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When are Nazi comparisons deplorable?
For Fox News, only when Republicans are the target
Jan. 16 -- The controversy over comparisons between George W.
Bush and Adolf Hitler in two ads submitted to the anti-Bush ad contest
run by the online activist group MoveOn.org says less about the state
of left discourse than it does about the double standards at Rupert
Murdoch’s News Corporation.
News Corp’s Fox News Channel started the controversy on January
4, airing Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie’s complaint
about the Bush/Hitler comparison. “That’s the kind of tactics
we’re seeing on the left today in support of these Democratic presidential
candidates,” Gillespie charged, calling such tactics “despicable.”
The whole next day (1/5/04), this was a major story on Fox News Channel.
John Gibson asked, “What about the hating Bush movement, the MoveOn.org
and George Soros sponsoring these ads that compare Bush to Hitler?”
— before being corrected that the ads were not sponsored by MoveOn
(or Soros, a funder of the group), and were taken down in response to
complaints.
Sean Hannity accused a guest: “You guys on the left are going so
far over the cliff. You’re making comparisons to the president
and Adolf Hitler.” Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway said on
Hannity’s show, “This is the hateful, vitriolic rhetoric that
has become the Howard Dean Democratic Party.” Bill O’Reilly
cited the ads as evidence that “right now in America the Democratic
party is being held captive by the far, far left.”
It should be noted that however hyperbolic, comparisons to Hitler and
fascism are not unknown in the American political debate. Rush Limbaugh
has routinely called women’s rights advocates “femi-Nazis,”
and references to “Hitlery Clinton” are a staple of right-wing
talk radio. Republican power-broker Grover Norquist on NPR (10/2/03)
compared inheritance taxes to the Holocaust.
Closer to home for Fox News, on the very same day that Gibson, Hannity
and O’Reilly were talking about the Hitler/Bush comparison as evidence
of the left’s extremism, a column ran in the New York Post that
described Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean as a follower
of Josef Goebbels, referred to him as “Herr Howie,” accused
him of “looking for his Leni Riefenstahl,” called his supporters
“the Internet Gestapo” and compared them to “Hitler’s
brownshirts.”
The New York Post, like Fox News Channel, is part of News Corporation,
Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire. And this piece wasn’t
just put up on the Post’s website as part of a contest—it
was written by a right-wing commentator who frequently appears in the
Post’s pages, Ralph Peters, and selected for the op-ed page by
the Post’s own editors. So it’s more than a little embarrassing
that these blatant Nazi comparisons were being made in the Post while
the paper’s corporate sibling was denouncing such comparisons as
a sign of derangement.
So what did the Murdoch organization do? Fox appears to have completely
ignored the Post’s own Nazi analogies—there’s no reference
to the column whatsoever in the cable channel’s transcripts. And
the New York Post seems to have sent the column down the memory hole—clicking
on a link that used to go to Peters’ story gives you a “page
not found” message, and the text isn’t found in the Nexis
media database. (Ironically, in light of this Orwellian disappearing
act, the column also compared Dean to Big Brother.)
In the interview that started the brouhaha, the RNC’s Gillespie
was asked if he would oppose similar attacks on Democrats. He replied:
“If they stoop to the kind of despicable tactic like morphing a
candidate into Adolf Hitler, yes, absolutely, I will tell you right
here on the air. Have me back if any organization does that, I would
repudiate it.”
The same organization that interviewed him did that, through another
of its branches, the very next day. So far, Fox News hasn’t had
him back on to condemn the New York Post.
Source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Women demand gender equality in media
Gaborone, Botswana, Jan. 13- Despite the growing number of women
choosing a media career, very few are in decision-making positions,
a situation the recently formed Botswana Media Women Association (BOMWA)
aims to correct. “In the leadership positions we have not reached
30 percent representation because media remains male-dominated at management
levels,” said Shollo Phetlhu, BOMWA chairperson and acting general
manager of Botswana TV (BTV).
“The media sets the agenda and is the mirror through which the
country looks at itself. We therefore feel that the role of the media
in nation building cannot be complete without the active participation
of women,” she said. Although Botswana has the highest proportion
of women print media practitioners in Southern Africa -- 41 percent
compared to the regional average of 22 percent -- women continue to
complain about entrenched gender imbalances. Challenging the media,
using its own codes and standards, is a strategy BOMWA intends to exploit.
“Our women need to be empowered in the area of training, to keep
abreast of development, because media is dynamic. For example, BTV women
no longer have to carry heavy equipment and can use small, portable,
and up-to-date cameras,” commented Caroline Phiri-Lubwika, information
officer at the Botswana chapter of the Media Institute Southern Africa
(MISA).
“This helps to break down barriers for women wanting to take up
challenging jobs,” she added.
Phiri-Lubwika said giving women a voice through the national media was
also vital.
“In every society women and children suffer the most, so it is
very important to allow them to be able to air their grievances. A male-dominated
management is unlikely to understand problems experienced by women,”
she explained. A recently released Gender and Media Baseline Study conducted
by MISA and Gender Links, a Southern African NGO promoting gender equality,
examined a total of 25,110 news items produced during September 2002,
and made some startling findings.
