Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Forum.AnotherSkepticGoesDown Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 Thanks for finding this. I have archived it. This is in line with: Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal By Pear Published: October 1, 2005 WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party. In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated " covert propaganda " in the United States in violation of a statutory ban. The contract with Mr. and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities. Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, " The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education. " The auditors declared: " We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds. " The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act. When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: " We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet. " But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. , saying his commentaries were " no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public. " The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to " procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition " in federal law. The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress. In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the " declining science literacy of students, " was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education. The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a " video news release " narrated by a woman named , said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children " gets an A-plus. " Ms. also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, " In Washington, I'm reporting. " The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports. The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as " stupid, wrong and ill-advised. " She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps " to ensure these types of missteps don't happen again. " The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. had performed all the activities for which he billed the government. The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. 's company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. , the report said. In March, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said that federal agencies did not have to acknowledge their role in producing television news segments if they were factual. The inspector general of the Education Department recently reiterated that position. But the accountability office said on Friday: " The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing. " The office said Mr. 's work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush's education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002. The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. to " convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government's behalf and in return for the payment of public funds, " the G.A.O. said. The Education Department spent $38,421 for production and distribution of the video news release and $96,850 for the evaluation of newspaper articles and radio and television programs. Ketchum assigned a score to each article, indicating how often and favorably it mentioned features of the new education law. Congress tried to clarify the ban on " covert propaganda " in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government's role is openly acknowledged. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01educ.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 The End of News? By Massing In late September, the Government Accountability Office—a nonpartisan arm of Congress—issued a finding that the Bush administration had engaged in " covert propaganda, " and thereby broken the law, by paying Armstrong , a conservative commentator, to promote its educational policies. The GAO also faulted the administration for hiring a public relations firm to distribute video news segments without disclosing the government's part in producing them.[1] The auditors' report, which followed a year-long investigation, presents chilling evidence of the campaign that officials in Washington have been waging against a free and independent press. Only months before, it was revealed that Tomlinson, the President's choice to head the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, had paid a Republican operative to monitor the political leanings of guests on Bill Moyers's show Now, as part of a broader effort to shift PBS's programming to the right. The Bush administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it. According to a recent report on government secrecy by OpenTheGovernment.org, a watchdog organization, the federal government classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81 percent over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Spending on the declassification of documents dropped to a new low. What's more, 64 percent of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. The Pentagon has banned TV cameras from recording the return of caskets from Iraq, and it prohibited the publication of photographs of those caskets, a restriction that was lifted only following a request through the Freedom of Information Act. The restrictions have grown so tight that the normally quiescent American Society of Newspaper Editors last fall issued a " call to arms " to its members, urging them to " demand answers in print and in court " to stop this " deeply disturbing " trend. The conservative columnist Safire, usually a supporter of Bush's policies, complained last September that " the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before. " --------------------------------------------------- But the campaign against the press is only partly a result of a hostile White House. The administration's efforts have been amplified by a disciplined and well-organized news and opinion campaign directed by conservatives and the Christian right. This well-funded network includes newsletters, think tanks, and talk radio as well as cable television news and the Internet. Often in cooperation with the White House, these outlets have launched a systematic campaign to discredit what they refer to disparagingly as " MSM, " for mainstream media. Through the Internet, commentators can channel criticism of the press to the general public faster and more efficiently than before. As became plain in the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, to cite one of many examples, an unscrupulous critic can spread exaggerated or erroneous claims instantaneously to thousands of people, who may, in turn, repeat them to millions more on talk radio programs, on cable television, or on more official " news " Web sites. This kind of recycled commentary has become all the more effective because it is aimed principally at a sector of the population that seldom if ever sees serious press coverage. Partly as a result, newspapers find themselves less popular than ever before, at a time when the newspaper industry itself is losing readers while struggling to cuts costs and meet demands for ever larger profits. Today's journalists, meanwhile, when compared to their predecessors, often seem far less willing to resist political pressure from the White House. In the 1970s, for example, The Washington Post refused to buckle under intense White House pressure during Watergate, and The New York Times did not shrink from publishing the Pentagon Papers. Recently, in contrast, the Times had to apologize for uncritically publishing false government claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and Time magazine released the notes of its journalist to a government prosecutor without his consent. Conservative commentators and the administration have also been able to intimidate publications into shunning investigative reporting, as when, for example, Newsweek promised to crack down on its use of anonymous sources after being criticized for its story about the mishandling of the Koran by the US military, and when CBS forced the resignation of four news employees after questions were raised about the 60 Minutes broadcast on Bush's record in the National Guard. With the President's poll numbers down and infighting among conservatives more visible, the coverage of Washington has sharpened of late, but overall the climate remains hostile to good reporting. 