"). Of even more interest, also from Kurtz, is a piece from yesterday's paper: "Backlash on the left", which kicks off: "It's official: The Democrats are fed up with the press."

The two Kurtz articles in particular are interesting. Today's piece gives another useful timeine and overview of the US MSM's stilted coverage of the issue. Both suggest, significantly, that the "left" in this country are now as "fed up" and disillusioned with the mainstream news media as the right. But I have to comment on something Kurtz says in his "News Media Give Overlooked Memo on Iraq Second Glance" from today. Focusing on the efforts by "liberal" groups such as FAIR and Moveon.org to push the memo onto the MSM agenda, he states:

For the past 15 years, conservatives have used their outlets -- in talk radio, right-leaning news operations, editorial pages and, more recently, blogs -- to pressure mainstream journalists into covering stories that might otherwise be ignored. And they have had striking success, from allegations about President Bill Clinton's personal life to CBS's questionable documents on President Bush's National Guard service to the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in last year's presidential campaign. Now the left can claim a similar success.

Kurtz might be suggesting that the left-wing pressure groups have "come of age" and are now ready to challenge the right's highly-organized media "echo chamber." But he neglects to mention a crucial difference, one that suggests that the "left" is far from ready. The right-wing examples he suggests all concern domestic issues, created out of whole cloth, or researched independently by bloggers, and pushed domestically onto the MSM agenda by the partisan domestic right-wing media echo chamber. But the DSM story did not originate domestically with the left-wing in this country. It came out of a foreign story - broken, in fact, by a right-wing (Murdoch-owned) British newspaper, and was propelled into the UK and international MSM spotlight by all UK media, left and right. Without that crucial foreign-based newsgathering and reporting - as well as seemingly rock-solid documentary evidence - the story could never have gotten even the minimal traction it is now receiving. If Kurtz is suggesting that some sort of left-right "level playing field" has been acheived, he's wrong!

So at this point, I would suggest four things:

• 1.) Like Howard Kurtz, I agree that liberals are now just as fed up with the MSM as conservatives, and rightly so;
  
• 2.) The circumstances around the US coverage of the DSM show again just how far right the country's MSM have moved - even in comparison with the UK.
  
• 3.) Unlike Kurtz, I think that the left are still far, far away from being able to match the right in independently pushing a domestic story onto the MSM agenda; the scales are still tipped decidely in favor of the right; and
  
• 4.) for the time being, the only way the "left" will be able to successfully leverage anything onto the MSM agenda will be through strong backing by extensive foreign-based (probably UK) newsgathering and reporting, plus rock-solid documentary evidence.

Kaplan on the memo(s)

Fred Kaplan of Slate asks, "What's really in the Downing Street memos?" Actually, he notes not one memo, or two, but seven, including the "famous" memo/minutes of the UK ministers' meeting; the secret Cabinet Office briefing paper written two days before that meeting (see here and here for London Calling's take); and "five eyes-only memos, written around the same time, about various official British meetings with President Bush, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz." These new documents, described by John Daniszewski in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, have, notes Kaplan, been available in full for a while on the Think Progress Web site. These newly revealed documents "help flesh out" the background to the DSM, notes Daniszewski.

The additional materials provide more evidence for duplicity by both Blair and Bush - but Kaplan questions whether it's an open-and-shut case. He's staying skeptical, and draws on Michael Kinsley's "Officer Barbardy" skepticism ("what's New Here?") in a Sunday Washington Post article. In fact, Kaplan suggests the new memos' emergence "weakens" the anti-Bush case. He contends that the "memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims." He's pushing it to say the Brits "quite clearly" bought the WMD argument. But worse, Kaplan does not address the legality issue; he does not use the term "legal" or "illegal" in his article. (American commentators just seem not to want to deal with the fundamental issue that the war was almost certainly illegal in international law!)

Kaplan then seems to get caught up in some tortured reasoning over the supposed meaning of "policy" being "fixed" versus "fixed around" the intelligence. He asks, "Does this distinction [between the two terms] matter? If all you want to know is whether Bush was deceptive, no; he was deceptive. If you want to know how government works, how officials make bad mistakes, yes; it matters a lot." (So does it matter, Fred? Make a clear decision.)

Anyway, my prime concern is over the MSM's conspiracy of silence up to now. And at least on this point, Kaplan makes a concession:

When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents—and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft.

I should be clear on this. My prime concern is not over a right-left spin war over the memos (which are finally getting some media attention, thanks as well to the unstinting efforts of John Conyers in the House). My concern is that most of the apologist spin is coming from major news media figures - "Officer Barbradys" such as Kinsley and David Sanger - who didn't do their job. These are serious journalists. I expect Hannity, O'Reilly, Hume and John Gibson to underplay or dismiss the issue, but not Kinsley and Ifill and Matthews. Instead of engaging with this UK-originated issue, they try instead to cover their tracks. I don't put Kaplan in this camp - not quite - but he's not helping much to clarify the issue either.

Murdoch reads Fleet Street's last rites

As Reuters becomes the last news agency to leave Fleet Street, in rolls Rupert Murdoch to give the last rites. According to Media Guardian, "The News International boss is to read the lesson at the journalists' church St Bride's at an afternoon service [today] commemorating the departure of Reuters, the last major British news organisation based in Fleet Street." Both the Guardian and The Independent offer interesting overviews of what was long the functional and spiritual home of the British press. The Independent includes a fascinating section on "The drinking, the socialising... and the stories."

Subversive C-SPAN

Gore Vidal, writing a commentary in this week's The Nation, praises C-SPAN as "the one truly, if unconsciously, subversive media outlet in these United States." Why? Because its weekly broadcast of the Westminster Parliament's Question Time allows Americans "to observe British politics in full cry." He describes Question Time - when the Prime Minister is required to take hard-hitting questions from an always-raucous House of Commons, as "the only glimpse that most Americans will ever get of how democracy is supposed to work."

