CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin: The theme in coverage of the current Mideast peace negotiations going on in Washington between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas appears to be skepticism. But does being critical of this process mean you don’t want peace? We’ll hear from Josh Ruebner, the national advocacy director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

Also on the show: Grading teachers based on how well their students perform on tests is a popular practice with so-called education reformers, White House policy makers and journalists. You almost wouldn’t know that the controversial policy has many critics and has even sparked demonstrations against the Los Angeles Times, when it published the rankings of 6,000 primary school teachers. We’ll talk to education researcher Diane Ravitch, a contributor to a new report on teacher ratings from the Economic Policy Institute, and the author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

All of that’s coming up but first, as usual, we’ll take a look back at the week’s press.

—We talked with Phyllis Bennis last week about how White House claims about “the end of combat in Iraq” were not exactly accurate, even though much of the media took them at face value. As Bennis and other critics have indicated, 50,000 U.S. combat troops, re-branded as advisors, remain in Iraq, including 4,500 special forces tasked with hunting and killing insurgents and training Iraqi assassination teams. This, in addition to increasing number of private contractors who will come under the command of the State Department, instead of the Pentagon, a move that gets around the “Status of Forces” agreement that the U.S. has with Iraq.

So, there’s no excuse for NBC News anchor Brian Williams to report without qualification, as he did on August 18, “It’s gone on longer than the Civil War, longer than World War II., and tonight, U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq.”

The same for liberal MSNBC commentators like Keith Olbermann, who touted the story as a historic event in a “special edition” of Countdown, on which Olbermann’s fellow MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow gushed about the very last U.S. combat troop to leave Iraq: “We just saw, right here live with that gate closing, the last U.S. combat troop, I’m totally covered in goose bumps. It is an important moment.'”

But as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald points out, kudos should go to Associated Press Standards editor, Tom Kent, who, in a memorandum, instructed AP journalists not to perpetuate the White House hype. Wrote Kent: “To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months.”

—The debate over tax policy is back in the media—specifically, the debate about whether to extend the Bush tax cuts. Barack Obama has long supported the idea of extending those lower rates for 98 percent of the population. The highest-earning 2 percent, meanwhile, would see their top rates go back up to where they were in the 1990s.

But some media seem to be trying to make that hard to understand. The Washington Post ran a September 8 piece that more or less got the facts right. But the headline was “Obama Set Against Bush Tax Cuts.” That spin might please the Republican National Committee; it does no service to readers. The New York Times had a similar piece previewing Obama’s speech on taxes. The story explained that Obama supports renewing many of the cuts, and further, that his package is “designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies.” The headline? “Obama Is Against a Compromise on Bush Tax Cuts.” Maybe they should give the headline writers a break and just print: “Obama Said Something; Story Below.”

—The September 7 New York Times featured an interesting story on its front page: Republican operatives in Arizona are recruiting “drifters and homeless people” to run on the Green Party ticket in order to pull votes away from Democrats. One of the Republicans involved, Steve May, freely admitted his role and introduced the reporter to his hand-picked candidates. Two Democrats are quoted slamming the tactic, but Columbia Journalism Review’s Joel Meares noticed something missing: the Green Party. The Times notes that “the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates,” but not a single genuine Green Party official or member gets to speak in the piece. At one point, the reporter explains that the Greens don’t have the resources to put candidates on ballots around the state, which creates the opportunity for write-in contenders to win primaries and get on the November ballot. Stories that deem the Greens worth talking about, but not to, probably aren’t going to help that.

—Arizona governor Jan Brewer was forced to acknowledge, sort of, her abject lying and fear-mongering about border violence in a September 3 debate. Prodded by her Democratic opponent, Brewer claimed she “misspoke” when she claimed on Fox News in June that there had been beheadings in the Arizona desert, and presumably misspoke again when she reasserted the claim later on local TV. “That was an error, if I said that,” said the woman who said that, at least twice.