The study found that news in Botswana, in all mediums, is told primarily
through the voices and perspectives of men. BTV had the highest number
of women sources (24 percent) and the private newspaper, Mmegi, the
lowest (seven percent). There were no women’s voices cited in the
reporting categories of science and technology, crime, agriculture and
religion. Women only make an appearance in stories related to gender
violence.
“There is a stereotype in the minds of decision-makers - women
cannot cover some areas such as politics and sports. We are expected
to cover issues related to entertainment and courts,” said Mmegi
journalist, Shirley Nkepe. “They think that because you are a woman
journalist, you are best used as a sexual object or a vehicle for their
opinions.” Phetlhu noted: “Our organization is open to men
because we want to enroll men who are sympathetic to women’s issues.
Men should not feel threatened, because we are not saying we want to
take their positions.”
Source: IRIN
CBS cuts MoveOn, allows White House ads
during Super Bowl
By Timothy Karr
New York, Jan. 17— The nearly 100 million viewers expected
to tune in to next month’s Super Bowl on CBS will be served up
ads that include everything from beer and bikinis to credit cards and
erectile dysfunction.
They will also see two spots from the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy. What’s missing from America’s premiere
marketing spectacle will be an anti-Bush ad put forth by upstart advocacy
group MoveOn.org. The group had hoped to buy airtime to run “Child’s
Pay,” a 30-second ad that criticizes the Bush administration’s
run-up of the federal deficit.
CBS on Thursday rejected a request from MoveOn to air the 30-second
spot, saying “Child’s Pay” violated the network’s
policy against accepting advocacy advertising, a company spokesperson
told reporters.
At the same time, CBS is allowing ads placed on the docket by the White
House’s anti-drug office. For the third year in a row the White
House has paid between $1.5 and $3 million each for 30-second spots
during the broadcast. The 2004 ads, produced for the White House by
Ogilvy & Mather, are expected to convey a message similar to their
previous Super Bowl spots. While CBS would not reveal the content of
the upcoming ads, previous White House Super Bowl spots drew a controversial
link between casual drug use and the financing of global terrorists.
Writing about the previous ads, LA Weekly media critic Judith Miller
reported that their message plays well into Bush’s anti-terror
campaign because it keeps ordinary citizens under siege and the war
on terror central in their minds — an objective which in 2004 serves
the president’s re-election strategy well.
CBS does not consider the White House ads to cross the line of advocacy.
“We are fallible human beings who do not have Solomon-like wisdom
but try to make rational decisions based on the ads we receive,”
Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS told MediaChannel. “Taking
into account the deep pockets in play in this election, we don’t
want to appear to favor one side over the other.”
MoveOn is now working the “back channels” at CBS, either via
local affiliates or through others within the network to get “Child’s
Pay” on during the Super Bowl this year, said Wes Boyd, MoveOn
co-founder.
Boyd claimed that the networks do place advocacy ads during the Super
Bowl. Moveon.org worked with Washington’s local ABC affiliate WJLA
in 2003 to air “daisy” — an ad based on the famous Lyndon
Johnson 1964 campaign commercial — which urged President Bush to
let the UN Iraqi inspections work.
“It’s not clear to me that the White House ad is a PSA as
opposed to advocacy ad,” Boyd said. “This is about CBS and
where they draw the line. It’s very arbitrary and capricious when
certain ads are accepted while others are not. The networks don’t
reveal their guidelines leaving the public unaware of the process.”
Franks would not comment when asked about previous White House Super
Bowl ads that equated the war on drugs to the war on terror. These ads
appeared in 2002 on the Fox network, which aired the NFL championship
that year, and in 2003, on ABC.
Franks would not reveal the content of the White House ads planned for
CBS’ February 1 broadcast. As a matter of policy CBS does not comment
on ad submissions in advance of broadcast, Franks said, adding that
there is “a thorough vetting of every ad that appears on CBS. End
of sentence.”
MoveOn.org has run afoul of Viacom, CBS’ parent company, in the
past. In February 2003, the grass-roots advocacy group solicited donations
from its email members to raise $75,000 to place an anti-war ad on billboards
in four major American markets. The group claims that they raised the
amount from members in two hours. When they approached Viacom Outdoor
— a division of Viacom and the largest outdoor-advertising entity
in North America — the company refused to post the ads, according
to MoveOn.
In March 2003, MTV, another Viacom-owned entity, refused to accept a
commercial opposing war in Iraq, citing a similar policy against advocacy
spots that it says protects the channel from having to run ads from
any cash-rich interest group whose cause may be loathsome. “The
decision was made years ago that we don’t accept advocacy advertising
because it really opens us up to accepting every point of view on every
subject,” Graham James, a spokesman at MTV told the New York Times.
The youth-oriented music station regularly airs recruitment ads for
the U.S. Army.
According to Adage.com, Super Bowl 2004 will also include product spots
for AOL, Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline, Daimler Chrysler, FedEx, FritoLay,
GM, H&R Block, Monster WorldWide, the NFL, Pepsi Cola, Philip Morris,
Procter & Gamble, Sony Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Universal
Studios, Visa USA, and Warner Brothers.
A survey of 1,000 adults conducted last year by Eisner Communications
found that 14 percent of those viewing the Super Bowl watch just for
the ads.
Timothy Karr is Executive Director of MediaChannel and Director
of Media For Democracy, MediaChannel’s 2004 citizens’ initiative
to monitor media coverage of the presidential elections.
Source: MediaChannel.org
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