Vidal also notes that C-SPAN shows other UK-originated political programs, especially around UK election time. The example he gives is of a special broadcast of the three main party leaders being interrogated about the Iraq War by a UK studio audience (he's talking about a special presentation of BBC's Q&A program, itself called "Question Time" - I talked about it in London Calling back on May 1 - though C-SPAN also regularly showed episodes of BBC 2's flagship political affairs program, "Newsnight" throughout the recent UK election campaign). He notes, as many have, how wonderful it is to see a head of government have to face his skeptical people to explain why the country had to go to war. "Blair, for just going along, had to deal with savage, informed questions of a sort that Bush would never answer even if he were competent to do so."

The rest of Vidal's commentary focuses on Rep. John Conyers' efforts to uncover presidential election irregularities in Ohio, but Vidal's use of the British example to shine a harsh light on America's creaking democracy is interesting, especially because he recognizes the power of C-SPAN to provide that light. (And just for the record, I think Britain's own democracy is pretty creaky in places - but it is far more lively, and that's crucial, I believe.) In fact, C-SPAN is one of the - very few - hidden wonders of the American media, providing wonderful insights into American government and democracy for those willing to still seek out televised information rather than mindless entertainment. C-SPAN also provides insights into other countries' political systems, including those of Canada (which has its own version of Question Time, called "Question Period") and France (e.g., during its recent referendum over the EU constitution). But undoubtedly the bulk of C-SPAN's foreign coverage goes to Britain. The crown jewel in this coverage is of course Question Time, broadcast live on Wednesday mornings and repeated on Sunday evenings. But as mentioned before, other UK political programs get aired as well (albeit infrequently). C-SPAN also regularly covers professional forums for journalists and other media professionals, and many of the participants in these forums, I've noticed, have British accents and work for British organizations.

So C-SPAN comes under a significant amount of influence from the Brits. And yes, I think this influence truly is "subversive," even as these public service channels (C-SPAN 1 and 2) continue to fly under the radar of the rest of the U.S. media system.

BBC takes top prize in Canada

We don't often talk about British media's impact north of the U.S. border on London Calling, but maybe we should. Canada continues to be an important market for UK media products. And the British product is highly regarded up there too - as was shown once again at the annual Banff World Television Festival - Canada's top international media event, currently underway in Banff, Alberta (click here for the festival site). According to the Canadian Press (published in the Globe & Mail), the BBC has just taken the top prize at the festival's awards ceremony; and, among the international awards, British shows bagged no less than nine trophies compared to just three each for the U.S., Japan, and Canada. The BBC alone captured six awards. The CP article calls it a "British invasion."

The BBC's series "Blackpool" (described as "A stylish British miniseries synthesizing music, gambling and drama" - though I haven't seen it) picked up the C$50,000 Global television grand prize.

The CBC notes that "more than 100 programmers and decision-makers are in Banff for the 26th annual event to represent broadcasters from around the world, including the CBC, the BBC, National Geographic Television, the Disney Channel, the Comedy Network, Germany's ZDF and Japan's NHK."

Of course, the BBC and other UK TV producers have a long history of involvement in Canada. In spite of Canada's strict domestic programming quotas and stiff competition from the United States, British producers have continued to export their products to Canada - not only on the public CBC, but also on commercial networks and now on BBC Canada - a "a general entertainment channel available on cable and satellite TV" and "a joint venture between BBC Worldwide and Canadian broadcaster, Alliance Atlantis." BBC Canada, in other words, is similar in function to BBC America in the U.S., except that because of "Canada's broadcasting regulations, BBC Canada must carry a quota of Canadian programming."

NYT looks really stupid - and complicit

Both Salon and Slate take a shot at the New York Times over how ridiculous the paper looks over its UK briefing paper story, written by David Sanger.

Slate's Today's Papers from June 13 awards the New York Times headline the No. 1 prize for "worst headline of the day." Notes Slate:

A day after the Post broke word of another prewar British memo, the NYT hops onboard. Presumably not content to simply repeat the WP's angle—"MEMO: U.S. LACKED FULL POSTWAR IRAQ PLAN"— the Times gets creative: "PREWAR BRITISH MEMO SAYS WAR DECISION WASN'T MADE." That headline hangs on a single clause of a single sentence in the 2,300-word memo:

Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq.

As it happens, the memo was first obtained by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times (U.K.). Its headline: "MINISTERS WERE TOLD OF NEED FOR GULF WAR 'EXCUSE.' "

Salon's War Room section, titled "New York Times' Downing Street shuffle", notes that, "Scrambling to play catch-up on the unfolding Downing Street memo story, [yesterday's] New York Times latches onto a single phrase from a newly leaked eight-page briefing document in order to produce the Bush-friendly headline, 'Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made.'" Just to make sure we're clear, Salon reminds us that "The truth is, the briefing document in question, dated July 21, as well as the previously leaked memo, dated July 23, both stress repeatedly how the Bush administration, despite its public rhetoric, appeared committed to war with Iraq. But thanks to today's Bush-friendly spin, New York Times readers are getting a very different story." Here's how War Roominterprets (quite accurately, I believe) the NY Times's government-friendly spin:

What the [New York] Times is saying is that despite the controversy surrounding the original Downing Street memo and its implication that the U.S. had decided on war -- contrary to numerous Bush statements -- eight months prior to the invasion, the newly leaked briefing document throws all of that into question because British officials noted Washington had made "no political decisions" to invade. In other words, according to the [New York] Times, Tony Blair might be right in his public insistence, given with Bush at his side, that the two governments misled nobody during the run-up to war.

