LOOK FOR THE MEDIA LABELS
Tue Apr 12, 7:58 PM ET
By Ted Rall

An Examination of the Propaganda of Nomenclature


NEW YORK--If you read newspapers, listen to the radio or watch television, you know that the media has assigned Muqtada al-Sadr a peculiar job title: radical cleric. "Gunmen fired on supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Friday," reports the Associated Press wire service. National Public Radio routinely refers to "radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr." "The protesters were largely supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr," says CNN. Even Agence France-Press refers to him the same way: "Followers of a radical Shiite cleric marched in Baghdad."

I wonder: Does he answer his phone with a chipper "Muqtada al-Sadr, radical cleric!"? Does it say "radical cleric" on his business card?

It's a safe bet that neither al-Sadr nor his Iraqi supporters considers him particularly "radical." And, if you stop to think about it, there's nothing inherently extreme about wanting foreign troops to leave your country. Radical is a highly subjective word that gets thrown around without much reflection. What's more radical, invading another nation without a good excuse or trying to stop someone from doing so? But that's the problem: the media has become so accustomed to absorbing and regurgitating official government propaganda that they never stop to think.

A Google News search of the terms "Muqtada al-Sadr" and "radical cleric" brought up 616 news and opinion stories, the latter derived from the former. Despite the prime minister's obvious status as an American-appointed puppet, "Iyad Allawi" and "collaborationist" yielded zero results. The message is clear: al-Sadr, and by extension Iraqis who oppose the U.S. occupation, are marginal wackos. Those who support it are referred to by questionable legitimatizing honorifics--prime minister, in Allawi's case--because the U.S. government called a press conference to announce him as such.

Repetition is key to successful advertising. The American media uses repeated arbitrary labeling in its supposedly impartial coverage in a deliberate campaign to alter public perception. Americans were meant to feel less sympathy for an kidnapped Italian woman shot by U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint in Iraq after the talking heads repeatedly referred to her as a "communist journalist." A Fox News reporter in the same story would never have been dubbed a "neofascist journalist." John McCain (R-AZ) might become president someday but "maverick senator John McCain" probably won't. Ralph Nader's name rarely appears in print without the unappealing word "gadfly" or a form of "crusading." Why not describe figures in the news using terms that aim for neutrality, like "Italian reporter" or "former Green Party candidate Ralph Nader"?

Labeling bias works to marginalize political outsiders while powerful elites receive their full honorifics. Howard Dean was antiwar firebrand Howard Dean but George W. Bush was never referred to as pro-war crusader George W. Bush. The press calls the founder of the Moral Majority "the Reverend Jerry Falwell," not "radical cleric Jerry Falwell." Even the word "cleric" implies foreignness to a xenophobic public; American religious leaders are the more familiar "ministers" rather than clerics. Instead of telling readers and viewers what to think with cheesy labels, why not let public figures' quotes and actions speak for themselves? Besides, well-known players like al-Sadr and Falwell don't require an introduction.

Loaded labels are commonly used to influence the public's feelings about groups of people as well as individuals. Under Ronald Reagan the Afghan mujahedeen, who received CIA funding and weapons that they used to fight Soviet occupation forces, were called "freedom fighters." Iraqis who take up arms against U.S. occupation troops, on the other hand, are called "insurgents," a word that implies rebellion for its own sake. This was the same term used by the New York Times and other mainstream media to refer to anti-U.S. fighters in Vietnam during the 1960s. Only later, when the Vietnam War became unpopular, did American newspapers begin calling the former "insurgents" members of an infinitely more patriotic-sounding "resistance."

Editors and producers who value balance ought to establish a consistent policy--either negative smears or positive accolades for both sides. Anti-occupation forces should always be called insurgents, guerillas, etc., while pro-occupation troops are dubbed collaborators. Either that, or call them freedom fighters and government loyalists, respectively.

Perhaps the most absurd labeling sin is the media's inconsistent treatment of nations that decide to change their names. When the Khmer Rouge, who went on to kill an estimated four and half million people, renamed their country Kampuchea in 1975, the international media had so little trouble adapting to the new name for Cambodia that they continued using it well into the 1980s, even after Pol Pot had fled into the jungle. Notorious tyrant Mubutu Sese Seko easily convinced the press to start referring to the Congo as Zaire in 1971; his equally despotic successor got them to switch right back. When the SLORC military junta changed the former British colony of Burma to Myanmar in 1989, however, journalists followed the U.S. State Department's refusal to accept the new name. Even "liberal" outlets like NPR still call it Burma or "Myanmar, formerly Burma." We need a consistent rule here, too. Either countries get to call themselves whatever they want or they should be stuck with their current names for eternity.