1. In 1969, when Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a series of speeches attacking the TV networks and top newspapers as liberal and elitist, only one small organization outside the government was pursuing similar aims. Accuracy in Media was run out of a modest office in Washington by a reactionary gadfly named Irvine. He published a newsletter that singled out journalists whose reporting he found objectionable, insinuating that they were soft on communism and on leftist dictators, if not entirely disloyal. Such charges caused conservative newspaper readers to question the fairness of some news accounts, but Irvine's politics were so extreme that most editors dismissed him as a crank. In 1979, conservatives discovered a new basis for criticizing the press when S. Lichter and Stanley Rothman released a study purporting to show the leftist leanings of national journalists. Of 240 journalists surveyed, eight out of ten said they voted Democratic in presidential elections from 1964 to 1976. Nine out of ten said they supported abortion rights, more than half said they saw nothing wrong with adultery, and few attended church. In 1985, Lichter and his wife , with the financial support of such conservative foundations as Scaife and Olin, formed the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research institute that, while presenting itself as nonpartisan, sought to document instances of liberal bias on the networks and in newspapers. Its reports helped complement the Reagan administration's efforts to portray the press as out of step with " mainstream America. " The impact of these efforts was apparent in journalists' often uncritical coverage of such issues as supply- side economics and the abusive activities of the Salvadoran military, the Nicaraguan contras, and other forces allied with the US in Central America. (There were exceptions, however, such as The New York Times's investigation of the CIA's relations with Panama's Noriega in the late 1980s.) An even more consequential, though much less visible, change took place in 1987, with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. Introduced in 1949, this rule required TV and radio stations to cover " controversial issues " of interest to their communities, and, when doing so, to provide " a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints. " Intended to encourage stations to avoid partisan programming, the Fairness Doctrine had the practical effect of keeping political commentary off the air altogether. In 1986, a federal court ruled that the doctrine did not have the force of law, and the following year the FCC abolished it. At that point, stations were free to broadcast whatever they wanted. In 1988, several dozen AM stations began carrying a show hosted by a thirty-seven-year-old college dropout named Rush Limbaugh. Advertising himself as " the most dangerous man in America, " Limbaugh attracted listeners by combining political jokes, thundering polemics, and outrageous overstatement. He spoke, he said, " with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair, because I have a talent on loan from...God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life. " The eternal enemy, he claimed, is " liberalism.... It destroys prosperity. It assigns sameness to everybody. " On his show, he has described feminists as " feminazis " and referred to the prison in Guantánamo as " Club Gitmo, " a place where the conditions are so plush as to resemble those of a country club. Limbaugh appealed to conservatives who felt no one else was expressing their resentments with such satisfying vehemence; soon hundreds of stations were carrying the show, which by now, according to Media Week, has generated well more than $1 billion in revenue. ------------------------------------------------ Limbaugh's success, in turn, has inspired " a vast new armada " of right-wing talk show hosts, according to C. in his book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. [2] A senior editor at City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative New York think tank, is so sure of the press's liberal slant that he makes only slapdash efforts to document it. He claims, for instance, that press bias is " at its most egregious in war reporting. " A prime example, he claims, is the " defeatist coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, " each of which was portrayed by CNN and the daily press as " another Vietnam. " overlooks the nearly unanimous support of editorial boards for both those conflicts, the credulous acceptance by national news organizations of the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's WMDs, and the triumphalist coverage of the US military's push into Baghdad.[3] He takes no note of the thoroughly conventional views of most of the guests on CNN's talk shows, the network's heavy reliance on retired military officers for commentary, and Wolf Blitzer's often obsequious and usually predictable questioning of administration officials. But South Park Conservatives does give a concise account of the right's successful assault on the mainstream press. " Drive across the country these days, " writes in a chapter on talk radio, " and you'll never be out of range of conservative voices on the AM dial or satellite radio. " The list of the top twenty talk radio shows nationwide is thick with conservatives. The most popular is Limbaugh, whose daily three-hour show attracts an estimated weekly audience of around 14 million. Next comes Hannity, whose show, carried on nearly four hundred stations, attracts 12 million weekly, and who is also the co-host of Fox News's nightly TV program Hannity & Colmes. " Dr. " Schlesinger, who inveighs against feminists and homosexuals, has eight million listeners, as does Savage, who ridicules the handicapped and considers Arabs " non-humans. " Ingraham, the author of Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America, has five million. Other popular right-wing hosts include Bill O'Reilly, , G. Gordon Liddy, and Medved. (The liberal Air America is now carried on sixty-eight radio stations nationwide, but its daily audience is puny compared to that enjoyed by the right.) As makes clear, these shows not only provide their own slant on the news, but also work ceaselessly to discredit what they call " liberal " news organizations. Day after day, talk radio echoes and magnifies the criticisms of the press made by the White House, charging The New York Times and The Washington Post, CBS and CNN with being for big government and against big business, for abortion rights and against gun rights, for Democrats and against Republicans. In mid-October, I tuned in to Limbaugh's show, aired in New York on WABC, and heard him spend much of his three hours defending the White House against press criticism that the President's aides had scripted a videoconference between Bush and a group of soldiers in Iraq. Attempting to turn the tables and make the press the issue, Limbaugh cited several cases in which he claimed news organizations have helped to stage events, such as when a reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press helped shape the question a GI asked Rumsfeld in Iraq about the lack of adequate armor for US military vehicles. This was a typical ploy by Limbaugh, who seeks at every opportunity to hail the progress being made in Iraq and to blame negative news on Bush-hating reporters. Limbaugh's three hours on WABC were followed by three by Hannity, who denounced the media for its distorted coverage of Iraq and its " nonstop attack on the President " from the very start of the war. Then came two hours by Mark Levin, a lawyer turned talk show host who specializes in right-wing name-calling (he called ph and his wife " finks, " Judy " a rat, " Ted Kennedy " a lifelong drunk, " The New York Times the " New York Slimes, " and Senator Schumer " Chucky Schmucky " ). Then came two hours by Ingraham, who, also taking up the Bush staging charges, denounced the " elitist " press for scripting " everything " and being " out of touch with the American people. " Such tirades are issued daily on hundreds of stations around the country. ---------------------------------------------------- An even bigger boon to the right, in 's view, has been the rise of cable news, especially Fox News. Founded in 1996, Fox first surpassed CNN in the ratings in early 2002 and now consistently outdraws it. It is available to more than 85 million subscribers, and, on average, it attracts more than eight million people daily— more than double the number who watch CNN. As with talk radio, Fox relentlessly hammers away at the press, casting it as fundamentally opposed to the values of ordinary Americans—particularly in such matters as abortion, faith, and fighting terrorism. Last spring, New York Times execu-tive editor Bill Keller estimated that last year Fox's Bill O'Reilly had attacked his paper no fewer than sixty times. Last May, during the controversy over Newsweek's report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo, Hannity & Colmes presented a report from Ramadi, Iraq, where Oliver North, now a Fox correspondent, was talking with Specialist Jonah Bishop of the US Army's Second Infantry Division. North said that he'd just returned to al-Anbar Province after many previous visits: Oliver North: It's things like this false story that came out about what happened at Guantánamo that creates divisions between the Americans out here and our Iraqi allies. It would strike me that what we're going to see, as a consequence of that, is an increase in the No. 1 unit of attack that they use against us, which is what? Specialist Bishop: " IEDs. " North: " That's improvised explosive devices? " Bishop: " That's correct. " In other words, North was asserting that the brief item in Newsweek would cause more roadside bomb attacks on US forces, and, by implication, more deaths of US servicemen. For weeks, Fox regularly repeated its charge against Newsweek's Koran report, neglecting to make any mention of the well-substantiated reports about the mishandling of the Koran at Guantánamo that were appearing in The New York Times and other papers. Fox was thus able to keep the issue alive in a way that the Bush administration by itself could not have done. The " Fox