The [New York] Times report "completely ignores the portion of the briefing document that raises questions about the legality of going to war." It ignores the part of the memo that clearly states, "Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law." To make the contrast clearer, War Room also draws us back to the portion of the new report by the Sunday Times of London that states quite clearly: "The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair's inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was 'necessary to create the conditions' which would make it legal." No reference to that in the NYT. Continues War Room:

Apparently the New York Times did not consider that to be newsworthy. Instead it focused on the notion that "no political decisions" had been made to invade Iraq. The problem here is that the briefing containing the phrase "no political decision" was written July 21, 2002, and the memo containing minutes from a senior meeting of British officials was written July 23, in which it was reported that Washington appeared bent on war. That is, the July 21 briefing paper was distributed to participants in preparation for the meeting two days later with Bush's closest intelligence advisors, where the updated details of war planning were then discussed -- and from which one conclusion reached by the Brits was: "Military action was now seen as inevitable."

The right-wing blogosphere had already latched onto the phrase in the original memo about "the intelligence were being fixed round the policy", arguing that the term could be interpreted in more benign ways (I don't agree, but the conservatives only need to muddy the waters on this, to provide just enough ambiguity to the situation in the eyes of the electorate.) Now the New York Times, in its first pronouncement on the issue, instantly tries to discredit the whole issue by focusing on the "no political decision" term - "a single clause of a single sentence in the 2,300-word memo". That's the conservative side's Talking Point right there. So much for the liberal New York Times. And David Sanger follows Gwen Ifill (and, I think Chris Matthews) and gets one of my silly "Officer Barbrady" awards! There'll be more to come, I'm sure.

Gwen Ifill: Defensive much?

While on the subject of journalists' "strikingly defensive" tones, that reminded me of a moment on the ususally-quite-good Washington Week in Review, hosted by Gwen Ifill on PBS. Last Friday night's show brought up the issue of the DSM, albeit fleetingly. Strangely, even though Tony Blair's visit to the US was one of the main points of discussion, none of the respected group of senior inside-the-beltway journos thought to bring up the subject of the DSM until the dying seconds of the show. Interestingly, it was David Sanger of the NYT (the same David Sanger who wrote the "strikingly defensive" piece on the new briefing paper in today's paper) who brought up the issue in a last-minute question to Alexis Simendinger of the National Journal. He instantly downplayed the significance of the question as follows: "Alexis, you know, one of the sideshows of [Bush and Blair's] appearance together was they were actually asked in public together for the first time about this Downing Street memo" [my emphasis].

So now that "this Downing Street memo" thing was just a "sideshow", Sanger asked what it was about (you can read the original transcript here). Simendinger began to answer Sanger's question with the words, "Precook the intelligence" -- which was all she said before Sanger jumped back in: "That's right. There are other readings of that memo as well . . ." Simendinger apparently took the hint, because she then moved off the "precooking" part and focused her answer on how Blair and Bush were in lockstep on their answers ("No daylight" was her phrase -- "no s**t, Sherlock!" was my response: what about the substance of the charges?)

But then Ifill stepped in, and this was the most disillusioning aspect of the show, since I normally regard Ifill quite highly. After acknowledging that she had actually asked Blair about the memo in a News Hour interview earlier that week (incredibly, though, she did not ask a follow-up question on the matter!), she happily agreed with Simendinger that "they stayed lockstep on their answer." Then she put the matter to rest by paraprasing Blair's response, safely minimalizing it, and editorializing in her "we're wrapping up now" tone:

IFILL: It was just "This did not happen. I don't know what this memo is. You can just ignore it. We did what we did. We took it to the UN." We've been hearing that answer for a couple years. So I don't know how many different ways you can ask the same question.

Thank you all very much. This was a very good conversation. We'll leave it there for this week.

So that's that then: "I don't know how many different ways you can ask the same question." But when she had the chance, she did not ask Blair even one follow-up question on the matter! Safe to say my mouth was gaping open at this point. Defensive much, Gwen? Couldn't you possibly be thinking "I had a gaping opportunity to press Blair on this, and I blew it? Possibly? Here's a good question for Ifill: "What would Jeremy do?" (Jeremy Paxman, that is.)

Another clear example of the mainstream media's "It's Old News Now/We've Covered That/Everybody Knows About it/It's not That Big a Deal/Let’s Move On" tactic. Ho hum. I think I have to start dishing out "Officer Barbrady" awards to American journalists. Gwen Ifill gets one!

The Times acknowledges the blogosphere

Here's something interesting I noticed all by myself :-) about Michael Smith's report on the second leaked British cabinet document in The Times of London; and since Juan Cole brings it up today (and since I first noticed the story on Cole's site), I'd better note it here and credit Cole accordingly. The interesting thing is Smith's crediting of the Internet in his story. He writes:

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media." [Emphasis added by Cole.]

Cole notes (quite correctly, I think): "If this story had broken in the 1970s, it probably would just have been buried by the mainstream US press and remained an oddity of UK's Fleet Street. But here you have the Times of London actually acknowledging the wind under its sails from the blogging world!"

Cole goes on to note Rep. John Conyers' www.downingstreetmemo.com web site and petition demanding answers on this issue from Bush. So, argues Cole, "Smith not only acknowledges the pressure put on the US corporate media by the bloggers, but he also points to a virtual social movement around the DSM, with emails and petitions circulating in the hundreds of thousands and giving the Democrats in Congress their first high-profile investigatory opportunity of the Bush presidency." He continues:

The seeping of blogistan[?] into the pages of the Times of London with regard to its own scoops seems to me a bellwether of the kinds of changes that are being produced in our information environment by the blogging phenomenon. The gatekeepers at the New York Times and the Washington Post can no longer decide whether a leak is a story or a non-story. The public decides what a story is.

As Cole also notes, in contrast to the almost complete US media silence on the original memo, at least some mainstream media are paying attention to the new cabinet paper -- including the Washington Post, which even put it on page A1 yesterday!

