Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 107

#Cancel Stewart?

Yes, he went there.  Responding to the online drive to #CancelColbert because of his joke making fun of Asians (related to the Washington owner now dropping "Redskins"), Jon Stewart tonight took this route:  He referred early on his show just now to the Chris Christie administration’s treatment of former aide Bridget Kelly as a hysterical woman,  suffering from man trouble and yet needing approval from men.  Stewart's graphic was headlined “Bitches Be Crazy, Right?” At the bottom a new hashtag: #CancelStewart.  (Except fans had already started one.) “How did that get in there?” Stewart asked?

Check out #CancelStewart for early responses, most backing him and opposing the "Twitter fascists."

UPDATE And now Stephen Colbert just responded in opening to his show. With more mockery.  B.D. Wong appeared.  Stephen did urge viewers to stop attacking his main antagonist Suey Park.

Eleven Years Ago: When Media Promoted Jessica Lynch 'Propaganda'

Eleven years ago this week the U.S. media were transfixed on the heroic rescue of a captured U.S. Army Pfc. named Jessica Lynch, who supposedly had emerged from her hellhole in Iraq, guns blazing, in a daring operation to save her. The invasion of Iraq had just started to run into some difficulties -- amid signs that Americans might not be greeted with flowers after all -- and the Lynch rescue helped rally the country and had significant propaganda value.
[image error] And propaganda, as it turned out, was at the heart of it. News would shortly emerge -- after the fall of Baghdad -- that the Lynch rescue was almost nothing like it was pictured in the press, most notably in a Washington Post account which was headlined "She Was Fighting to the Death." In fact, Lynch never fired her weapon. Two months later, on June 17, 2003, the Post ran a 5,000-word front-page piece that admitted errors in the original account -- but also defended much of it.

Twelve days after that, Michael Getler, then the paper's ombudsman, observed: "This was the single most memorable story of the war, and it had huge propaganda value. It was false, but it didn't get knocked down until it didn't matter quite so much."

Around the 5th anniversary of the war, Lynch told U.S. News and World Report: "I'm still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend...They wanted to make people think that maybe this war was a good thing," she said. "Instead, people were getting killed, and it was going downhill fast. They wanted a hero."

Lynch had indeed been severely injured as her Humvee crashed during an ambush outside Nasiriyah and was taken by captors to a hospital. When she was rescued on April 1 the Post and other media claimed she had reportedly killed several Iraqis in a gun battle and sustained many gunshot wounds herself. The Pentagon helpfully described the rescue as a brave Special Operations raid, featuring battles with Iraqis and Black Hawk helicopters firing away.

A New York Times story on April 3, 2003, by Thom Shanker and John Broder followed the outline, with Lynch suffering gunshot wounds in a dangerous rescue: "It was an Iraqi who got word to the Americans, Bush administration officials said, launching a mission that included Marine Corps artillery to distract enemy soldiers and Army Rangers securing the hospital grounds while Navy Special Operations forces, called Seals, extracted Private Lynch while being fired upon going in and coming back out."

Another April 3 story in the Times covered Lynch's hometown in West Virginia celebrating he release. It carried the bylines of Douglas Jehl and -- Jayson Blair. The "Jessica Lynch" scandal later got mixed up in the "Jayson Blair" scandal when it turned out he had lied about certain aspects of his "coverage" of that episode.

But much of the media went wild over the story (as noted in my new book on Iraq and the media), even as Lynch's father revealed that he had been told that no gunshot wounds had been discovered.

It wasn't until early May 2003 that the story really fell apart, thanks largely to a Toronto Star reporter named Mitch Potter, whose sources told him that actually Lynch had been well cared for at the hospital, that her captors had left up to two days before the raid and that actually fire from U.S. forces had prevented hospital staffers from loading her in an ambulance. The BBC soon confirmed much of this scenario.

The Post corrective appeared a few weeks later. On June 20, 2003, Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column wrote:

"Pfc. Jessica Lynch did not mow down Iraqis until her ammo ran out, was not shot and apparently was not plucked from behind enemy lines by U.S. commandos braving a firefight. It looks as if the first accounts of the rescue were embellished, like the imminent threat from W.M.D., and like wartime pronouncements about an uprising in Basra and imminent defections of generals. There's a pattern: we were misled...