effect, " as it's called, is apparent at MSNBC, where Joe Scarborough nightly sounds like Bill O'Reilly, and at CNN. In recent years, as its ratings have declined, CNN has devoted more and more of its broadcast day to entertainment, commentary, and soft news. Here one can find a lineup of cautious and vacuous daytime anchors, the predictable attacks on outsourcing and Mexican immigration by Lou Dobbs, and the superficial celebrity interviews of a Zahn and Larry King. CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, including sharp reports on FEMA's shameful neglect of New Orleans's poor residents, shows that the network can still provide exceptional coverage in times of crisis, and in the weeks since CNN seems to be returning to a more serious approach to the news. The Fox effect has been apparent, too, at the Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose sixty-plus stations give it access to a quarter of the US TV audience. Since late 2002, observes, Sinclair has fed its affiliates a seventeen-minute news report that uses Fox's slogan about being " fair and balanced. " The report includes an opinion feature called " Truth, Lies and Red Tape " that claims to present stories that the established networks " don't want viewers to hear, " as a Sinclair executive put it. (One segment derided the United Nations for " spending more time and money defining the War on Terror instead of fighting it. " ) In April 2004, Sinclair directed its eight ABC affiliates not to run a Nightline segment in which Ted Koppel read the names of the more than one thousand US servicemen who had by then died in Iraq. In the ensuing controversy many conservative commentators defended Sinclair's decision, and the discussion on talk radio, cable news, and the Internet helped foster the idea that the mere discussion of US combat deaths in Iraq is somehow unpatriotic. The Sinclair debate complemented the various steps the administration has taken to suppress coverage of US casualties. Only in the last few months, as insurgent violence has intensified and the number of American and Iraqi deaths has mounted, has the coverage of the war grown more skeptical on some TV news broadcasts. (On the same day that Scooter Libby's indictment was announced, CNN chose to rebroadcast an hour- long report, " Dead Wrong, " on the Bush administration's false claims about WMD.) 2. But it is a third, technological innovation that, along with the rise of talk radio and cable news, has made the conservative attack on the press particularly damaging: blogs. These Internet Web logs, which allow users to beam their innermost thoughts throughout the world, take no longer than a few minutes to set up. They first began to appear in the late 1990s, and there are currently more than 20 million of them. As one critic has observed, many are by adolescent girls writing their diaries on-line. Those with any substantial readership and political influence probably number in the hundreds, and most of these are conservative. As writes with considerable understatement, " the blogosphere currently leans right. " At The Truth Laid Bear, a Web site that ranks political blogs according to their number of links with other sites, eight of the top ten blogs are conservative. The conservative sites include InstaPundit (University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds), Power Line (three lawyers), michellemalkin.com (a syndicated columnist whose recent book defends the internment of Japanese- Americans during World War II), Free Republic (conservative activists), Captain's Quarters (run by a call-center manager), the Volokh Conspiracy (mostly law professors), and Little Green Footballs (commentary on foreign policy with a strong pro-Israel slant). Complementing them are a host of " milblogs, " written by active-duty military personnel promoting vigorous pursuit of the GWOT (Global War on Terror). (By far the most-visited political blog is the left-of- center Daily Kos; its popularity is owing in part to its community- style approach, which allows registered readers to post their own comments as well as comment on the posts of others.) In addition to being linked to one another, these blogs are regularly featured on more established right-of-center Web sites such as the Drudge Report (three billion visits a year), WorldNetDaily (which appeals to the Christian right), and Dow 's OpinionJournal, which features Taranto's widely read " Best of the Web Today. " These sites, in turn, are regularly trolled by commentators like Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who then publicize many of their messages over TV, radio, and their own Web sites. NationalReviewOnline seeks out new conservative blogs and launches them with great fanfare. And the Bush administration actively supports these efforts. Last December, for instance, Lynne Cheney observed on the MSNBC program Hardball that she regularly reads Instapundit and Power Line—a powerful recruiting tool for those sites. For these bloggers, the principal target is the mainstream media, or MSM. Every day, they scrutinize the top dailies, the three broadcast networks as well as CNN, and the newsweeklies for evidence of " liberal bias. " Over the last year, they have demonstrated their influence. When 60 Minutes ran its segment on the memos about Bush's National Guard service, Power Line led the way in raising doubts about the authenticity of the documents and the reliability of their source. After CBS apologized, the remaining serious questions about Bush's National Guard service were abruptly dropped by CBS and the press in general.[4] Last fall, when Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi sent her friends a group e-mail that bluntly described the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad, right-wing bloggers accused her of bias and demanded her recall. The Journal quickly announced that Fassihi would take a previously scheduled vacation and so remain out of Iraq until after the US presidential election. (She has since resumed reporting from Iraq.) Earlier this year, when CNN president Eason Jordan claimed at the Davos summit that the US military was deliberately targeting journalists critical of the war in Iraq, bloggers exploded in outrage. Within days, a computer software analyst in Medford, New Jersey, had set up a new Web site, Easongate.com, to stoke anger against Jordan on the Internet. From there, the controversy jumped to TV, and soon after Jordan resigned. Liberal bloggers have had some successes of their own. Partly as a result of their commentaries, for instance, the press has paid more attention to the so-called Downing Street memo of July 2002, in which Tony Blair and his advisers discussed the Bush administration's plans for war in Iraq. In addition to Daily Kos, prominent left-leaning blogs include Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, and, for commentary on Iraq, Informed Comment. While these sites are critical of the national press, their main fire is directed at the Bush administration. What's more, these sites are not supported by an interconnected system of talk radio programs and cable television commentary, and their influence therefore tends to be much more limited. -------------------------------------------------- The thick web of connections among right-wing commentators is typified by Hugh Hewitt. A law professor who once served as the director of the Nixon Library, Hewitt hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show from a studio in an Orange County, California, mall. In between chats with studio guests, he posts commentary on his blog, hughhewitt.com, which receives about 40,000 visits a day. He contributes a weekly column to the Daily Standard, the online edition of the conservative Weekly Standard. Hewitt is also an evangelical Christian who sees blogs as an effective way to spread the word of Christ. According to World, an evangelical monthly magazine, Hewitt " may well be the world's leading blog-evangelist. " An entire Web site has been set up to record the blogs he has helped inspire; it currently lists more than 250. On his own blog, Hewitt regularly flags what he considers to be instances of anti-Christian bias in the press. In mid-June, for instance, when The New York Times ran an article about the growing number of evangelical chaplains in the armed forces and the tensions they were causing, Hewitt observed that this was the latest installment in the Times's " Drive Evangelicals from the Military " series.