Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 370, April 27, 2007
On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/
Will this be the last week? That depends... on YOU.
SEVEN Pledges Have Been Received, THREE to go.
The tempo of the Drive is picking up, and now we only need THREE new Pledges to reach the arbitrary goal of ten new Pledges which will allow me to declare the Spring 2007 Pledge Drive a roaring success. We can do it! Wouldn’t we all love to get this Pledge Drive over with? I know I would. But if you haven’t made your Pledge yet it’s up to YOU to get us over the top.
Need I remind you that there are TWO WAYS to make a Pledge? You can...
Make out a check to “Nygaard Notes” and mail it to:
P.O. Box 14354
Minneapolis, MN 55414
To www.nygaardnotes.org , and look for “Donate to Nygaard Notes.”
And, THANK YOU to those of you who took the occasion of the Pledge Drive to RENEW your pledges early! It is humbling and inspiring to have the ongoing support of such thoughtful, engaged people. I promise to do my best to continue to be worthy of your faith in me.
1. “Quote” of the Week
2. News Stories Reported But Never Seen: The Wire Services
3. Where Do Nygaard Notes Readers Live?
4. Need Inspiration to Make a Pledge? Read What They’re Saying About the Notes
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Greetings,
Thanks to all of you who have sent in your Pledges! Because of your faith in and commitment to Nygaard Notes I am now able to not only pay the small bills that are involved in doing the Notes, but also to pay myself over $500 per month for the time I spend producing this newsletter (and the time I spend doing the non-writing support work needed to keep it going). Receiving this amount of income from pledges allows me to cut back my hours at my other jobs to a level that is almost sustainable! That is, I’m able to cling to my sanity and still produce something worth reading. Thanks to you, every year gets a little better, which gives me hope that this project WILL soon become actually sustainable, and will be around for a long time, getting better and better as we go.
It strikes me as nearly miraculous that you all have made it possible for a truly independent journalism project like Nygaard Notes to survive for what will soon be eight years. I have to pinch myself to see if I am dreaming!
At the end of this week’s piece on the wire services I say that “the first job of a journalist is to ask questions.” This may strike some as a surprising statement. Isn’t the job of a journalist to report the news? Well, yes, but before any story is produced, the shape, color, tone, and even the very existence of that story is shaped by someone asking questions. That idea may seem painfully obvious, or it may seem painfully wrong, to some of you, but I personally think that the understanding of this simple idea is the key to becoming media literate. I’ll explain what I mean in the next Nygaard Notes.
Thanks again, Pledgers! Until next week,
Nygaard
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1.
“Quote” of the Week
On March 23rd the National Public Radio program “On the Media” decided—for reasons that only they would know—to give a platform to one Major Armando Hernandez, who is “the media outreach embed chief with the multinational forces in Iraq.” It seems the Pentagon has “recently launched a YouTube [internet video] channel to present carefully chosen video clips of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers succeeding in combat.” As NPR put it, “The channel is only a few weeks old, but already they consider it a success.”
In the course of the interview, the NPR host asked, “Is there anything that’s off limits for soldiers in sending this stuff along to you in hopes that it’ll be posted on the YouTube channel?” And the Major replied:
“The things that we will reject is any video containing profanity, sexual content, extreme gore, operational security violations, mockery of host country or third-country nationals or any footage that depicts the coalition and Iraqi forces in a poor light.”
Later in the interview, the Major described the YouTube project as “a manner in which the military is illustrating an unfiltered view of coalition operations here in Iraq.”
Even the NPR host challenged him on that last comment (“Well, not an unfiltered image.”) But why this propagandist was given national air time in the first place is a question the answer to which NPR should be asked to share with its audience.
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2.
News Stories Reported But Never Seen: The Wire Services
I doubt that most people understand how many important decisions are made each day by the nation’s news editors having to do with what is “news” and what is not. One easy way to gauge this is to compare the daily reports on the wire services with the stories that appear in actual newspapers.
The wire service stories are the stories that are filed and are available to any news editor, but not to the general public. There is a constant feed of news stories coming into the nation’s newsrooms from the wire services every day, every hour in fact, and only some of them are chosen to be “in the news” for that day. Since these stories are so readily available to the nation’s editors—they’re already written!— it’s worthwhile to give a little thought to the patterns that we see in the “news/not news” decisions about whether or not to run them.