From my reading of this article, by Walter Pincus, it looks as if the Post is playing down the importance of the new document -- Pincus's piece focuses a lot of attention on the "lack of post-war planning" angle, and downplays the much more contentious issues of Bush's duplicity and the likely illegality of the invasion. Also, while it gives due recognition to Smith of the Times, it neglects to mention the role of the Internet. Instead it merely says that the DSM "has been the subject of debate since the London Sunday Times first published it May 1." (Debate? Where? Not in the pages of the Post. Is Pincus trying to sneak in an "Officer Barbrady" ruse?) Pincus then shows how gun-shy the Post still is on this issue, when he writes: "Opponents of the war say [the memo] proved the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision". Is it not now possible to state clearly and unambiguously that, if you accept them as genuine, the memo and now the briefing paper, taken together, make it unambiguously clear that the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision? Especially as Pincus then acknowledges that "neither Bush nor Blair has publicly challenged the authenticity of the July 23 memo"?

Anyway, Cole argues that the page 1 treatment by the WP "is clearly in part a result of the enormous pressure the bloggers and the public have put on the Post on this issue. Indeed, it is probably the case that having "ombudsmen" at the papers of record, who discuss and explain editorial decisions, is itself a response to the interactivity of contemporary culture, exemplified by the internet." The New York Times also has a story on the new document by David Sanger (in today's paper), but it is "deeply buried" in the paper (don't have a page number yet) and is, according to a contributer to Cole's site (Stanford linguist Jean-Philippe Marcotte), "strikingly defensive" in tone. Now why would the New York Times be defensive on this issue?

Another UK document surfaces

Juan Cole reports on his blog that The Times of London "has dropped another bombshell document concerning the planning of the Iraq war in Washington and London." This time the document -- apparently leaked to the Times -- is the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the minutes of the meeting, now immortalized as the DSM. Says Cole:

The leaked Cabinet office briefing paper for the July 23, 2002, meeting of principals in London, the minutes of which have become notorious as the Downing Street Memo, contains key context for that memo. The briefing paper warns the British cabinet in essence that they are facing jail time because Blair promised Bush at Crawford in April, 2002, that he would go to war against Iraq with the Americans.

The Times report is here, and the contents of the briefing paper are reproduced here.

Is this is for real it is indeed a "bombshell".

About Ofcom and the BBC

A word or two about Ofcom, the UK government's TV regulator, and its ongoing battle with the BBC. Ofcom (or the Office of Communications) is basically Britain's version of the FCC. However, Although Ofcom's designed to be an overall regulator of all British broadcasting, replacing five different regulatory agencies, it was not given ultimate authority over the BBC when it was formed. This is something it would very much like to rectify.

As I mentioned in mediaville, Ofcom currently is locked in a battle with the BBC over ultimate control of the public corporation. According to Media Guardian, Ofcom has challenged reform proposals set in a government green paper on the BBC's royal charter, published last week. Ofcom argues that the proposal to maintain an independent BBC board - called the "BBC Trust", replacing the old Board of Governors - is not radical enough.

Instead, Ofcom would prefer to see the creation of a new, independent body (doubtless under its own oversight) that will also give other UK broadcasters a slice of the BBC license fee pie. At one point, culture secretary Tessa Jowell, seemed inclined to agree, though she has apparently backed off. The green paper (government jargon for a "a tentative government report of a proposal without any commitment to action; the first step in changing the law [prior to] the production of a white paper") seems to keep BBC reforms to a minimum.

Back in March, when Jowell announced the continuation of the license fee, a new BBC Trust, and a new 10-year charter, she said that the BBC was "as much a part of British life as the NHS" and should retain its independence from the government. But worryingly, she also said that, "like the NHS it faces the need to change so that it can be as effective in the future as it has been in the past." She also "recommended that its funding should be reviewed within the next charter period," and this is the opening that Ofcom apparently seeks to exploit.

"... 'Cause I'm as free as a Freeview ..."

(With apologies to Lynyrd Skynyrd)

We've often talked on London Calling about how the British model of media-public, open-access information sharing - anchored primarily around the publicly supported BBC - is so attractive in comparison with the profit-based model prevalent in the US. We often focus on broadcasting and the Internet - especially the latter, where American websurfers are able directly to benefit from the wealth of riches available from across the pond. But it's also worth considering another area of British media where a public, open-access model seems to be beating back the rapacious big media companies, at least for the time being: and that would be in the realm of digital over-the-air television, and especially a completely free terrestrial digital service available across Britain, called Freeview.

Digital television in the UK is streets ahead of the United States. There are now some "15.4m digital households, a rise of 643,000 or 4.4% [over last year] meaning almost 62% of UK households have digital TV." The number is growing by some 50,000 a week, and will continue to grow rapidly. The government plans to begin switching off the analog signal in 2008 - and unlike in the U.S., this is a firm deadline, and will in effect complete the national move to multichannel television.

As the digital multichannel pie gets bigger, a public model of digital broadcasting is making a serious challenge to the for-profit approach. According to MediaGuardian, based on figures supplied by Ofcom, Freeview now atttracts five million homes in the UK - or one-third of the entire digital market in that country. This is up from 25% penetration of the digital market in first quarter 2004. The article notes that Freeview has a head of steam behind it, and "is likely to be boosted further by Channel 4's recent decision to put its entertainment channel, E4 - and E4+1 - on Freeview for the first time, as well as the addition of ITV3.

The article quotes Andy Duncan, CEO of Channel 4, as saying that Freeview was now a "critical platform alongside satellite and cable and has to be taken seriously". You bet your sweet bippy it does!

Some background: According to Wikipedia:

Freeview is a free-to-air digital television service in the United Kingdom broadcast from [government-funded] terrestrial transmitters using the DVB-T standard. Launched on October 30 2002 at 6am, it took over the DTT licence on 4 multiplexes to broadcast from the defunct ITV Digital.

Unlike [the now-defunct] ITV Digital and the cable and satellite digital TV services, it offers no subscription, premium or pay-per-view channels. All that is needed to receive the Freeview service is a set-top box costing around £30 to £100, or a new television with an integrated digital tuner. An annual television licence fee is levied for the service, the same fee that covers the analogue channels.

(See also the Freeview web site.)