[5] Christian bloggers are part of a growing group of Christian news providers. As h Blake reported in the May/ June Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Broadcasting Network, home to Pat on's 700 Club, today employs more than a thousand people working at stations in three US cities and several foreign countries. Evangelicals control six national TV networks and some two thousand religious radio stations. " Thanks to Christian radio's rapid growth, " Blake observes, " religious stations now outnumber every other format except country music and news-talk " —the latter category, as we have seen, also overwhelmingly dominated by the right. For three years before the Terri Schiavo case got national attention, it was constantly discussed on Christian stations, which sought to frame the issue as one of activist judges who were not upholding the sanctity of life. Soon after Bush was elected in 2000, directors of the National Religious Broadcasters were invited to meet the President and Ashcroft, and the group has held monthly conference calls with the White House ever since. All in all, Blake observes, evangelical broadcasters have " remained hidden in plain sight—a powerful but largely unnoticed force shaping American politics and culture. " The rapid growth of conservative outlets for commentary has contributed to a siege mentality among journalists. Steve Lovelady, who edits CJR Daily, a blog sponsored by the Columbia Journalism Review, told me that based on the frequent e-mails he receives from editors and reporters around the country, he thinks that newsrooms are in a state of " growing panic. " Journalists " feel like they've never been under greater attack, " Lovelady says. " Press criticism seems harsher and more accusatory than it used to be. " In addition to feeling under attack from without, Lovelady adds, journalists feel threatened from within. In previous decades, the major newspapers were mostly owned by family-run companies, which usually insulated newsrooms from the vicissitudes of the stock market. Today, most newspapers are owned by large publicly held corporations, for which profit margins are increasingly more important than investment in better reporting. This has sapped news organizations of their ability to defend themselves at precisely the moment they need it most. 3. The much-discussed fortunes of the Los Angeles Times are a case in point. For more than four generations, the paper was published by members of the Chandler family, who were controlling shareholders of the Times Mirror Company, which, in addition to the Times, owned Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Hartford Courant. In 2000, however, Times Mirror was bought by the Chicago-based Tribune Company, a huge corporation that had become accustomed to 30 percent annual profit margins. (In addition to the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Company owns nine other papers, twenty- six television stations, a 22 percent share in the WB television network, and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.) The purchase came shortly after the revelation that top executives at the Los Angeles Times had approved a deal with the Staples Center to share the advertising proceeds from a special section about the sports and entertainment arena, an arrangement widely criticized as breaching the traditional wall between news and business. At first, Tribune executives seemed committed to restoring the Times's strong reputation, as reflected in their decision to hire Carroll, the widely respected editor of the Baltimore Sun, as the paper's new editor. And Carroll came through: in 2004, the paper won five Pulitzer Prizes, the second most ever for a paper (after the seven won by The New York Times in 2002). Financially, though, the paper was still feeling the effects of the 2000 recession, with advertising revenue sharply declining and circulation dropping well below its traditional level of more than one million. The paper continued to be very profitable, but its margins had dipped below the 20 to 25 percent it had achieved in its most prosperous years. At the same time, the paper had come under heavy attack from southern California bloggers such as Hugh Hewitt, who portrayed it as liberal, lofty, and out of touch. According to Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, more than a thousand Los Angeles Times readers canceled their subscriptions after the paper ran a story critical of Arnold Schwarzenegger just before the 2003 recall election that brought him to office.[6] Between 2000 and 2004, the Tribune Company extracted some $130 million from the paper's annual billion-dollar budget. Then, weeks after the 2004 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, Tribune executives informed Carroll that further cuts were needed, and over the summer more than sixty staff members took voluntary buyouts or were laid off. The Washington bureau lost 10 percent of its staff, and those who remained were assigned to a new office along with the much- reduced Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and other Tribune papers. The cutbacks have made it harder for reporters at these papers to meet their daily deadlines, much less undertake in-depth reporting. In July of this year, in the face of demands for more cuts, Carroll resigned from the Times. ---------------------------------------------------------- The developments at the Tribune Company mirror those in the newspaper industry as a whole. For most big-city papers, circulation is declining, advertising is shrinking, and reporters and editors are being let go. The full extent of the crisis became apparent in May, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported circulation figures for 814 daily papers for the six months ending last March. Compared to the same period the year before, total daily circulation fell by 1.9 percent and Sunday circulation by 2.5 percent. Sunday circulation fell by 2 percent at The Boston Globe, 3.3 percent at the Philadelphia Inquirer, 4.7 percent at the Chicago Tribune, and 8.5 percent at the Baltimore Sun. At the Los Angeles Times, circulation fell 6.4 percent daily and 7.9 percent on Sundays. Even The Washington Post, the dominant paper in a region of strong economic growth, has suffered a 5.2 percent daily circulation decline over a two-year period. There are a few exceptions. The New York Times and USA Today, both national newspapers, have had modest circulation gains. Even so, the New York Times Company announced in October that it was going to eliminate five hundred jobs, including forty-five in the Times newsroom and thirty-five in the newsroom of The Boston Globe. (The Globe recently announced that it was dismantling its national desk.) The Wall Street Journal has been holding its own in circulation, but its ad revenues have sharply declined. It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, Carroll told me earlier this year, " it would be a juggernaut. " Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when most papers went public, they had little trouble maintaining such levels. Many enjoyed a monopoly in their markets, and realtors, car dealers, and local stores had no choice except to advertise in them. The introduction of new printing technology helped to reduce labor costs and to shift power away from unions and toward management. But papers have since faced successive waves of new competition— first from TV, then from cable, and now from the Internet. Yet Wall Street continues to demand the same high profits. " Of all the concerns facing newspapers, " Carroll told me, I'm most worried about cost cutting. Many CEOs are in a hard place, having to deliver short-term financial results or, most likely, get fired. Newspapers are very profitable, but their growth is slow, which means incessant cost cutting to meet Wall Street's expectations. The cost cutting leads to weaker journalism—fewer reporters, fewer photographers, fewer editors, fewer pages in the paper. Gene , a former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who left that paper over ongoing demands for cuts in his news operation, says that cutting news budgets to hit profit targets is a form of " systematic suicide. " How can newspapers continue to insist on annual profit margins of 25 to 30 percent " and remain appealing to readers? " he asked. He argues that newspapers should respond to the increasing competition by investing more, not less, in newsrooms: " I think most papers could easily get their circulations up— maybe not gigantically, but they could certainly stop the erosion and head in the other direction if they served their readers better. " But many experts on the newspaper business are not convinced. Morton, a well-known newspaper analyst, points out that some very well-run companies, such as The Washington Post, have hired more reporters, foreign correspondents, and editors, yet continue to lose circulation. The reason, he says, is clear: the disappearance of young readers. " It is the fundamental problem facing the industry, " Morton says. " It's probably not going away. And no one has figured a way out. " 4. The full extent of this problem is described in Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, by T.Z. Mindich.[7] A former assignment editor for CNN who now teaches journalism at St. 