By Mary MacElveen

A reader that I have been corresponding with from Great Britain wrote me the following email concerning last night’s Republican debate: “I watched the debate last night and was so completely disgusted with your system. How can your system allow a private company to hold a debate and then exclude or do a hatchet job on a candidate? It filled me with disgust.” He is not the only one disgusted. By the way, we started corresponding after he read my John Pilger piece.

When I asked how it was done in Great Britain, these were his remarks, “If we had such a debate it would be like one of our shows on the BBC called “Question time” where individuals or politicians are in a panel and then have to answer questions from the public under the moderation of Dimberly.” He then goes onto write, “I would have great difficulty getting anyone here to believe what I witnessed last night.” He is not the only one.

I first want to say that I have never watched “Question Time” as they take questions from the public and directed towards candidates running for office in Great Britain. I have watched the show via the Internet dealing with other issues in the past. I do think it note-worthy to do so when their next election takes place.

In response to his email to me, I did send him this YouTube.com feed which comes from the Gravel 2008 campaign showing media manipulation. Please study at how much time each candidate is given on-air and how they are positioned in this CNN debate. It is called marketing plain and simple. They want you to purchase the candidates they are promoting and leave the rest behind on the store shelf.

Having had retail experience, I liken this to putting brand name Clinton and Obama on the main floor aisle and the rest of the brands stuck way back in the corner. In retail you want the consumer to purchase the high-ticket items first and seeing how much is raised by the front runners for their campaigns; it is what makes them the high-ticket items.

In the Republican debates as I watched them last night more time was given to Romney and Giuliani then the other candidates. Again, being front runners, they are the ones the media will concentrate on. I suppose that Republicans who are supporting the lower-tier candidates feel equally angered.

As you know on behalf of both former Senator Mike Gravel and Congressman Ron Paul, I have written articles when Paul was threatened with not being included in prior debates. I recently wrote an article directed towards NBC and CNN for not inviting Gravel to participate in their debates. That is media manipulation and the people should not stand for it.

When Gravel was excluded from the last CNN debate a Clinton supporter asked this question on a political list, “Not that I was ever a Gravelian, most of you know where my allegiances lie — Yes, I admit it proudly, I’m a Clintonista - always have been, always will be. But I’ve noticed that Mike Gravel has not been in the last 2 or 3 debates. Did he drop out, and I missed it?? Did he fall off the edge of the earth?? What happened to him?? I’m just curious.” I do suspect that the main-stream public not in tune with politics may take it that Gravel did drop out of the race. Good going, CNN for killing democracy. To the uniformed public, Mike Gravel is still in the race and you can visit his web site.

In writing my John Pilger piece which exposed the atrocities promulgated by Richard Nixon, I want all of you to watch this Gravel anti-war commercial. You will not see a more impassioned stance against this war and let me remind you it was Gravel himself who helped stop the blood-letting in Viet Nam through his filibuster of the draft. He was the one that disclosed and had published the Pentagon Papers. Yet, this is the candidate that CNN and NBC did not allow you to hear from. One other Clinton supporter stated to me in a private email, “I don’t care what he did thirty years ago” and I find that hubristic. Gravel alone stood up to a mad-man in Nixon while many of these other candidates folded like lawn-chairs and capitulated. They would not know bravery if it stared them in the face.

But, getting back to the first Clinton supporter that asked if Gravel dropped out of the race, here was part of my response back to him, “As far as the NBC debate goes, NBC did not invite him. According to this article, “Just a week before one of the most important debates in the bid for the presidency, NBC announced that Mike Gravel (Senator- Alaska) will not be allowed to participate in this public debate.” Excuse me, NBC, this election does not belong to you and you do not get to set the rules. As far as the Las Vegas debate, CNN did not invite him to partake citing, “CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman says Gravel didn’t meet the fundraising threshold set by the network. Candidates had to have raised at least $1 million in donations to get an invitation.” As you will see the media does not believe in democracy.”