In fact, the set-top boxes, which comprise the only additional (one-time) expense, have come down in price, and can now be had for £30 - £40 (approx. $60-$80). So all in all, Freeview is an amazing deal - almost unbelievably so. Just for the record, I live in a part of the United States dominated by Time Warner Cable, one of the two giants operators that dominate the U.S. cable market (the other is Comcast). In Time Warner Cable-land it now costs between $55 and $65 per month to receive basic digital cable service (and that's for more than 100 channels that, taken together, have less of interest on them than the five UK terrestrial channels available for free, even without Freeview, across the UK - and Freeview has a lot more than five free channels).

I saw Freeview myself for the first time last summer. My brother and his family live in an area (the Scottish Highlands) where traditional terrestrial TV reception could be pretty dodgy, so the ability to receive crisp, clear digital reception of BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5 would probably be worth the price of a set-top digital box on its own. But they can now get at least 30 channels for free, including the following:

ITV2
BBC Three
BBC Four
BBC News 24
ITV News Channel
Sky News
Sky Sports News
BBC Parliament
Sky Travel
UKTV History
The Hits
UKTV Bright Ideas
CBBC Channel and CBeebies (both children's BBC channels)
ITV3

Presumably this explains Freeview's expanding base - and also why cable-delivered television (which still requires subscription) has suffered, seeing its share of the digital TV decline, "falling from 18.4% in the first quarter of 2004 to 16.5% for the same period this year." In fact, cable TV has never made major inroads into the UK market - it has always been stymied by the excellent fare available on terretsrial television and by the fact that, unlike the US, satellite broadcasting took off first in the UK (back in 1989).

The necessary infrastructure component comes from significant UK government investment in digital transmission technology (including nationwide transmitters and repeaters, multiplexing and digital compression) to provide an extensive networked service - again, for free - to viewers across the UK. Meanwhile, in addition to the 5 million Freeview homes, "another 445,000 homes have access to free digital television through "Freesat" - former Sky subscribers who have kept their digiboxes." Now I'm sure people have complaints about this service, but you can't complain about the price(!), and the key thing is that it is a service that considers the wants and needs of the TV-viewing community, as opposed to considering the wants and needs of for-profit corporations first and last. Not surprisingly, for-profit entities in the UK are feeling some pressure - even BSkyB, which "remains the market leader with 7.3 million subscribers," or a 48% share. It'll be interesting to see how long Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting, which was one of Freeview's founding members (presumably hoping to entice viewers to its subscription channels), continues to support a service that is pretty attractive on its own.

In America, we benefit immensely from the free access to information and services on the web (anchored by the public behemoth of the BBC). What we don't see is the parallel operation in digital television - access limited to those living in the UK, of course - which is building a robust, working, public service alternative to the for-profit, pay-per-view system that is often seen as the only option left for national television in the United States. This provides a very appealing model for those U.S.-based dreamers among us who wish for a public service media system that can adapt to the new technological environment and avoid the gated community media model (based on the ability to pay) that increasingly predominates in the U.S.

The media's "Officer Barbrady" ruse, or Can the DSM break big anymore?

This is a long post, sorry, but, ahem, I think it's worth getting down on (electronic) paper. Eric Boehlert, writing in Salon, provides a fine overview of the story so far surrounding the DSM in the States. Titled "Bush lied about war? Nope, no news there!", it asks why it's taken more than a month for the U.S. press to even begin covering the Downing Street memo. There are some interesting insights in here, but Boehlert seems to be tending toward the point of view that the media simply can't or won't "break" this as a big story now, because to do so would clearly show them up for not breaking the story weeks ago. To provide support for this pov, Boehlert examines a favorite strategy employed by news organizations caught out not covering a major story when they should. This is (what I'm calling) the "It's Old News Now/We've Covered That/Everybody Knows About it/It's not That Big a Deal/Let’s Move On" strategy applied to the DSM. Actually, it kind of reminds me of the favorite refrain of Officer Barbrady in South Park, who, after any strange, out-of-the-ordinary public happening, automatically downplays its significance by telling everyone to "Move along now, Nothing to see here!" So maybe I should call it the "Officer Barbrady" ruse. That's catchy! The kids will like that. :-)

Boehlert focuses first on Tim Russert's performance on last Sunday's Meet the Press to show how this works. Russert asked a question about the memo to Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, but it was the way he phrased it that was interesting. Boehlert notes that "In setting up his question to Mehlman on Sunday, Russert said, 'Let me turn to the now famous Downing Street memo'" (emphasis added). The next point might be obvious to the few of us who have been following this story carefully, but for the vast majority of Americans it won't be obvious, so it needs to be spelled out. States Boehlert:

Famous? It would be famous in America if the D.C. press corps functioned the way it's supposed to. Russert's June 5 reference, five weeks after the story broke, represented the first time NBC News had even mentioned the document or the controversy surrounding it. [My emphasis.] In fact, Russert's query was the first time any of the network news divisions addressed the issue seriously. In an age of instant communications, the American mainstream media has taken an exceedingly long time -- as if news of the memo had traveled by vessel across the Atlantic Ocean -- to report on the leaked document. Nor has it considered its grave implications -- namely, that President Bush lied to the American people and Congress during the run-up to the war with Iraq when he insisted over and over again that war was his administration's last option.

Did Russert have any notion of what he was saying? Was he doing an Officer Barbrady?

Anyway, the Boehlert article notes that the story is finally getting some very limited play in the mainstream media - thanks to the U.S. blogosphere that has been getting its information from overseas (overwhelmingly UK) news sources. But this follows what has been up to now a "breathtaking lack of interest" in the story by the U.S. media - in spite of the glaringly obvious news pegs. Remember (and I have to keep reiterating this to maintain my grip on reality) the DSM, which implicates both the UK and US administrations in outright lying or serious deception (take your pick) had been leaked to the Times of London and printed way back on May 1 and, coming days before the general election, generated extensive press coverage in the UK. But in the US? I repeat the data provided by Boehlert to show the extent to which this story barely existed in the United States.