's College in Vermont, Mindich writes that while more than 70 percent of older Americans read a newspaper every day, fewer than 20 percent of young Americans do. As a result, he writes, " America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history. " Of twenty-three students asked to name as many members of the Supreme Court as they could, eighteen could not name even one. It is frequently argued that young people are always less interested than their parents in following the news; as they get older, they'll undoubtedly become more engaged. Mindich thinks not. In the 1950s and 1960s, he observes, " young people were nearly as informed about news and politics as their elders were. " If young people aren't reading newspapers now, he argues, there's a good chance they won't as adults. All eyes are now on the Internet. Even as paid circulation has dwindled at many papers, the number of visits to their Web sites has soared. Both nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com rank among the top twenty on-line global news sites; in September, the Times site received visits from more than 21 million different users. Because these sites are mostly free, however, many readers have switched to them from print editions, which can cost several hundred dollars for an annual subscription. But there is no clear indication that young people are more likely to read news on the Internet than in print. According to Mindich, only 11 percent of young adults in a recent survey cited the Internet as a major source of news. Moreover, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal, which runs a profitable subscription-only Web site, newspapers have until now failed to establish an on-line presence for which readers are willing to pay. In September, the New York Times Web site launched " TimesSelect, " a new premium service that charges $49.95 a year for access to the paper's archives and select Op-Ed-page commentary (except for subscribers, for whom access is free). But it remains unclear whether such a service will generate significant revenue. For the Web to become profitable, it will need to be supported by advertising. To date, the returns here have been modest, but they are growing. This year, for instance, latimes.com expects to take in $50 million, with ad revenues doubling in each of the next few years. In the long term, most observers agree, the future of newspapers lies with the Web, where transmitting the news requires no expensive newsprint, delivery trucks, or union drivers. The question is, can the Internet generate revenue—and readers—fast enough to make up for the shortfalls from print? If the newspaper industry continues to shrink in response to the unrealistic expectations of Wall Street, the loss would be incalculable. The major metropolitan dailies, for all their faults, are the main collectors and distributors of news in America. The TV networks, to the extent they still offer serious hard news coverage, get many of their story ideas from papers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor. Even the bloggers who so hate the " mainstream media " get much of their raw material from it. If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power. The central question, in light of these difficulties, is how the press will respond. The environment in which the press works is often inhospitable, but it's precisely in times of crisis and upheaval that some of the best journalism gets done. Unfortunately, a look at the press's recent performance —including that of our leading newspapers— is not encouraging. As I will try to show in a subsequent article, news organizations, rather than push back against the forces confronting them, have too often retreated andacquiesced. —This is the first of two articles. Notes [1] See GAO reports to Senators R. Lautenberg and M. Kennedy, " Department of Education— Contract to Obtain Services of Armstrong " [b-305368] and " Department of Education—No Child Left Behind Act Video News Release and Media Analysis " [b-304228], September 30, 2005. [2] Regnery, 2005. [3] The reporting of Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau was one of the few exceptions to this trend. See my articles in these pages, " Now They Tell Us, " The New York Review, February 26, 2004; and " Unfit to Print? " The New York Review, June 24, 2004. [4] For an analysis raising questions about CBS's internal investigation, see Goodale's article " The Flawed Report on Dan Rather, " The New York Review, April 7, 2005, and the correspondence that followed in The New York Review, May 12, 2005. [5] For more on Hewitt and his influence, see Lemann, " Right Hook, " The New Yorker, August 29, 2005. [6] See " Fault Line, " The New Yorker, October 10, 2005. [7] Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18516 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 File shows US 'psychological operations' concerns By Will Dunham Thu Jan 26, 7:00 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged in a document made public on Thursday that information spread by the Pentagon to influence foreign peoples and enemies increasingly seeps back home and is " consumed by our domestic audience. " The Pentagon argued the " psychological operations " information was truthful. But the research organization that obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act described it as propaganda planted overseas that inevitably made its way back to the United States. The document's disclosure comes amid a fierce debate over what is permissible for the U.S. government in getting its message across to foreign audiences. For example, the U.S. military command in Iraq is investigating a military program that funneled money to some Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-American articles. The document, marked " secret, " was titled " Information Operations Roadmap, " and laid out the need for the Pentagon to improve its capabilities in psychological operations, electronic warfare, military deception and other areas. " Secretary Rumsfeld's road map says the American people can't be protected from the Pentagon's psychological operations abroad but it doesn't matter as long as he's not targeting the American public. It's the collateral damage theory of propaganda, " said Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at Washington University in Washington. The document stated that " information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP (psychological operations), increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa. " Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he rejected the notion the Pentagon was comfortable with the notion of propaganda " bleeding back " from overseas to the United States. " We're not OK with it, " Di Rita said. " First of all, we're not lying. We're talking about truthful, accurate information, so that's baloney, " Di Rita said. The document noted that psychological operations were restricted by both Pentagon policy and presidential executive order from targeting American audiences and news organizations, as well as U.S. military personnel. " The increasing ability of people in most parts of the globe to access international information sources makes targeting particular audiences more difficult. Today the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG (U.S. government) intent rather than information dissemination practices, " the document stated. Information used in psychological operations " will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public, " it stated. " The likelihood that PSYOP messages will be replayed to a much broader audience, including the American public, requires specific boundaries be established, " the document stated. Pentagon officials said the document remained in effect but that some matters it covered were being re-evaluated. http://news./s/nm/20060127/ts_nm/arms_usa_information_dc US plans to 'fight the net' revealed By Adam s BBC Pentagon correspondent A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for " information operations " - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks. Bloggers beware. As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer. From influencing public opinion through new media to designing " computer network attack " weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war. The declassified document is called " Information Operations Roadmap " . It was obtained by the National Security Archive at Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act. Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, signed it. The " roadmap " calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare. The document says that information is " critical to military success " . Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance. Propaganda The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks. All these are engaged in information operations. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans. " Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience, " it reads. " Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public, " it goes on. The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. " Specific boundaries should be established, " they write. But they don't seem to explain how. " In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad, " says Adair of the National Security Archive. Credibility problem Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness. When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications. And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon. But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear. The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking. It reveals that Psyops personnel " support " the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station which broadcasts to Cuba - as receiving such support. It recommends that a global website be established that supports America's strategic objectives. But no American diplomats here, thank you. The website would use content from " third parties with greater credibility to foreign audiences than US officials " . It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, " miniaturized, scatterable public address systems " , wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet. 