"Ms. Lynch is still a hero in my book, and it was unnecessary for officials to try to turn her into a Hollywood caricature. As a citizen, I deeply resent my government trying to spin me like a Ping-Pong ball....

"The Iraqis misused our prisoners for their propaganda purposes, and it hurts to find out that some American officials were misusing Private Lynch the same way." 

And the media went along for the ride.

Lynch got hate mail for years from people accusing her of making of the story - when it was really the Pentagon and the press. She told Diane Sawyer in a TV interview: "They used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong." She told Congress in testimony in 2004: "They should have found out the facts before they spread the word like wildfire."

Greg Mitchell’s new edition of So Wrong for So Long includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen, a new introduction and a lengthy afterword with updates.

By the Time We Get to Woodstock

Updates:  After a nice turnout in Rhinebeck last month, Upstate Films has booked film at its sister theater in Woodstock,  for April 5.  Again, I will speak. And a big benefit screening coming up in Cooperstown next month.  For more on the film, and on our tie-in book, Journeys With Beethoven, go here.  CBS morning TV show has us booked, for now, this Saturday.

In biggest turnout yet, nearly 600 flocked to a screening at Following the Ninth  in Wichita last week, where director Kerry Candaele appeared.  Momentum for the film keeps building.   And more screenings to come around the USA.

Earlier: As you may know, the film I co-produced Following the Ninth (directed by Kerry Candaele) was released last November and has drawn wide acclaim--from The New York Times to featured segments on Bill Moyers' PBS show and NPR's "All Things Considered"--and has played in a couple of dozen cities already.  But a regular-length trailer for this unique exploration of the amazing influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was never produced.  Instead, a terrific seven-minute mini-film served that purpose and it was so terrific that Moyers showed the entire piece on his TV show.  But the film still has months to run around the USA and world, so Candaele has now produced a more traditional two-minute trailer and it was just posted tonight on YouTube.

When Geraldo Got Booted Out of Iraq

[image error] Lest we forget, it happened eleven years ago tomorrow.  From David Carr:  "Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News Channel correspondent who broadcast a report from Iraq on Sunday night that gave details of the position and plans of United States troops, is expected to be pulled from the country on Tuesday, military officials said yesterday.  ''It sounds to me like some rats at my former network, NBC, are spreading some lies about me,'' Rivera said on the air. ''You know, they can't compete fair and square on the battlefield, so they're trying to stab me in the back.''

On Sunday night, Mr. Rivera was being interviewed by a Fox News anchor, John Gibson, and began drawing a map in the sand.

''Let me draw a few lines here for you,'' he said. ''First, I want to make some emphasis here that these hash marks here, this is us. We own that territory. It's 40 percent, maybe even a little more than that.''

He went on at length with more specifics, and military officials at Central Command felt that by drawing lines in the sand, Mr. Rivera crossed one as well.  ''At one point, he actually revealed the time of an attack prior to its occurrence,'' Lt. Mark Kitchens, a spokesman at Central Command, said yesterday morning. Lieutenant Kitchens added that Mr. Rivera had been escorted to Kuwait...

Money Bawl: Wolves on Speed

I've often wondered why the NYT constantly scoops itself, and discourages sales of its Sunday paper, by posting the most important feature from its Magazine a few days before print publication.   Now they've set some kind of record perhaps by already rushing online a massive excerpt from Michael Lewis's upcoming book "Flash Boys" on wolves and Wall Street and high-speed trading, which appears in next Sunday's edition.  An except from the excerpt:

In the fall of 2009, Katsuyama’s friend at Deutsche Bank mentioned this Irish guy who seemed to be the world’s expert at helping the world’s fastest stock-market traders be faster. Katsuyama called Ronan Ryan and invited him to interview for a job on the RBC trading floor. In his interview, Ryan described what he witnessed inside the exchanges: The frantic competition for nanoseconds, clients’ trying to get their machines closer to the servers within the exchanges, the tens of millions being spent by high-frequency traders for tiny increments of speed. The U.S. stock market was now a class system of haves and have-nots, only what was had was not money but speed (which led to money). The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. “I learned more from talking to him in an hour than I learned from six months of reading about [high-frequency trading],” Katsuyama says. “The second I met him, I wanted to hire him.”
He wanted to hire him without being able to fully explain, to his bosses or even to Ryan, what he wanted to hire him for. He couldn’t very well call him vice president in charge of explaining to my clueless superiors why high-frequency trading is a travesty. So he called him a high-frequency-trading strategist. And Ryan finally landed his job on a Wall Street trading floor. 

When Hollywood Moguls Threatened to Move to Florida

My new ebook, When Hollywood Turned Left, was published last week.  Derived from my earlier The Campaign of the Century (which won the Goldsmith Book Prize), with new material, it focuses on the wild response in Hollywood--then controlled by conservative Republicans--to leftwing author Upton Sinclair winning the Democratic primary for governor, leading a mass movement, in 1934.  This included the creation of the first use of the screen for "attack ads"--thanks to MGM's Irving Thalberg.  The rightwing attack was so outrageous it sparked liberals out there to organize and Hollywood has titled left ever since.

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt re: one of the most notorious aspects--almost all the studio chiefs docked their employees, from low-level to top stars, one day's pay to go for the slush fund of the Republican candidate, Frank Merriam.  One of those who tried to protest was the young screenwriter Billy Wilder, who had arrived in the U.S. just recently.  Now here's a more comical stunt: When the Hollywood moguls threatened to move their studios to Florida if Sinclair was elected.  It opens in early September just after Sinclair had swept the Democratic primary.

*

Before visiting Nick in New York, Joe Schenck intended to spend a couple of
days with the Chamber of Commerce boys down in Miami, inspecting
real estate that might provide refuge for the studios after November 6.
Why Florida? Miami was sunny, it had palm trees and ocean, it was
relatively unsettled, and best of all, state officials promised to give the
moguls a tax break if they made the move.

Florida even had a town called Hollywood.

A few days later, in Miami a the airport, reporters crowded around Schenk's
traveling companion, famous actor Douglas Fairbanks, who declined to discuss
his stormy separation from his wife, Mary Pickford. Doug revealed that
he was thinking of remaking his classic silent film The Mark of Zorro
as a talkie, but doubted he would be able to "recapture the zest necessary
to carry it over." Then the autograph seekers enveloped him.
 
Joe Schenck made an announcement of even more serious conse-
quence. "Florida, if it is wide awake and offers tax concessions for a few
years," he declared, "will be the center of the moving picture business
of $150 million a year in the event Upton Sinclair is elected governor of
California. Sinclair's taxation plan will drive the industry out of Califor-
nia. Florida has everything the industry needs," Schenck explained.
"Conditions in this state have greatly improved since the time, several
years ago, when attempts first were made to establish part of the indus-
try here, and there is no handicap here now to be overcome."
 
Florida officials, anticipating this statement, had pushed through the
legislature a proposed amendment to the state constitution that, if
adopted by voters in November, would exempt the movie industry from
paying taxes on its property and products for fifteen years. The Miami
Herald and the Chamber of Commerce pledged to promote the move,
recalling that the city of Jacksonville had hosted fourteen small studios
early in the century until political interference drove them out of the
state. Perhaps California would make the same mistake, to Florida's
benefit.
 
If the locals thought Joe Schenck was merely grandstanding for the
folks back home, they didn't show it. Neither, for that matter, did
Schenck, since he spent the better part of the day driving around with
Chamber officials, inspecting possible sites for his studio. One or two
properties might actually do the trick, he remarked afterward. Then he
and Doug Fairbanks climbed into an American Airways plane piloted
by Eddie Rickenbacker and flew north to Newark.

In a campaign address, Upton Sinclair expressed his reaction to Joe
Schenck's proposed move to Miami: "Think of what those big Florida
mosquitos would do to some of our screen sirens. Why, one bite on the
nose could bring a fifty-thousand-dollar production loss."

Jonathan Schell: Agent Orange Victim?