I would say that if all candidates were given equal time on these debates, it may result in lower-tier candidates being able to raise the larger sums of moneys that the others have raised. These debates in my opinion are not true debates but commercials advertising the candidates when the questions themselves are often fielded by the media. I think it would be far more interesting to hear un-fielded questions coming from the public and see how the candidates handle answering them. Don’t you? Or if they did not answer the question to hear the debate attendee state, “You failed at answering my question.” Now that would be democracy at its finest.

Also on various news shows, often the media will concentrate on the front-runners and the other candidates are left in the dust. That is blatantly un-American. Also, if the corporate-controlled media were to give each candidate equal time, the polling numbers would truly mirror how Americans were responding to each candidate.

As we all know, the presidential candidate of both parties will be selected long before their respective conventions: So, why the need to have a convention in the first place? In my opinion these conventions are a week-long infomercial and love-fest. As candidates gather at them in which they get Secret Service protection, the tax payers are paying for that service and those not aligned with any of these parties are socked with the bill. In my opinion once the candidates from both parties are chosen, just campaign, but do not stick the American people with the bill in order to gather at a convention. If on an IRS return I could choose what not to pay for it would be of course the war first and mixed within would be these conventions.

In closing this would all take place if we lived in a perfect political system and as we have all seen it is far from being perfect. I hope someday that it will change, but as of now, it is the corporate controlled media that selects our candidates and I find that un-American. The corporate-controlled media would not know what it means to be an American if it came up and bit them.

Can the “new media” help an uncensored journalism to emerge? Is there a connection between new media and new journalism? One clue to an answer to these questions is that new media especially the Internet make possible new sources and forms of journalism such as citizen journalism and blogger journalism. But why is a new journalism needed and what would be its mission?

Recently, a panel (see below) was gathered at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism CJS[1] in New York City to address “The Changing Media Landscape.” This was the third annual panel under this title. The hall was full and the session with six panelists and questions from the audience lasted for two-and-a-half hours. The whole event was Web cast live[2] and had a live chat session by which offsite watchers could ask questions.

The panelists were Josh Cohen, the business project manager of Google News, a major news aggregator and model of a new way to present news; Hossein Derakhshan[3], known as the “blogfather” of the over 800,000 strong blogging community who blog in Farsi, the language of Iran; John Dube, director of digital programming for CBC news, Canada’s national public radio and TV broadcaster; Mindy McAdams a professor of new media journalism at the University of Florida; Andrew Lih, journalism professor and author who has taught in New York, Hong Kong and now Beijing; and Michael Rogers, resident futurist of The New York Times, part of a department with the mission to advise the paper’s management on what changes are likely to come in the next five years that will effect journalism. The panel was moderated by Sree Sreenivasan, CJS dean of students.

The discussion began with Cohen putting forward Google Inc. as a corporation striving to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. Google News is similar to the familiar Google Web search engine except that Google News clusters links to many news sites around current news stories. Derakhshan told of his blog being filtered (blocked) in Iran, and also that his former hosting company in the U.S. had shut down his site. He is also facing a $2 million law suit filed by an expatriate Iranian who is siding with the U.S. government’s hostility to Iran. Derakhshan was critical of the subtle propaganda he sees in the coverage by all Western media new and old of the nuclear development program in Iran. He also questioned whether the trend called Web 2.0 was becoming a “tyranny of the popular.” If what gets on the front page of sites like digg.com is whatever is most popular at the moment, might not unpopular but perhaps more important views become as isolated in the new media environment as in the old?

Dube answered this last question. He defended Web 2.0, observing that “most popular lists” are a filtering but may be helpful because they use the “collective wisdom of the crowd” to get personally useful information to a reader. McAdams added the question of the importance to journalists of being paid. She saw that people in Burma took risks to get videos and blog posts of the repression of protesting monks out to the rest of the world as their contribution to the struggle and not as a source of income. Andrew Lih added that citizen journalism is playing a particularly active role in Asia and gave Burma and Pakistan as current examples.

The panelists continued as above to speak to a variety of topics especially Web pages, blogs and the increasing use of video. For me, however, the heart of the discussion addressed Google News and censorship.