'Fight the net' When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system. " Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system, " it reads. The slogan " fight the net " appears several times throughout the roadmap. The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence. " Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing. " US digital ambition And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to " provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum " . US forces should be able to " disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum " . Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet. Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real? The fact that the " Information Operations Roadmap " is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon. And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4655196.stm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 Sane and sensible. Best article yet.hazy_n_dazed_sk <hazy_n_dazed_sk@...> wrote: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.htmlFuss and FeathersPandemic Panic over the Avian Flu By FumentoThe Weekly Standard, November 21, 2005Copyright 2005 The Weekly Standard . Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. -Dr.Seuss . It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. - Duke Ellington . Never place a period where God has placed a comma. - Gracie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 The author has been fired for what sounds like taking money to write what the payer asks for. I will send a link if you are interested. From: Flu [mailto:Flu ] On Behalf Of Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 2:13 PM Flu Subject: Re: [Flu] Fuss and Feathers Sane and sensible. Best article yet. hazy_n_dazed_sk <hazy_n_dazed_sk@...> wrote: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html Fuss and Feathers Pandemic Panic over the Avian Flu By Fumento The Weekly Standard, November 21, 2005 Copyright 2005 The Weekly Standard .. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. -Dr.Seuss .. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. - Duke Ellington .. Never place a period where God has placed a comma. - Gracie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 Fumento is a "troll" . I had some emails with him. See also this from curevents: --------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Editor,I was disappointed with Fumento’s article “Fuss and Feathers, Pandemic Panic Over the Avian Fluâ€, The Weekly Standard 11/21/05. I am sure that Mr. Fumento means to avert panic, but there are several errors within his argument which undercut his message, and I disagree with his approach.He begins by listing events wherein there were public health ‘false alarms’, to establish doubt about alleged current risk. However while the ‘Swine Flu’ scare of 1976 may qualify as a true false alarm, the outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu in Hong Kong in 1997 and the SARS outbreaks in 2003 are in a different category—effective interventions. The outbreak of H5N1 in poultry and humans in Hong Kong was ended when Hong Kong culled every chicken or duck within its borders; human cases ceased as a result. The SARS outbreak in 2003 was contained by very active and costly public health action in Toronto and China. In any case you cannot predict whether the H5N1 avian flu alarm will prove justified based on these histories.He goes on to make the case that only one of the three pandemics in the 20th century had a high mortality rate, which is perhaps some comfort, but fails to address the issue that our 21st century economy is based on just-in-time manufacturing and delivery, and is particularly vulnerable to the effects of widespread worker absences. Even if a pandemic had a zero mortality rate, because no one would be immune to the virus, so much of the workforce would be temporarily incapacitated in any affected region that our JIT supply chains would be severely impaired. We would see shortages of critical goods propagating throughout the economy, causing economic damage even in areas spared by the virus. This is an important omission on Mr. Fumento’s part, because it avoids an aspect of pandemic upon which the average person can have an impact. As we saw with Katrina, the greatest toll was on the unprepared. If everyone expects the possibility of supply chain disruptions and ‘stocks up’ on critical items for home and business now, when the supply chains are intact, then some of the potential damage of a pandemic will have been mitigated; there will be a buffer against economic effects. If no disaster occurs, people will eventually use this excess inventory anyway, and so the only disadvantage is the cost of storing goods and the potential to tie up some otherwise-liquid capital in the inventory.Fumento then discusses the death-toll projections of various authorities. But he does not discuss in all cases how the various figures were derived so that people can evaluate which estimate they deem to be most likely.The World Health Organization uses the low end of population-adjusted death estimates from the 1967 pandemic—the mildest in the last century—a virus which was a hybrid between a bird flu and an existing human flu. Osterholm uses the high-end figures from the 1918 pandemic—the most severe in the last century—a purely avian virus that mutated to infect humans without exchanging genetic information with any human viruses, and thus which more closely resembles what seems to be happening now.The figure of 1 billion dead worldwide arises from the current death rate from the virus, 52%, applied to an infection rate of 30%, which is the low end of infection rates observed in past flu pandemics. Of the three death estimates, only the most pessimistic incorporates data observed directly about the current virus. Therefore that estimate, though unlikely, cannot be entirely discounted as an upper limit to the possible death toll.On a minor scientific point, Fumento confuses antigenic drift—small random mutations affecting the outer proteins of flu and causing the yearly variation in flu strains—with antigenic shift—which occurs when two flu viruses within a single host exchange genetic material, resulting in a new combination of proteins on the virus surface. The latter is the likely genesis of the 1958 and 1967 hybrid-virus pandemics.On a more important scientific point, Mr. Fumento misinterprets the evolutionary forces acting on this virus which may cause it to become more dangerous to humans. We need not wait for any evolutionary pressure to force H5N1 to acquire ability to infect non-bird species; the current strain of H5N1 in Asia is already capable of inefficiently infecting humans. Once in a human, the evolutionary pressure upon that virus and its descendants favors those viruses which can efficiently propagate within that human. While the initial mutation to a better-adapted state is at random, any mutation which favors survival in a human is under a positive selective pressure and is not easily lost while the virus remains in a human host. Every new human infection thus represents a ‘parallel processor’ for a mutations to accumulate that will create a human pandemic strain. The recent reconstitution and analysis of the 1918 virus showed that co-infection by a human flu virus, once thought necessary for a flu to attack us as new host species, is not required; a purely bird flu can mutate to infect humans efficiently without borrowing genes from existing human flu strains.Although H5N1 flu was first identified in 1959, it did not infect humans in any noticeable way until 1997. Since then it has continued to cause sporadic human infections. This is evidence that the post 1997 version of this virus in Asia differs in some way from its forbears. The fact that the rate of human infections has been increasing in fits and starts since January of 2004 suggests that our risk of pandemic from a variant of this virus is increasing as time passes. Most recently, an outbreak in Indonesia seemed to result from casual contact of visitors with birds at a zoo, instead of the intensive bird contact seen in previous cases in chicken farmers. This is yet more evidence that the virus is evolving in a dangerous direction. Each new human case gives Nature another chance to roll the dice in an environment which will select for strains best adapted to humans.In discussing drugs used to treat flu Mr. Fumento mis-states the biology of neuraminidase, which does not play a role in viral copying, but in the exit of a virus from a cell; neuraminidase on the viral surface allows a virus to leave its parent cell without becoming ‘glued’ to the cell by the hemagglutinin on the viral surface. (Basically, hemagglutinin allows virus to stick to cells to get into them; neuraminidase allows a virus to ‘unstick’ and get out.)Mr. Fumento and others have made much of the single strain of Tamiflu resistant H5N1 isolated from a Vietnamese patient along with 9 other Tamiflu-sensitive variants. But little mention has been made of earlier experiments involving Tamiflu and human strains of flu in Japan. In the course of evolving Tamiflu resistance, human flu viruses so cripple themselves as to become non-transmissible to other people. If this holds true for H5N1 then each new case of Tamiflu resistance would have to arise