According to TVEyes, an around-the-clock monitoring service, between May 1 and June 6 the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS combined [original emphasis]. (With Blair's arrival in Washington Tuesday, there was a slight spike in mentions but still very little reporting of substance.) By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention 263 times the tabloid controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press.

Since the Times of London published the memo on May 1, White House spokesman Scott McClellan has held 19 daily briefings, at which he has fielded approximately 940 questions from reporters, according to the White House's online archives. Exactly two of those questions have been about the Downing Street memo and the White House's reported effort to fix prewar intelligence. (Three weeks after the memo was leaked in Britain, McClellan prefaced a response to a question about it by telling White House reporters he was not familiar with "the specific memo.")

Until Tuesday, the number of U.S. newspaper articles reporting on the Downing Street memo could be counted on two hands, including two articles in the New York Times, two in the Washington Post (print edition), and one each in Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Chicago Tribune. Only the Chicago Tribune article ran on Page 1, and it focused on how little commotion the memo had caused in the United States, noting, "The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war." Additionally, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau covered the story for its chain of newspapers.

I'd say this is pretty breathtaking. But what's even scarier to me are the numerous instances recounted by Boehlert where TV and print journalists feigned either ignorance or disinterest. Take, for example, this May 25 exchange between actor and activist Tim Robbins and Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" (recounted by Boehlert). I’d call this another attempt to “do an officer Barbrady”:

Robbins: I think there should be more discussion about the Downing Street memo and less about Newsweek. I think that that story seemed to be buried. And there seems to be a lot of questions that the Downing Street memo raises.

Matthews: Tell me about that.

Robbins: Well, it suggests that the administration knew full well they were being duplicitous and were operating with weak intelligence.

Matthews: Well, they -- well, they did tell us at the time, Tim, that the best argument for getting the Europeans to join us in the war was using the WMD argument, but it wasn't their primary purpose. The primary purpose apparently was democratization in the Middle East, nation building.

Robbins: And I think they didn't mention that until much later, Chris. I think that the original -- original reason was that [Saddam] was an imminent threat.

Matthews: Let me ask you about Hollywood. Do you think Hollywood, in its critique of this president, has been effective? Somebody put up a sign recently to Hollywood: "Thank you, Hollywood, for getting Bush reelected."

Now that the story is finally finding some "legs" thanks to the ceaseless efforts of those in the blogosphere, the mainstream media are desperately trying to lessen its impact. As Boehlert notes:

Playing catch-up this week has produced some awkward moments for reporters, such as Russert's referring to the memo as "famous" even though nobody at NBC News had ever bothered to report on it. On Monday, Fox News' online site reported that the memo "has received little attention in the mainstream media, frustrating opponents of the Iraq war," while failing to mention that Fox itself had effectively boycotted the memo story for five weeks. On Tuesday, Fox News finally reported that "there's been a lot of controversy recently about a memo that suggests British officials warned well before the war in July of 2002 that the Bush administration felt war was inevitable." Again, Fox failed to explain why the news organization had ignored a controversial story for more than a month.

That's just the latest press oddity surrounding the memo story, says Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org. "It's very strange that when it now comes up in the media, it's described as well known. It's not well known. Most people don't know anything about the memo. It's very disturbing."

This is the aforementioned "It's Old News Now/We've Covered That/Everybody Knows About it/It's not That Big a Deal/Let’s Move On" thing, aka “doing an Officer Barbrady”. And I don't think the "disturbing" characterization is strong enough. This whole thing is positively Orwellian. The media are learning a very dangerous, and seemingly effective trick: That if you go from completely ignoring a story for weeks or months to pretending that it's been done to death and is old news and can't we move on to something else, you can avoid the nasty controversy of actually breaking a story and following it up, because that will only bring instant opprobrium from the legions of conservative critics who will cry “liberal bias” and incessantly slam you for being "liberal", "anti-Bush", "unpatriotic" etc. And the mainstream news media are so gun-shy now that they'll go quite far to avoid that. After all, why bother? They don't need the hassle. And everyone's already made up their minds about Bush, right? (Right ....?) Let's just get back to Michael Jackson. Meanwhile, most Americans (those who still get their news from neutered domestic TV sources) will accept this obfuscation at face value - after all, research consistently shows that most viewers can't remember specifics of TV news reports, only a few salient (i.e., constantly repeated) news stories and the general tone of the coverage. If the tone of the coverage is "that's old news, nothing to get worried about" - or if the issue is ignored altogether - viewers don't get riled up by anything. The story dies - in fact, for the vast majority of Americans, the story never existed in the first place! Like I say, Orwellian. But back to Boehlert:

The fact that it took five weeks for more than a handful of Washington reporters to focus on the memo highlights a striking disconnect between some news consumers and mainstream news producers. The memo story epitomizes a mainstream press corps that is genuinely afraid to ask tough questions and write tough stories about the Bush administration. Worse, in the case of the Downing Street memo, it simply refuses to report on the existence of a plainly newsworthy document.

"This is where all the work conservatives and the administration have done in terms of bullying the press, making it less willing to write confrontational pieces -- this is where it's paid off," says David Brock, CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal media advocacy group. "It's a glaring example of omission."

"I think it exacerbates the sense among some [of our] listeners that NPR is not taking on the Bush administration," notes Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for National Public Radio, who continues to receive listener complaints about the missing memo story. As of Tuesday, NPR had aired just two references to the Downing Street memo, and both occurred in passing conversation, without giving listeners the full context or the details of the memo. Asked about the network's slim coverage, Dvorkin says, "I was surprised. It's a bigger story than we've given it. It deserves more attention."

Also, as I mentioned before, I don't think the “bridge” from alternative to mainstream media is as strong on the liberal side as the one for the conservative media - thought that might be changing, slowly.

Slowly, the Downing Street memo is getting that attention. "Stories are starting to trickle in now only because so many ordinary people are raising hell about it," says David Swanson, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, which launched on May 26. This week, thanks to constant exposure on the Air America radio network, the site is receiving 1.7 million hits a day, according to Swanson. "My colleagues are doing more radio shows than we can fit in during a day."