One of new media’s spectacular successes is Web and database information sources and the search engines that make the information accessible. For example, the Google Web search system brings to a user very rapidly a fair number of hits for almost any search term or phrase usually with a helpful ranking of relevance. In principle the search could include data from every Web site. A questioner from the audience asked Cohen why the news site OhmyNews International no longer appears in Google News search results after having appeared in such search results for more than a year. Cohen answered that Google News operated on a different principle from that of Google Web. Not all news sites are being indexed by Google News. “Google News works on a closed index,” Cohen explained. Every site submitted is reviewed to determine if it meets the inclusion guidelines. Also, if the Google News team receives a complaint, it reviews a site again with possible removal as the result.

Cohen was asked if the inclusion guidelines can be seen. They are not online so there are many complaints online that the process is not consistent and that the Google News team never answers specifically why it puts a site in or why it takes a site out of the index. Cohen answered that the Google News team does apply its inclusion guidelines consistently but he agreed transparency is lacking. He acknowledged that the team does review sites when it gets complaints. If the site meets the criteria but the team feels it should still not be in the index, the team can ask the programmers to fine tune the algorithms to correct the situation. Cohen’s answers implied that Google’s claim that there is no bias in its searches leaves out the human judgment of what sites get indexed in Google News. That judgment could be as subjective as any editorial decision that selects which articles get on the front page of a Web site or newspaper. The exclusion of sites raised the question of censorship by Google not only in China but also in the U.S.

Derakhshan commented that the concept of censorship is not well constructed theoretically. He offered his definition that “censorship is controlling the reality by constructing various versions of it.” That definition includes the blunt censorship by governments such as in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and just now in Pakistan. He added that the value of his definition is that it includes other more subtle mechanisms of censorship like embedded journalism and corporate journalism. Derakhshan told of a journalist who wrote a story about the kidnapping of Westerners in Iran, which her editor published. But when she wrote a similar story of the U.S. arrest of Iranians in Iraq the editor would not publish it. Journalists learn from such treatment what stories to cover and which ones not to waste time on. Editors know their advertisers or sponsors and are sensitive about what to cover as a sort of corporate self-censorship.

In the coverage in the Western press of Iranian nuclear technology development, Derakhshan drew a parallel with the Western press reporting of the proposed nationalization of Iran’s oil by the government of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953. Then The New York Times characterized Mossadeq as a “dictator” and warned, “Iran Is Playing With Fire,” just before he was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. Today there is a similar demonization of Iran and its president. Derakhshan observed that in current articles in The Boston Globe, on the BBC and in the whole Western press without exception there are two final paragraphs. One paragraph reports that the U.S. suspects that Iran has “ambitions” to develop nuclear weapons. The always appearing next to last and last paragraph reports that Iran denies it has plans other than for peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The censorship here is that there is a third party, the International Atomic Energy Agency, not mentioned. This third party has judged that there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Derakhshan’s conclusion is that a censorship question can be raised about every nation and it would be more fruitful if censorship were discussed only in this context.

A question asked of Lih was about China. With 163,000,000 Chinese people online and spectacular journalism like online support for the owners of the “Awesome Nail House” and for the “Four Hundred Fathers” seeking to free their kidnapped children from slave-like labor conditions, how come the press outside of China can only look for Internet censorship in China? Lih answered that the question was important. He sees that the Internet users in China “are usually too busy enjoying the Internet they have to lament the Internet they do not have.” He reported that the Internet has changed things so completely in China and become so much a part of business and personal networks that it is something that cannot be turned back. It is already impossible to black out completely any information or activity. In the long run he predicted it can only get more open. Lih’s answer seemed to agree with the tone of the question that the Internet in China is being misreported in the Western press.

The panel’s discussion highlighted for me that even Google searches can be part of a process of filtering or censorship. New media does not necessarily mean less censorship. The new journalism that is needed is one that exposes the possible false narrative of the mainstream media, educational curricular and history books and seeks to get underneath the surface to find and report on the full story. New media like citizen journalism and blog journalism has the potential to be such needed journalism but it can succeed only if it understands the full picture of reality and censorship.