de-novo in each individual patient, and would pose no threat to others.However it is still unclear if neuraminidase inhibitors will be helpful in controlling the virus; as-yet-unpublished data allegedly suggests that the 48 hour window for beginning treatment may be severely shortened in the case of H5N1 infection, due to the phenomenon of ‘cytokine storm’. H5N1 directly activates TNF-alpha over-expression, resulting in a runaway immune system that attacks and damages the lungs and other vital tissues, causing multi-organ-system failure fairly early in the disease. Because this effect turns the immune system against itself, those with the healthiest immune systems—healthy people between the ages of 20 and 40--are the worst afflicted. This phenomenon is also suspected to be the reason that the 1918 H1N1 virus killed so many people in that age-range.It is unclear if anti-virals will be able to impact this process or not.Still, whatever resources are expended on increasing production of these antivirals will not be wasted; they remain effective against seasonal flu even should a pandemic not occur in the immediate future.Mr. Fumento goes on to discuss Ira Longini’s computer modeling of pandemic containment. While he mentions that the models give 2 weeks to 1 month as the time-frame within which a rural outbreak could be contained, he fails to mention that the total patient count must be less than 40 cases, that turn-around time for identifying the virus still runs at more than a week, and that each case must infect fewer than two additional people for the virus to be containable at all. The implication is that ‘ring containment’ should be attempted if there is an outbreak, but success is not assured. We cannot use this strategy to say ‘problem solved’.The World Health Organization has established a reserve of 3 million doses of Tamiflu for use in any third world nation which suffers an outbreak.Mr. Fumento also makes several errors in discussing the implications of the virus’s observed mortality rate.Most flu is transmitted to new victims during the time period before the patient becomes symptomatic. For this reason, there is little evolutionary pressure on flu viruses to become less virulent until such time in a pandemic as most of the victim’s social contacts are already immune. Once the population has some immunity, the ambulatory phase for the flu victim must be longer for the victim to encounter another susceptible host, and at that point only less aggressive viruses have the opportunity to be transmitted—aggressive viruses don’t let their hosts walk around long enough to encounter a new host.In the case of a virus that transmits before it causes symptoms, in an environment of susceptible people, you cannot use the argument that lethal viruses have no chance to transmit themselves.Experts who project the virus may become less lethal do so on other bases. As an example, currently the virus replicates its RNA most efficiently at the body temperature of birds—about 104F—and when it gets into humans it tends therefore to replicate in deeper tissues such as the intestinal lining and the deeper, warmer areas of the lungs, rather than the cooler upper airways favored by human flus. This means more damage is done to these deep tissues. It also means that the virus lives ‘farther from the exit’ and has a hard time getting from a human host out into the environment where it can infect its next victim. If the virus must change its temperature preferences in order to become human-human capable, this may also change which region of the respiratory tract is most affected, and perhaps reduce mortality if damage to the lungs is reduced. (In general bronchitis is less deadly than pneumonia.)Mr. Fumento also implies that care in the Hanoi hospital is of lower quality than that in the US. The Hanoi Hospital is among the best in Vietnam and by reports of travelers there is better equipped than most community hospitals in the US. But this point is somewhat moot as, in the event of a pandemic, hospital services will likely be overwhelmed so early as to be essentially unavailable to most flu sufferers. For this reason one key task for local health authorities will be to communicate principals of home care to the community.Mr. Fumento points out the ‘denominator’ in the death rates we currently observe for H5N1 is a problem—we do not know how many minor cases never report for treatment or are misdiagnosed. However, the normal flu experience he cites, of ‘no symptoms at all, nary a sniffle’, generally occurs in cases where the infected person has some cross immunity to a flu strain due to a past infection with a related strain. In the event of a pandemic, there will be no such existing cross-immunity. There is only a little data about whether H5N1 has been circulating unnoticed in mild form in Asia. Earlier this year there was a ‘scare’ in Vietnam when a new test for H5N1 was being developed and tested against 1000 samples from outpatient flu cases. Several of the samples tested positive for H5N1. As a result those samples were tested by a more reliable method, and no positive samples were found. What this shows is that the new test had a number of false positives, but it also shows that out of a sample of 1000 outpatient (ie: mild) flu cases in Vietnam, none of them were H5N1. This tends to support the hypothesis that there are not many mild cases of H5N1.Mr. Fumento cites a single study on blood samples from Chinese farmers in 1992 which showed a high percentage with H5N1 antibodies. This was mentioned at a conference but has not been repeatable or observed by any other groups studying the situation and so has been considered by some to have had a flawed method.Mr. Fumento points out that there is no particular reason that a bird flu should be more lethal than ordinary flu, and he points to the Dutch outbreak of H7N2 in 2003 as an example. A outbreak of bird flu other than H5N1, or even of a low-pathogenic H5N1 as found this week in a duck in Canada, is cause for alarm only if your poultry farm is affected. The problem is that the highly pathogenic H5N1 strains have been more lethal in all test species (mice, ferrets, chickens, cats) than any other flu ever tested, and we know it has infected people. “Bird flu†isn’t necessarily highly lethal; H5N1 can be.On the subject of vaccines, there are also several subtleties missed by Mr. Fumento. The vaccine currently being purchased by the US government is necessarily a mis-match for the pandemic strain, since we do not yet know what the configuration of that strain would be. If animal models of mis-matched vaccines can be trusted, this mis-matched vaccine should protect against death, but will not reduce illnesses due to the disease. Thus this imperfect vaccine will not mitigate the potential economic disruptions of a pandemic, and will be less effective in slowing spread of the disease since vaccinated people will still be capable of transmitting it. Once a pandemic strain is identified, it will take 6 months to develop a well-matched vaccine and another 3 months to have manufactured it in even minimal quantities for distribution. This matched vaccine would be expected to prevent illness entirely.“Deaths, however, would be vastly lower because we have so much better access to medicine,†says Mr. Fumento. Nothing could be further from the truth. The intensive care available in Hanoi is comparable or better than that in a US community hospital. Beyond that, during an outbreak, the demand for hospital care will so outpace the number of beds that it will effectively not exist for the majority of flu sufferers. Some hospitals may have expansion plans to use public buildings or local hotels for flu-overflow patients, but the limiting factor is more likely to be staff availability than bed availability. Not only are hospitals chronically understaffed under normal conditions, but healthcare providers will also catch the flu, and some will choose not to work in order to protect themselves or their families from infection or to care for sick loved ones. In addition, most drugs now are manufactured in whole or in part abroad. Trade is likely to be severely impaired during a pandemic and this will disrupt the supply of even common drugs like statins, heart medications, and antibiotics. Even one key ingredient in Tamiflu, shikimic acid, is derived from the pod of a tree which grows in China (Chinese star anise), the supply of which could be disrupted. Because these drugs are delivered on a just-in-time basis with minimal inventory held in stock, hospitals can be expected to quickly run out of whatever supplies they have if they do not plan ahead and increase their inventory of such staples.What could reduce death rates in the developed world is our level of general hygiene—fewer people infected in the first place—not our access to medical care once an infection is present. Frequent hand-washing and staying at home when you have the slightest illness will be key in gaining this advantage. Employers will have to change their cultures to encourage people to stay home when sick rather than ‘toughing it out’ or coming to the office to prove what a loyal team-player they are.Because of these supply chain issues, people with chronic illnesses would do well to get a 3 month supply of their essential drugs; health insurance companies would do well to change