What hits home hits hardest. I too have been victimized by the idiotic practice of repeat labeling. "Controversial cartoonist Ted Rall" garners no fewer than 58 hits on Google. Care to guess the results for "patriotic cartoonist Ted Rall"?

This problem unfortunetly is a proecuppation in Europe as well, how free is the media from the influence of state? Big corporations that run the media elite are often tied to the wants and wishes of government. We all know that the biggest threat to freedom in any society is and always will be from government.

What we need is more choiches, more watchdogging, more voices, more investigative digging.

And the problem also seems to be that most people, because they are used to reading and watching only what these media want, don't try to look a bit harder to find other sources of information, less dependent, less biased, more thorough.

I like to get my news here. You never get to accept anything as fact. If you try, someone will call you on it and you'll have to spend the rest of the day researching to find out if the news article that got posted was actually true or not.

Yeah, at least when one writes here one doesn't have an agenda, at least I don't think so.

POLICE PERJURERS
Mon Apr 18, 7:03 PM ET
By Ted Rall

Throw Lying Cops Off the Force


NEW YORK--Cops lie. Not all of them, but so many lie about their arrests, tickets and interactions with the public that it's a miracle anyone still respects the law.

Corrupt cops were around long before Serpico, but the problem appears to be getting worse. After the dust settled from the recent Rampart Division scandal, Los Angeles prosecutors were forced to drop hundreds of charges against innocent people sitting in jail, who'd been convicted of crimes invented from thin air by police officers willing to lie in order to embellish their arrest record. Now courts have found that New York City police, already facing multi-million-dollar lawsuits filed by demonstrators who were held in horrifying "Little Gitmo" conditions at the 2004 Republican National Convention, fabricated charges against nearly all of those they arrested.

The NYPD arrested 1,806 people during the RNC. "Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full coarse," The New York Times reported April 12, "ninety-one percent ended with the charges dismissed or a verdict of not guilty after trial."

Ninety-one percent!

Using a new tactic, protesters hired hundreds of anti-RNC cameramen to videotape their arrests. Their evidence proved that cops trumped up nearly every charge. Some of those arrested, it turns out, were passersby who didn't participate in the protests at all. The videos, reported the Times in its usual understated style, offered "little support [for police] or actually undercut the prosecution of most of the people arrested." After viewing the evidence, Manhattan's district attorney dropped the charges.

The newspaper cited the case of Dennis Kyne, the first RNC arrestee. At Kyne's trial for "inciting a riot and resisting arrest," NYPD officer Matthew Wohl testified that he had been forced to pick up the defendant "while he squirmed and screamed," grabbing "one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

The videotape, unlike P.O. Wohl, doesn't lie.

The tape "showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints."

The prosecutor "abruptly dropped all charges."

In an Orwellian twist, the authorities even censored their own tapes to delete evidence of police lies. Alexander Dunlop, charged with pushing his bicycle into a line of police officers and resisting arrest, was seen on a police tape before the incident in question and sitting in handcuffs after his arrest. The D.A.'s office erased "parts of the tape that show him calmly approaching the police line, and later submitting to arrest without apparent incident."

Summer's convention demonstrations were one of last year's biggest stories, taking place in the streets of the nation's largest and most densely populated city--not to mention its media capital. If cops are willing to lie about events witnessed by hundreds of people in broad daylight, while the cameras roll, if they're unafraid to file phony charges against white college kids with rich parents who can afford good lawyers, one can easily imagine what they do to minority teenagers on the desolate streets of the slums. Who can blame urban kids for despising the police?

This clean-cut Ivy-educated white columnist has encountered enough instances of cops lying to reasonably conclude that the socially destructive phenomenon is widespread:

· A couple of years ago a Los Angeles police officer cuffed me while citing me for jaywalking--actually, I was in the crosswalk with the green "walk" signal in my favor--then tossed my ID into the gutter. The LAPD internal affairs division repeatedly ignored my complaints about this unprofessional goon.

· A Nevada state trooper, not content to ticket me for the 80 miles per hour I was actually speeding on a desert stretch of U.S. Route 95, wrote me up for a more ambitious but false 100 in a 70 mph zone. I was so incensed at the level of exaggeration that I later flew back from New York to challenge the ticket. I won.

· I'm currently awaiting the outcome of a ticket I was issued for violating New York's law against talking on a cellphone while driving, a rule with which I agree. First, I always use an ear bud--which is legal. And as my phone bill attests, I wasn't even using the phone at the time in question.

Why do so many cops lie? My pet theory is that, in the same way that Bill Clinton's sex scandals encouraged promiscuity among impressionable young people, George W. Bush's contempt for the truth and the law, including granting permission to torture and jail the innocent, set a tone that emboldens law enforcement officers to feel that they can get away with anything.