Tom Englehart, the longtime editor and writer (now running TomDispatch, which I've contributed to) is out with a tribute to his friend and colleague Jonathan Schell, who passed away from cancer last week.  As I've written, I knew Jonathan for about 30 years and he was an inspiration for me, especially in my writing about nuclear issues.  But before I got into that, I wrote widely about Agent Orange, the Vietnam defoliant, and profiled the woman at the V.A., Maude DeVictor, who pretty much discovered of first fully documented the harmful link to our troops years.  Well, Tom in his piece makes the following alarming claim or observation.  Keep in mind, that Schell's first great reporting covered his extensive trips to Vietnam in the 1960s:

He died on the night of March 25th of a cancer spurred on by an underlying blood condition that just might have been caused by Agent Orange, the poisonous defoliant chemical so widely used by U.S. forces in Vietnam.  There is, of course, no way of knowing, but the Veteran’s Administration website does list his condition as one that might have been Agent Orange-induced.  In life as in death, Vietnam may have defined, but never confined, him.

The there's this amazing Schell recounting of what happened when he'd returned from Vietnam in 1967.

When I got back from Vietnam I met Jerry Wiesner, provost of MIT and a friend of my parents. He had been Kennedy’s science adviser and knew Secretary of Defense McNamara. We had lunch and when I told him about what I’d seen in Vietnam he said, “Would you be willing to go and talk to McNamara about this?” I said, “Yeah, sure,” and the meeting was arranged. So I went down to the Pentagon, where I’d never set foot, and was ushered into the secretary of defense’s office. It’s the size of a football field -- a proper imperial size. And there was McNamara, all business as usual, with that slicked-back hair of steel.  I began to tell my story and he said, “Come over to the map here and show me what you’re talking about.”

Well, I truly had my ducks in a row. I had overflown the entire province of Quang Ngai and half of Quang Tin. And so I really had chapter and verse. After a while he interrupted and asked, “Do you have anything in writing?” I said, “Yes, but it’s all in longhand.” So he said, “Well, I’ll put you in General so-and-so’s office -- he’s off in South America -- and you can dictate it.” And so for three days I sat in the general’s office dictating my longhand, book-length New Yorker article on the air war in South Vietnam. Up from the bowels of the Pentagon would come typed copy. It was a dream for me, probably saving me a month’s work because this was long before word processors.

Three days later, stinking to high heaven because I had no change of clothes, I reappeared in McNamara’s office. I handed it to him, he took it, and that was the last I heard about it from him. But I learned later that a foreign service officer in Saigon was sent around Vietnam to retrace my steps and re-interview the pilots and the soldiers I had quoted. He even read back to the pilots the gruesome ditties they had sung for me at the bar. The foreign service officer had to admit that my book was accurate but he added, “What Schell doesn’t realize is what terrible circumstances our troops are in. He doesn’t realize that old ladies and children are throwing hand grenades because the people are against us.” Hence, the Vietnam War makes sense because the South Vietnamese are against us!

Vincent: White Lightning

Van Gogh's birthday today, so one of my photos: of the room where he died in Auvers.  And my colorized version of his famous painting of church nearby.

11 Years Ago: Questions About 'Embedded" Iraq Coverage Rise

The dangers were there from the start--and the results have been well chronicled since.  But how did the media cover questions about its "embedded" coverage of the Iraq war near the start?  As you'll recall, reporters and camera folks were allowed for the first time to sign up and travel fully with our invading (and later occupying) forces.  This allowed valuable close hand reporting--although with various censorship restrictions.  It also produced coverage that was, shall we say, often influenced by identifying with the troops and the mission a bit too much.  Often we heard "we" are doing this or that as reporters sent along for the jeep and Humvee rides. 

Here's the first NYT report from eleven years ago that started to look at the issues, with quotes from Michael Kelly of The Atlantic, left (who would die there) and critic Todd Giltin and others.   My new book covers this issue at length.

Sunday Morning in the Church of Beethoven

Posted two weeks ago but here again, terrific flash mob in market in Odessa, Ukraine, this month.   Latest on our Beethoven Ninth film and book.