I’m not a mind-reader, so I can’t say why some things are included and others are not. But here is a short list of examples of some recent choices that have been made by the nation’s editors on some big stories.
I decided recently to check out a couple of different full-text newspaper databases (Lexis/Nexis and ProQuest Newstand, comparing what I saw on the news wires with what you (or anybody) saw in the newspapers. Here’s what I found.
I started with the top domestic issue that United Statesians are concerned about: Health care. I wondered how much coverage had been given to the bill before Congress that would establish a universal, single-payer health care system in this country. That bill is the “National Health Insurance Act,” HR 676. What I found was that there was one mention (literally, ONE) over the past six months, and that was an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, not exactly one of the nation’s agenda-setters. Not a single news story mentioned the bill, at least not by name. Even on the wire services, there were only 12 mentions. (For those who are interested, those wire services included the Inter Press Service, the Federal News Service, Business Wire, PR Newswire, US Fed News, and others.)
Next I turned to one of the most important foreign policy issues of the day, the triangle of Israel, Palestine, and the United States. The news event I chose was a November 8th attack on Palestinian civilians and the response in the U.N. Security Council.
On November 8th, according to the Associated Press, “Israeli tank shells ripped through a residential neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip [in the town of Beit Hanoun]...killing at least 18 members of an extended family, including eight children, and wounding dozens of others.” The Baltimore Sun called it “one of the worst strikes against Palestinian civilians in six years of conflict with Israel.” The attack caused Hamas to call off their year-old truce with Israel, and calls went out to attack U.S. targets in response. “America ...is responsible for the Beit Hanoun massacre. Therefore, the people and the nations all over the globe are required to teach the American enemy tough lessons,” Hamas’ military wing said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.
While the attack was widely reported in this country, a tremendously significant event three days later was not. That event was a U.S. veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution that “would have condemned Israeli military operations in Gaza as well as Palestinian rocket fire into Israel, while calling for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and a cessation of violence by both parties.” The resolution was supported by 10 nations, with four abstentions, in the 15-member Council.
In the week after the U.S. used its veto power in this way, the wire services sent out 95 articles on the subject. Of these 95 stories, exactly one was seen in the U.S. press, on page 14 of the Los Angeles Times. The wire services that covered it included the Bahrain News Agency, Xinhua General News Service (China), Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Qatar News Agency, Inter Press Service, and Voice of America. (In all cases, these are English-language versions made available to U.S. newsrooms.) As is often the case, we see here that the veto—and its very considerable political implications—likely was well-reported and thus well-known around the world. Except among the citizens of the country that cast the veto.
The final example I examined was coverage of an event that occurred just two days after the veto, and which was highly relevant to that story. November 13th saw the release of an important report by a high-level international group, led by Spain and Turkey, that had been meeting for a year with the aim of “generating a report containing an analysis of the rise in cross-cultural polarization and extremism and a set of practical recommendations to counter this phenomenon.” Sponsored by the United Nations, the group is called the “Alliance of Civilizations,” and their conclusions are highly relevant for those concerned with the phenomenon of “terror” and for what some have mis-characterized as a “clash of civilizations.” In fact, offering a thoughtful response to the idea of a “clash of civilizations” was specifically what gave rise to the project.
In the week following the release of this report, the wire services had 45 stories about it, while the nation’s newspapers ran a total of two stories, both on the inside pages (The Christian Science Monitor and the NY Times). Some of the wire service headlines were accurate, including “No Clash of Civilizations, Says UN Report,” and “Politics Root Cause of West, Muslim Divide: UN Report.”
(The work of the Alliance of Civilizations project is sufficiently important that I plan to report on it in the pages of Nygaard Notes very soon.)
So, here’s the score on the three wire service/newspaper comparisons you just read:
National Health Insurance Act: Wire Services, 12 stories. Newspapers, 1.
U.S. Veto of Security Council Resolution on Beit Hanoun: Wire Services, 95. Newspapers, 1.
Alliance of Civilizations report release: Wire Services, 45. Newspapers, 2.