their policies to allow three months of medication to be purchased in a single trip to the pharmacy.There are also errors in the section about the Spanish Flu.Influenza, Spanish flu included, does not respond to antibiotic treatment. Like other flus, there is risk of an opportunistic bacterial infection moving in once the flu has damaged respiratory tissues. Antibiotics are of course useful in treating this, but they do not affect the flu itself. Many of the physicians of the day thought that Spanish flu had a high propensity to progress to bacterial pneumonia. However, in those days, the phenomena of cytokine storm or of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—which looks a lot like pneumonia but is caused by immune system byproducts—were unknown. This, plus the fact that viruses were not discovered as agents of disease until 1926, is what lead many early researchers to think that the Spanish flu had been caused by a bacteria. Mr. Fumento seems to think this indicates that secondary infection was the leading cause of death during the Spanish Flu pandemic, in which case antibiotics would have greatly reduced the death rate. But it may be that the high secondary infection rate was only the best available explanation at the time, and not the right one; the clinical symptoms of ARDS are nearly identical to those for pneumonia.In any case, for H5N1, while secondary infection might contribute to deaths in a pandemic situation, those treated in intensive care units in 2004 and 2005 have been given antibiotics against that risk, and they have still died at a rate of 52%.While trench conditions in World War II undoubtedly contributed to the rapid evolution and transmission of the Spanish Flu, conditions in many impoverished and overpopulated rural areas of Southeast Asia provide a similar number of opportunities for a virus to transmit to vulnerable people.Mr. Fumento explanation was a bit unclear about the reason for increasing pneumonia vaccination in the case of a flu vaccine shortage. The pneumonia vaccine does not prevent flu, only opportunistic bacterial pneumonia which may move in after flu damage. If you have fewer flu vaccines, you will have more people get the flu, therefore more people need protection against the secondary infections, which are the main cause of death for normal seasonal flu.The article concluded with some rather dismissive comments which might lead readers to think there is no potential threat and that if a threat existed, there is nothing they can do. It ends with what I regard as reassurance based on minimization of real risk.Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 is an existing danger to the poultry industry and a potential danger to human health. “The experts†are working on public health strategies and treatment plans and new drugs and vaccines to modify the course of illness and to slow the spread of any outbreak. But as we learned from the Katrina Hurricane, those who wait for government to save them and were not at least partially prepared for the crisis did poorly. Mr. Fumento says ‘there is never such a thing as a helpful hysteria.’ I side with Dr. Osterholm, who says ‘we want to scare people into their wits, not out of them.’ Following the latter philosophy, there are things we can do to prepare for a pandemic ourselves while awaiting the medical experts to do their part.We know there may be supply chain disruptions. We know there will be worker outages. We suspect there could be many deaths. Based on past pandemics we can guess it will be roughly two months for an outbreak to burn itself out in a community.As individuals, we can prepare for these situations by stocking up on items which may go short if trade is impaired (sneakers, toothbrushes), by having enough symptomatic over-the-counter medications to treat the entire family for flu (cough medicine, ibuprofen), by having a reserve supply of any prescription medications we habitually take (heart meds, diabetes meds), along with enough food to get through a course of illness without having to go to the grocery store, and preferably enough to go for several weeks in case the community is so hard hit that the stores temporarily close. Consider what you would do if power went out in your area and due to worker absences, take longer than usual to restore. Imagine the possible problems, and be sure that you have the solutions in hand.As employees and business-people, we can prepare by examining personnel policies surrounding illness and making it culturally ‘okay’ to stay home at the first sign of illness. We can provide alcohol-based hand-sanitizers for employees to use whenever they think of it. We can create continuity plans to deal with supply chain disruptions. We can structure contracts to contain exit clauses in the event of pandemic. We can cross-train critical skills to have at least two back-up individuals for all business-critical skills or information. We can devise ways for employees to work from home. We can increase inventory from input to finished goods to provide a buffer if our suppliers run out of stock or if our competitors have a flu-related shut-down and we are left to fill the gap in supply. As I said for individuals, imagine the possible problems,, and be sure you have the solutions in hand.Health departments should address all the outbreak-related medical issues, including providing education to give people confidence in caring for milder cases at home. Governments should make sure that utilities stay up and that emergency services such as fire and police continue to function. Governments or churches should devise ways to deliver food and essentials to sick people who lacked the resources to stock up for themselves.Have some supplies. Have a plan. Realize that there may be some people who die—or not. Realize that it may take longer to get anything done because people will be randomly short-staffed. Realize that there may be patchy outages of supply for common goods we take for granted, and that these will be temporary and not cause for panic.All this--even if nobody dies--because with a worldwide JIT economy there is no slack to make up for the high percentage of workers who may be out due to illness.I think Mr. Fumento’s article was an attempt to calm nerves that might be frazzled by all the recent coverage about the dangers of Avian flu. But the way to do that is not to gloss over what dangers there may be. The way to prevent panic is to provide people with the best available information, some thoughts as to how to interpret that information, what other people and government are doing about the situation, and to point out what is within their power to do about the situation. People are not helpless in the face of a pandemic, and unlike any prior time in history, this time we have forewarning.So prepare.Thank you, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 8, 2006 Report Share Posted March 8, 2006 Yes, I noticed that; but I still think the article is sensible. Seems a shame he'd screw up like that.Lynn Aker <lynn@...> wrote: The author has been fired for what sounds like taking money to write what the payer asks for. I will send a link if you are interested. From: Flu [mailto:Flu ] On Behalf Of Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 2:13 PMFlu Subject: Re: [Flu] Fuss and Feathers Sane and sensible. Best article yet.hazy_n_dazed_sk <hazy_n_dazed_sk@...> wrote: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.htmlFuss and FeathersPandemic Panic over the Avian Flu By FumentoThe Weekly Standard, November 21, 2005Copyright 2005 The Weekly Standard . Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. -Dr.Seuss . It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. - Duke Ellington . Never place a period where God has placed a comma. - Gracie . Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. -Dr.Seuss . It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. - Duke Ellington . Never place a period where God has placed a comma. - Gracie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 9, 2006 Report Share Posted March 9, 2006 This makes a number of very good points. Employee absenses or fatalities due to the flu will limit production and cause shortages. But even if that were not true, there would be shortages of some medical supplies because of increased demand. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 9, 2006 Report Share Posted March 9, 2006 The author has been fired for what sounds like taking money to write what the payer asks for, and the conservatives have a history of buying news. I do not like propaganda and do not appreciate any political party or nation which attempts to use propaganda to pervert my opinion of events. > The author has been fired for what sounds like taking money to write what > the payer asks for. I will send a link if you are interested. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 9, 2006 Report Share Posted March 9, 2006 How many species has this bird flu leapt to now? They said that it had adapted to mammals and it now infects them. And they know that the 1918 Spanish Flu was originally a bird flu. What does it take for us to be warned? > > Yes, I noticed that; but I still think the article is sensible. Seems a shame he'd screw up like that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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