It’s good to put that particular lie to rest, but it would be better if corporate media themselves would revisit their own distortions and errors in coverage of the issue. For years now we’ve read about violence “spilling over” into the U.S. from Mexico, as though that country’s crisis were something alien and unknown, having nothing to do with the U.S. or its policies. A new report from the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns underscores how this “spill over” metaphor distorts reality:

Most of the guns come from Texas, California and Arizona. The imaginary crime wave supposedly caused by unauthorized immigration from Mexico is fodder for the Jan Brewers of the country. It would be helpful for media observers to call attention to the actual assistance U.S. gun dealers are providing to violent criminals on the other side of the border.

—Finally, two of the biggest funders of climate-denial propaganda, trying to conceal the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet, are the oil company ExxonMobil and the oil tycoons of the Koch family, led by Charles and David Koch. And two of the biggest funders of Nova, PBS’s leading science program and one of the main sources of scientific information on television, are ExxonMobil and David Koch.

Is there something wrong with this picture? PBS doesn’t think so. Nova’s executive producer, asked about Koch’s funding of the program, declared that Nova “maintains complete, independent editorial control of its content.” Which is, of course, what commercial broadcasters say about their sponsors; the reason we have public broadcasting in the first place is because we don’t believe them.

PBS ombud Michael Getler, for his part, asserts that “as a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust Nova.” If “trust” were an adequate response, though, then you wouldn’t need to have an ombud, would you?

Koch’s funding of Nova became an issue after Nova reran an episode on August 31 about human evolution that veered off into a peculiar discussion of the positive benefits of climate change. “We’re not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change,” the narrator declared, followed by scientist Mark Maslin saying, “We can survive the future, because we are that creature, because we are that smart.”

What the program doesn’t say is that Maslin believes we can survive the future by restricting the burning of fossil fuels that makes billions for Nova’s sponsors. He instead comes across as the kind of don’t worry, be happy Pollyanna that those sponsors like to fund—well, that’s just a coincidence, isn’t it? If you trust Nova.

JOSH RUEBNER

CounterSpin: The Associated Press reported September 3 that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, now engaged in talks with Palestinian President Abbas, faced some internal opposition to what they called his “peace moves.” The piece went on to quote a Palestinian activist who it described as opposed to the resumption of the talks, “though he has supported peace efforts in the past.” The idea seems clear: if you want peace between Israelis and Palestinians, you ought to support the current U.S.-brokered negotiations now underway. But is that true? Or are there legitimate concerns about the process that we ought to engage?

We’re joined now by Josh Ruebner, he’s the national advocacy director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

Welcome to CounterSpin, Josh Ruebner!

Josh Ruebner: Thanks so much for having me.

CS: Well, it might seem like common sense to think that it’s bound to be a good thing for parties engaged in conflict to sit and talk, but in your recent piece on these negotiations you suggest that it isn’t really that simple. What could be the downside to something that’s called a “peace talk?”

JR: Well, I think it’s true that if both parties to a conflict agree to come to the table and negotiate in good faith, there is every reason to expect that the sides will be able to reach a positive resolution to the conflict. But that’s not at all the situation that you have here with the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks. Recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted in a leaked videotape from 2001 bragging about how he stopped the 1990s peace process, known as the Oslo process. And his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is himself an Israeli settler who lives on expropriated Palestinian land and has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. So it’s very difficult to see, with negotiating partners such as these, how Palestinians can reasonably expect good faith efforts out of their Israeli counterparts for these negotiations. And the danger of course is that failed negotiations, sham negotiations, only breed cynicism and anger and bitterness and disillusionment about the prospects for coexistence in the long term.

CS: And if talks fail, the idea that well, we tried talking—that can have a material impact. Well, you also have concerns about the very structure of these talks. For example, the matter of who is at the table, or what principles are going to guide them.