TOTAL SCORE on three major stories, domestic, national, international, MADE AVAILABLE VS PUBLISHED: 152 to 4.
And, of course, there are many, many more newsworthy events that are never reported at all, even by the news services. But that’s another story.
(The Lexis/Nexis database does not cover all newspapers, but does cover the major “agenda-setting” ones, like the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and so forth. I also looked at the Proquest Newsstand full-text newspaper database, where the results were very similar.)
The first job of a journalist is to ask questions. And the nature of those questions—including the first and most important question: What is important and what is not?—is determined by a whole bunch of things. One of those things is not a conscious conspiracy to filter the news on the part of U.S. journalists. I mean, there are upwards of 58,000 full-time journalists working at mainstream U.S. daily newspapers—that would be a very large conspiracy!
As a look at the wire services shows—and I’ve taken many looks in addition to this one—there are a lot of journalists out there who are doing good work. And it is also true that there are patterns to be seen in the questions that are asked, and not asked, in the shaping of our information environment.
Those patterns have to do with values. In the next Nygaard Notes I’ll take a look at how values shape the questions we ask, and where those values come from.
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3.
Where Do Nygaard Notes Readers Live?
People often ask me where the readers of this hard-to-categorize newsletter reside. Since I distribute Nygaard Notes mostly by email, the truth is that I don’t know where most of you live! But I certainly know where those of you who send in pledges come from, and it’s quite a range.
People who have sent in pledges hail from 24 different states in the U.S., and five countries besides the U.S. Add in the readers who have not pledged, and you see 28 states represented. All over the nation, from Washington State to Florida, from Vermont to California, Texas to Wisconsin, Michigan to Arkansas, people are reading Nygaard Notes! Plus, many many many from my own state of Minnesota, o’course.
While I’m at it, why don’t I mention some of the other places that Nygaard work has been published, since it would not be possible to make the time to do the type of writing I do without the support of all of you who have sent in Pledges?! I have had pieces published recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, in Z Magazine, on the website “OpEd News.com,” and in the excellent national newsletter Counterpunch. As the level of Pledge support grows, I will find time to submit more pieces to reach a wider audience, as so many of you have told me that I should. I’m getting to it—thanks to you!
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4.
Need Inspiration to Make a Pledge? Read What They’re Saying About the Notes
Pledge Drives are a time to tell you about Nygaard Notes, where it comes from and what it is trying to do. It’s also a time to let individual readers know that you are not alone in your support for the Notes. This third week of the Spring 2007 Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive seems like a good time to let you read a few of the comments that have come my way recently (unsolicited!) from other readers. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s what Pledge Drives are for, I guess.
Back in September of 2006, a Peace Studies professor in Indiana asked to use some Nygaard Notes material in his classes, and in the process he said:
“Your work is encouragement for all of us who wrestle with entertainment-focused media and public disengagement... You move readers to new depths. It’s a much needed task and I’m grateful to have been led to the Notes.”
Later on, in November, reader Linda wrote in to say:
“You are a powerhouse in the guise of a modest, world-changing revolutionary.”
A bunch of people wrote to say nice things in February of this year. Among them were Tony, who said in response to Notes #362:
“You’ve written something very important here.... you’ve got some good stuff here that ought to get wide exposure.”
Davis echoed that sentiment a couple of weeks ago, in response to Notes #367, saying:
“I feel enlivened by the great, impassioned writing of these notes.... Your voice deserves to be heard.”
And here’s Paul, who said:
“I appreciate and learn from each of your analyses. In your take on the media, you are the Noam Chomsky of the Twin Cities.”
And finally, here’s Jocelyn, who simply said:
“Many thanks and continued praise for your fantastic work!“
Well, now that you’ve read all that stuff (I didn’t make any of it up, honest!), it’s time for you to FINALLY send in that Pledge you’ve been meaning to send. You know what to do:
MAIL A CHECK TO:
Nygaard Notes
P.O. Box 14354
Minneapolis, MN 55414
OR
GO ONLINE
To www.nygaardnotes.org , that is, and look for “Donate to Nygaard Notes.”
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Jeff Nygaard
National Writers Union
Twin Cities Local #13 UAW
Nygaard Notes
http://www.nygaardnotes.org
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