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The cable news crawl has raised the question; is Iraq on the brink of civil war? Members of the Bush administration say no. The Iraqi Defense Minister has said that if civil war breaks out, it will never end. The Washington Post cited a body count of 1,300 directly related to sectarian violence in Iraq - but stopped short of drawing linguistic conclusions. So, who really gets to make the call? Bob explores the question with some of the experts.
If you control the language, do you control the debate? Choosing "freedom fighter" over "terrorist" or "insurgency" over "civil war" has the power to sway a political debate in either direction. But why? Bob speaks with Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford University and author of Going Nucular, about the role language plays in any political discussion.
Mid-term elections are starting to heat up and the press is in hot pursuit of themes around which they can organize their coverage - for example, "Democrats in disarray" or "Republicans mired in scandal." But those seem a little tired. So the media have been quick to pounce on a fresh narrative being offered - an expanding field of veterans, running for Congress as Democrats. Brooke talks with political onlookers on both sides of the spectrum about this "Band of Brothers."
The American oil industry is funneling some of its massive 2005 profits into a P.R. campaign designed to play down the size of the profits, and play up the industry's good will. First, Bob talks with Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the group behind the ad campaign. Then, with Tyson Slocum, from the advocacy group Public Citizen, who says big oil is pulling a fast one on the American public.
The White House spokesperson has briefed the press live on TV regularly since 1998 when Clinton Press Secretary Mike McCurry allowed CNN's cameras go live. The result is that the public can watch as reporters do the dirty work of trying to get answers from the spokesperson. Theatrics are a necessary part of the process but do reporters play it up for the camera? First, Bob talks with veteran ABC newsman Sam Donaldson. Then, Brooke talks with Mike McCurry.
The late media critic Neil Postman argued in his seminal book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," that as TV prevailed over the printed word, it impaired our ability to make sense of a world of information. Jay Rosen writes the blog, PressThink and is a professor at NYU, where Postman taught. Rosen counts Postman as both mentor and hero and joins Brooke to discuss "Amusing Ourselves to Death," now in a new edition, as ever more relevant.
Highlights from Past ShowsFor the past seven years, intelligence operatives have been poring over public records in the National Archives. Their orders: to identify documents that should never have been made public in the first place. The problem: much of what they decided to re-classify has already been widely disseminated, and poses no apparent threat to national security. Brooke speaks with Matthew Aid, the historian who inadvertently discovered the secret reclassification program.
Vice President Cheney was at the center of several serious stories this week. The one about how he shot his friend and didn’t tell the press definitely won the most coverage, but it also became a symbol for the other more complicated stories about cherry-picking intelligence in the lead-up to war and authorizing the dissemination of classified information. Murray Waas, a writer for The National Journal, joins Brooke to recap the Veep’s big week in the press and assess whether the news media took aim at the right story.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