JR: Absolutely. The Obama administration has really done itself no favors by convening these negotiations with no terms of reference, as they’re known in diplomatic language. Terms of reference are basically guiding principles for negotiations. And when Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell was asked at the press conference when he announced the resumption of negotiations if there were going to be terms of reference for these negotiations, he said no the parties will figure that out for themselves. And that’s a really very dangerous thing, I think, because all previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been based on very clear guiding principles, and those refer to different UN resolutions that have been passed over the decade that kind of lay the framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the absence of those guiding principles, what’s going to happen is that Israel will use its overwhelming asymmetry of power to try to dictate unfair terms to the Palestinians that are not based on human rights, not based on international law, not based on UN resolutions, and therefore don’t have a snowball’s chance of being accepted.

CS: The New York Times ran a headline: “Settlements in West Bank Are Clouding Peace Talks,” which sounded a little inappropriate, but I took more seriously a Q&A that the AP ran for readers on September 3. In answer to a question about what’s “standing in the way of a deal?” AP explained: “Among the major obstacles is Palestinian opposition to Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” You sort of have to read that as Palestinians being the obstacles to peace on the settlement issue. What do you make of that framing? Is it just Palestinians who oppose settlements in the West Bank?

JR: Well, I think that framing is so problematic. I mean how can you expect Palestinians to sit down at the table and negotiate with Israel when Israel continues to colonize the exact territory that is envisioned for a Palestinian state. And of course it’s not just Palestinians who believe that Israeli settlements are illegal. They are in fact illegal under international law, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which expressly prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into territories that it occupies, which is exactly what Israel has done since 1967. And the entire world, including the United States, views Israel’s settlements as being illegal.

CS: Well, maybe one of the damaging themes that we find in media is just the idea that “there will ever be conflict” in the Middle East; it’s not solveable, it’s tribal, it’s like death and taxes. Is there anything inherently inevitably complicated about this process, as opposed to South Africa or Northern Ireland? And where do you see cause for hope?

JR: I don’t think there’s anything inherently complicated or difficult to understand about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You have two nationalisms struggling over the same piece of land. And for the past 100-plus years, first the international Zionist movement, and then the state of Israel has attempted to impose its domination over all of historical Palestine, which is what it’s done and continues to do this day. Really the only equitable solution to this is to share the historical land of Palestine between the two nationalisms. But so far, Israel hasn’t been willing to treat Palestinians as human beings who are equal and have equal rights to them and to the land that they are the indigenous inhabitants of. You know, the situation of apartheid in South Africa lasted in one guise or another for hundreds of years. But when the parties came to the table and the rulers of apartheid South Africa decided that they had to dismantle their discriminatory regime, the negotiations themselves actually didn’t take all that long. So, you know, if Israel were to come to the table, were to say you know what we’re not going try to exert apartheid control over Palestinians anymore, we’re not going to occupy Palestinians anymore, we’re going to treat Palestinians as equal human beings to us, then I don’t believe there would be any need to have these negotiations drag on for more than a year.

CS: Well, and you see some change in the air, on the ground in terms of public opinion, but also in media coverage.

JR: Absolutely. I think the fact that Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006 and attacked the Gaza Strip in 2008 and 2009 in such a really ferocious and brutal manner has really opened the eyes of millions of people around the world to the brutality of Israel’s treatment of not only Palestinians but Lebanese as well. And I think that the proliferation of alternative media, new media, social media makes it much more difficult for Israel to control the narrative that it’s the victim in this conflict, that it’s the underdog, that it’s surrounded by a bunch of hostile powers. Because people can see for themselves through videos, through on-the-ground testimony that don’t need to be filtered through the mainstream media, that that indeed is not that case, that indeed Israel is the aggressor and is victimizing Palestinians and Lebanese. So I think that’s contributing to a vast sea change in public opinion.

CS: We’ve been speaking with Josh Ruebner, national advocacy director for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. They’re on the web at EndTheOccupation.org. His piece, “Top 10 Reasons for Skepticism on Israeli-Palestinian Talks,” appeared on the Huffington Post.

Thank you very much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

JR: Thanks so much for having me.