Whatever the cause, cops who slander the innocent unravel our respect for the uniformed authority figures who are the most public face of our government. Public contempt undermines the tacit consent of the governed, the vague but essential groupthink that perpetuates political legitimacy in any society. Lying cops imply lying leaders; lying leaders imply illegitimate rule.

Amazingly, police departments rarely impose sanctions against cops whose testimony is repeatedly found to be untrue by judges, prosecutors and juries. The prevailing attitude is: do whatever, say whatever, and see what sticks. But this has got to stop. Criminal policemen ought to face treatment at least as harsh as employees of other, less vital, professions who lie to their boss. When a judge or the prosecutor's office throws out a case because the evidence disproves a police officer's account of the incident, a warning should be placed in his file. The second time he bears false witness, he should be fired and ordered to find another, more appropriate job (political consultant, secretary of state, or CFO for a Fortune 500 company).

Why do so many cops lie? My pet theory is that, in the same way that Bill Clinton's sex scandals encouraged promiscuity among impressionable young people, George W. Bush's contempt for the truth and the law, including granting permission to torture and jail the innocent, set a tone that emboldens law enforcement officers to feel that they can get away with anything.

He should have left out this paragraph.



Lying cops have been around FAR longer than Bush, and kids were giving each other bj's before Clinton.

I haven't read the article yet, but isn't he being sarcastic, and taking a poke at people who said that Clinton made it permissable for kids to suck dick? Like, "See, you demanded this was so back then, but it can always be flipped back onto you!"

He should have left out this paragraph.



Lying cops have been around FAR longer than Bush, and kids were giving each other bj's before Clinton.

THEN THEY CAME FOR THE CHILDREN
Tue Apr 26, 9:00 PM ET Op/Ed - Ted Rall
By Ted Rall

Feds Arrest Girls for Teen Snottiness

They've vanished into the netherworld of a Homeland Security gulag and their story has already disappeared from the headlines, but the shocking case of two 16-year-old girls from New York City arrested a month ago ought to inspire outrage among every American worthy of the name. Since the government's reasons for the girls' imprisonment could apply to virtually any teenager, it should also spark fear.


Like many rebellious teens, I fought with my mother. Local police, called to my home during at least one particularly impressive clash of wills and voices, talked us back into the land of the calmly reasonable. Then they left.


Like many young people, I was fascinated by morbid, violent subjects. After I turned in an essay depicting a political assassination from the killer's viewpoint, my creative writing teacher sent me to talk to my guidance counselor. After I assured him that I had no desire to knock off any politicians, he returned me to class.


A quarter century later, my mom and I are best friends and I haven't done anything the Secret Service ought to worry about. Right now, however, two girls from New York City are rotting in a HomeSec prison in Pennsylvania for doing nothing more than I did--one for fighting with her parents and writing an essay, the other accused of being her friend.


In early March, the New York Times reported on April 7, one girl's parents "went to the local police station house" in the Queens Village neighborhood because "their daughter...had defied their authority." Things calmed down and the parents, believing their daughter had been scared straight, asked the NYPD to forget the whole thing.


It was too late for that.


Without a warrant, NYPD detectives and federal agents burst into the girl's home--no wonder they don't have time to look for Osama!--where they "searched her belongings and confiscated her computer and the essays that she had written as part of a home schooling program," say her family. "One essay concerned suicide...[that] asserted that suicide is against Islamic law." The family is Bangladeshi. They are Muslim. That, coupled with the mere mention of suicide bombing in her essay, was enough to put the fuzz on high alert.


Although she is conservative and devout, the girl and her parents vigorously deny that she is an Islamist extremist (not that such opinions are illegal), but this is post-9/11 America and post-9/11 America is out of its mind.


Based solely on an essay written by one of the two, the FBI says both girls are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to become suicide bombers." But the feds admit that they have no evidence to back their suspicions. Nothing.


"There are doubts about these claims, and no evidence has been found that such a plot was in the works," one Bush Administration official admitted to the Times. "The arrests took place after authorities decided it would be better to lock up the girls than wait and see if they decided to become terrorists," another told the New York Post. The same logic could be used to justify locking up any Muslim, or anyone at all. Heck, maybe that's the idea.


The Bangladeshi girl, who was homeschooled and wears a veil, says she never even met her outgoing and more Americanized "co-conspirator" from Guinea before the cops accused them of plotting to do...something. Maybe.


She says FBI agents threatened to deport her parents and place her American-born siblings, a four-month-old baby and an 11-year-old, in foster care unless she confessed.