So, some hope, maybe. Let's see.

Addendum: Here are some useful memo links: (U.S.) Downing Street Memo site; AfterDowningStreet.org; and the Times of London original memo site.

A Grand Media Strategy that's worked

Since I brought up the news media's timidity in the face of concerted Bush administration attacks, I thought it'd be good to turn to Sidney Blumenthal for some historical context. Blumenthal, writing in The Guardian yesterday, uses the current Mark Felt/Deep Throat revelation to draws a direct line from Nixon's to Bush's Grand Media Strategy:

One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise was the necessity of muzzling the press. The Bush White House has neutralised the press corps and even turned some reporters into its own assets. The disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq, funnelled into the news pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic case in point. By manipulation and intimidation, encouraging atmosphere of self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced the press from dissenting professionals inside the government. Mark Felt's sudden emergence from behind the curtain of history evoked the glory days of the press corps and its modern creation myth. It was a warm bath of nostalgia and cold comfort.

BTW: Unfortunately, Blumenthal also contends that the press, even during its finest hour, was being used by the intelligence services. He notes a story by "the Albany Times Union of upstate New York, unreported so far by any major outlet." Apparently "Felt was not working as 'a disgruntled maverick ... but rather as the leader of a clandestine group' of three other high-level agents to control the story by collecting intelligence and leaking it." Hmmmmmm. "For more than 30 years the secrecy around Deep Throat diverted attention to who Deep Throat was rather than what Deep Throat was - a covert FBI operation in which Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was almost certainly an unwitting asset."

Interesting - and thoroughly depressing if true.

Richard Curtis gets real . . . again!

Great insight from Doctor Media about how the British might be uniquely situated to insert global political messages into entertainment "without raising the rest of the world's [and America's] hackles - at least in part when their message is about global cooperation and assistance as opposed to the threats and bullying ...". I thought it'd be worthwhile adding something about that last point - that the Brits just might be able to have a go even at U.S. "bullying" and get away with it.

Take that lovely lovely man, Richard Curtis. Choire Sicha in the aforementioned LA Times article on Curtis and "The Girl in the Café" (starring the wonderful Bill Nighy and Scottish Trainspotting "girl" Kelly Macdonald) missed something when he (she?) reported that Curtis in his movies has "largely been ignorant of concerns beyond fat thighs and the rocky roads of romance." But, I ask you(!), what about the key scene in 2003's Love Actually, where the British prime minister (played by Hugh Grant) finally stands up to the philandering sleazoid American president (Billy-Bob Thornton) - and at a press conference no less! Here, courtesy of imdb.com, is the exchange.

Press Conference Reporter: Mr. President, has it been a good visit?

The President (Billy-Bob Thornton): Very satisfactory indeed. We got what we came for and our special relationship is still very special.

Press Conference Reporter: Prime Minister?

Prime Minister (Hugh Grant): I love that word "relationship". Covers all manner of sins, doesn't it? I fear that this has become a bad relationship. A relationship based on the President taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to, erm... Britain. We may be a small country but we're a great one, too. The country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter. David Beckham's right foot. David Beckham's left foot, come to that. And a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the President should be prepared for that.

And then the whole conference room bursts into wondrous applause, and in subsequent scenes all of Britain is buzzing about how the PM stood up to the Pres and isn't that wonderful. One in the eye for the yanks there, eh?

Yes, I know it was all cheesy and completely implausible, but I bet most Brits secretly really enjoyed that scene (I know I did!). So this has got to be a little political, no? Maybe something America should be concerned about? Yet Love Actually was pretty successful in America, making at least $60 million here by February 2004. But I don't remember a right-wing backlash against Curtis and British film generally. (Was there one?) Did Curtis get his sucker punch in under the radar? Or did Hannity and Co. merely think "It's just those eccentric Brits, bless 'em"? "It's only Hugh Grant, he's so cute"?; "What was that about Harry Potter?" Or what? So yes, I think there really is something to this idea that the Brits can take shots at the States and get away with it - while the French or anyone else trying it on would have to dive for cover. Good one, Doctor Media! And the whole G8/Live Aid thing is going to be really fascinating as it develops, and its influence is felt in the US. Stand by for action!

DSM latest

Last word on the DSM for today: Daily Kos gives a quick roundup of some of the emerging U.S. coverage of the DSM. Interestingly, the web site notes that "The DSM [Downing Street Memo] story has exploded so rapidly into the MSM [MainStream Media?] that my diary is going to be very selective". I'm not sure if I'd sign on to the story "exploding" - at least not yet. We'd have to have a "bombshell" memo for that to happen, right? (OK, sorry!)

Enough. But I can't sign off without being serious for a moment and reminding myself that that I do agree with those who think that the DSM can't really be a bombshell because I think most people in the U.S. (on all sides of the spectrum) know and accept that it is true that Bush was set on going to war from mid-2002, and have accepted it as such for a long time (and certainly by election day last November). Very few are going to change their minds about Bush on the basis of this memo. Perhaps the only way the story will get any traction is if the administration comes out and strenuously denies it. It's likely that they're too smart to get into that game. Why bother? Of course, senior Democrats could really start pushing the story, but that's unlikely too. They're complicit too in the events leading up to the Iraq war. But the story remains fascinating, because it reminds us that, as Lori put it in a comment, liberals still lack a solid "bridge" (a liberal equivalent of Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh) to send the big news from "the buzzing blogosphere" across to "the mainstream media outlets where most of America still gets its news." To extend the metaphor: The UK news media might help provide the tools and expertise for a small footbridge for news that the US media generally ignore, but it's still too small and flimsy to overcome the conservative machine that increasingly drives the news agenda in the United States.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Let's see.

The cover of Time?