Even in PATRIOT Act-era America, alleged fantasies of martyrdom aren't a crime. So HomeSec's ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is holding both two girls as illegal immigrants--one for entering the U.S. without an inspection, the other for overstaying her visa. And even that charge rests on razor-thin ice: "This is a girl who's been in this country since she was two years old," the Guinean girl's teacher says. Ditto for the one from Bangladesh. Holding kids accountable for the actions of their parents is crazy, which is why immigration authorities don't usually do it. Two-year-old babies don't wade across the Rio Grande or overstay their visas. Deporting American teenagers--American in every way that matters--to countries they've never even visited is equally insane.


I would be the first to applaud the FBI if they had arrested two proven would-be suicide bombers before they had the chance to strike. If they have evidence to that effect, they should make it public and bring charges in open court. But that's clearly not the case here.


When this story first broke I didn't write about it because I assumed that a public outcry would soon lead to its reasonable resolution. Sadly, this has not happened.


Homes searched without a warrant, kids thrown in prison for thoughts real and imagined, people's lives destroyed by an out-of-control federal government--will Americans speak up for what's right? Please call and write your congressman and senator to demand the release of the two girls from Queens.

PERSONAL POLITICS BECOME OFFICE POLITICS

How Your Vote Can Get You Fired



You arrive at work early, work hard and leave late. You're quiet, respectful and well liked. You keep your nose clean: when someone brings up politics, you're smart enough to shut up or walk away. You wouldn't want to say anything that might annoy one of your coworkers.

Once you get home, though, you get to be yourself: a committed political activist. You work the phone bank at Republocratic headquarters, update your blog with scathing takedowns of opposing politicians and chat up your neighbors to urge them to vote for your favorite candidates. But when you clock back in, you leave it at the door. You're cool. One morning, your boss calls you into her office. "It has come our attention that you're a Republocrat," she says. "We don't want your type working here. Gather your things and get out. You're fired."

Can she do that? Are your political opinions your employer's business? It depends on the state.

My friend's employer recently gave "Jackie" (not her real name) a choice: give up her political blog or be fired. She lives in Florida, where labor laws prohibit discrimination based on sex or affliction with sickle-cell anemia--but not political expression. Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, head of the Miami chapter of the ACLU says: "The [Florida] law is pretty clear that a private employer can fire someone based on their political speech even when that political speech does not affect the terms and conditions of employment."

If Jackie lived in California or New York, she could sue her boss merely for even threatening her with dismissal. Unless you're spending your free time working for the violent overthrow of the government, those states protect a worker's right to political speech outside the workplace. (Companies may ban some workers, such as store clerks, from wearing political buttons or campaigning during work hours.) But only five states have laws protecting workers' offsite political speech.

Residents of the other 45 states get no help from federal law. "Do not think you're protected by the First Amendment," says Lewis Maltby of the National Workrights Institute. "It doesn't apply to private employment." Only five states, he says, ban political firings. Even contractors that earn income from the government are exempt, as are private offices, shops, restaurants and factory floors--where 85 percent of Americans work.

Last year's presidential election campaign first exposed the problem.

Lynne Gobbell's boss fired her from her job after she refused his demand that she remove the Kerry-Edwards bumpersticker from her car. "I would like to find another job, but I would take that job back because I need to work," she told the Decatur paper. "It upset me and made me mad that he could put a letter in my check expressing his (political) opinion, but I can't put something on my car expressing mine." Coworkers confirm that the company attached a pro-Bush letter to paychecks.

He has that right under Tennessee law.

On the other side of the left-right divide, Playgirl magazine fired editor Michele Zipp after she wrote an article "admitting" that she was a Republican. "I wouldn't have hired you if I knew you were a Republican," Zipp quoted a Playgirl executive. As a New Yorker, she can sue for damages.

Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, every American is entitled to his or her political opinions. But unless you're so wealthy that you can afford not to work, what good is the right to free speech if your employer can fire you for using it--even after working hours? Our hodgepodge of conflicting state labor laws highlights the absurdity of the situation. Why can the leftover "W '04" sticker on your car get you canned in Florida but not in California? How can the United States bring democracy to the Middle East while allowing American citizens to be fired for how they vote?

Extending national protection to outside-the-workplace political expression is something that even Democrats and Republicans in this highly partisan Congress ought to be able to agree upon. Neither party wants its supporters to lose their jobs. The obvious remedy is to add the protection of political speech to the list of activities and identifiers already covered under current federal labor laws: whistle blowing, race, color, national origin, religion, age, gender, etc. Only then will we truly be a nation that values and protects free speech.

Jackie, by the way, has ended her blog. In the town where she lives, jobs are hard to find.