While digging around the U.S. news media for more - any - coverage of the Downing St Memo (which I'm just going to shorten to DSM from now on), I came across a link to a Time magazine June cover story on what was called the "bombshell memo". Excitedly I clicked through, wondering if the story was finally about to break big in the States. Of course I was to be disappointed. The "bombshell memo" story dated back to June 2002, and concerned the memo written by FBI Minneapolis agent and whistleblower, Coleen Rowley, who accused the agency of ignoring intelligence warnings about 9/11 and obstructing information that might have prevented the terrorist attacks. (Oops, I'd forgotten all about that.) So that's what apparently constitutes a cover-worthy "bombshell memo" in Time-land. So where does that leave the DSM?

Just for kicks I went back over Time's U.S. front covers since May 1, 2005, when the memo story broke in the UK. Plenty of hard news there, right? Wrong. Seems the most important things going on in the world these past few weeks include America's Home-buying binge (this week, June 13); "Lose that Spare Tire" (June 6); "The Class of 9/11" (May 30); Bill Gates' new X-Box (May 23); "A Female Mid-life Crisis" (May 16); and a really big section on "The Last Star Wars" (May 9). This must be why Time remains the world's leading newsmagazine! (Maybe I should check back through Entertainment Weekly to find cover stories on Iraq, Tony Blair, and the Senate filibuster crisis!) Anyway, the May 2 issue did have a cover of the new Pope Benedict XVI, and a brief piece inside on Blair. So I went back through the contents lists for all seven issues, to see if there was anything else from Britain. But I could find no major stories about the UK election, its context or its aftermath after May 5; and certainly no mention of any memo. Maybe it's hidden in the news briefs section. Or not.

So there you have it: the DSM can't really be a "bombshell" in Amereica, as it hasn't been annointed as such by Time, which saves such powerful adjectives for other, much more serious news stories.

Btw, apologies for any excessive sarcsam in the previous two paragraphs.

BBC's sneak preview for DS memo

I'm afraid I missed this at the time, but back on March 20 the BBC gave an early hint at the evidence contained in what has become known as the Downing Street memo. The Guardian reported it at the time as the BBC giving "another sign that it is determined to maintain its editorial independence by screening a Panorama programme strongly critical of Tony Blair's manipulation of thin intelligence, on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq." But it looks especially prescient now (Panorama is the BBC's flagship documentary/public affairs program, btw). The Guardian report states that the program:

included interviews with former officials who had already broken in public with the government's Iraq strategy. It also quoted extensively from leaked documents first revealed by the Daily Telegraph. In the most startling revelation, the programme claimed that at a meeting on July 23 2002, Sir Richard [Dearlove, head of MI6] said a war was inevitable, adding that the facts and the intelligence were being fixed round the policy set out by George Bush's administration. The claim was based on several reliable sources, Panorama said.

Very interesting. This is clearly the same information that emerged from the Downing Street memo, which didn't emerge until May 1. But here is strong evidence being presented of UK-US duplicity back in March, some six weeks earlier. Just thought I'd mention it.

Daily Mail to overhaul Sun?

Fascinating piece in today's Media Guardian about the possibility that the Daily Mail newspaper is within shouting distance of overhauling Rupert Murdoch's Sun in daily sales. This might not have too much news value for Americans, few of whom bother to read either publication (in paper or web versions). But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that, if Americans do know anything about the sleazy British popular press, they're usually thinking about the Sun, which has for 30+ years represented one "end" of the UK's popular-quality divide. If its primacy is about to be dislodged, that's quite significant, even in the States. The same piece, btw, also gives some useful historical context about the UK press over the past century.

That darn (Downing Street) memo

Rep. John Conyers - who I mentioned in the previous post was charging cable news media with giving the Bush Administration "a free pass" - also appeared on Monday's Diane Rehm show. (More below.)

Rehm's show focuses on Tony Blair's visit to Washington this week to meet President Bush, and "some of the issues likely to be on their agenda including the war in Iraq, aid to Africa and the upcoming G-8 summit." Rehm's guests were both Brits: Martin Walker, editor in chief, United Press International (representing a center-left UK perspective); and Adrian Wooldridge, Washington correspondent of The Economist and author of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America".

On Iraq: Interestingly, Martin Walker said that although the Downing Street memo story has been underplayed in the U.S., it was also a "one-day wonder" of a story in Britain during the election campaign, and then "faded away". Walker sits on the fence a bit over whether he thinks Blair and Bush actually "lied" over Iraq - it all depends on whether you believe that they both knew that they were going to go to war in 2002. Walker also suggests that the memo "is not a smoking gun - or if it is a smoking gun, then Bush's fingerprints aren't on it." As a foreign government document, the memo does have British fingerprints on it, thinks Walker, but not American.

The discussion is quite interesting, especially as Walker tries to parse out the events leading up to war, and whether what Bush and Cheney said and did actually ammounted to "lying." Finally, Rehm asks both her guests flat out whether they thought the Bush adminsitration lied to the American people. Martin Walker gives a "sort of" answer, while Wooldridge, when pressed, answered "to some extent".

On aid to Africa: They discuss differences between Blair and Bush over Blair's "big idea" to eliminate extreme poverty through 100% debt relief, and jump starting a massive increase of aid to Africa, partly through selling off some of the IMF's 3,200 tons of gold. Bush seems to be not interested. A possible UK-US split? Watch this space.

On global warming: Adrian Wooldridge seems to think that Bush now accepts that his handling of the Kyoto Treaty was a "public relations disaster", and that he might be more inclined to throw the rest of the world a bone over global warming.

Back to John Conyers (here's his web page, btw.) After these compelling exchanges, Conyers came on (by phone) to discuss the "fixing" of intelligence to go to war in Iraq. Unfortunately he's not a particularly effective media speaker. Also - and this was quite funny - the congressman's appearance on Rehm's show came immediately after Martin Walker had commented that the real problem (and why no-one can score a hit on Bush while Clinton was excoriated for his duplicity over Monica Lewinsky) is that there is still no serious political opposition to Bush, and Congress is a bunch of "pussycats"! Conyers' heart is in the right place, but his performance took some of the oxygen out of what had been up to then a good discussion.