Why Am I Not Surprised?

When I turned on the radio, I was surprised to hear the authoritative voice of a woman I thought to be a news anchor introducing a scientist, a qualified individual I was led to believe, who declared that fears of global warming were unfounded and assured listeners that such phenomena were merely part of the Earth’s natural cycle. When the clip ended I learned that I had just been listening to a VNR.

In November of this year, Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price released a report for the Center for Media and Democracy entitled “Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs.” This is a follow-up report to their original finding that 46 television stations in 22 American states were airing video news releases, fake news reports provided by PR firms, without disclosing their nature, source, or sponsorship. This information is shown on VNRs before the main content, but television stations frequently edit it out. News anchors introduce the subject and speakers of VNRs then seamlessly cut to the story. The viewer is left to think that this is a news item like any other and will view it with the same confidence in its veracity and impartiality.

The truth is that the information given in VNRs can be misleading or even wrong, and they are anything but impartial, being funded by and scripted for corporate and government clients. Included in the report are 33 VNRs with sponsors such as General Mills, GlaxoSmithKline, and General Motors. Take the VNR that I heard on the radio, for example. It was entitled “Global Warming and Hurricanes: All Hot Air?” and was released in June 2006 by the broadcast PR firm Medialink Worldwide. They declined to mention that their client was a website published by Tech Central Station, which was at the time a project of the Republican lobbying and PR firm DCI Group. Exxon Mobil is a DCI Group client and has made generous donations to Tech Central Science Foundation for its support on the issue of climate change. The VNR speakers were two scientists who, in contradiction to the scientific community at large, purport that global warming is a “hoax” and have profitable relations with corporations which seek to propagate and legitimize this opinion.

This doesn’t relate to rights exactly (though a few corporations named in the report complained that it was an affront to their freedom of speech) but I think that it exposes an important issue. Farsetta and Price aren’t calling for the censorship or banning of VNRs, only that their use be clearly and fully disclosed so that viewers can make a critical assessment of their content. I want to say that we have the right to know the truth, but I don’t think that the charter actually covers that one, so we’ll have to leave it up to journalistic integrity.

Read the report summary and highlights and watch VNRs:
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews2/execsummary

tag: last301

A Dangerous Symmetry

The themes of circularity and continuity in the Ixil Triangle reading provide a good topic for discussion. They first appear when the author describes how the Spaniards, after vanquishing the Quichés and the Ixils, “took over the existing structure of subjugation and tribute already laid out”(63) by the elites of the indigenous peoples themselves. Before the Spaniards set foot on the continent, it was already immersed in a history of conflict, there were the oppressed and indebted and those who reaped the benefits of these conditions. Were the Spaniards merely inserted into a dominant role destined to be played by various actors over centuries of Guatemalan history? Their brutality and greed, therefore, were to be expected of a dominant actor. Their subjugation of non-dominant actors was only unusual because its destructiveness was intensified by their guns, bacteria, and horses. Otherwise history continued as usual, an endless contest between winners and losers. The author seems to suggest this interpretation. The “recurring cycles” and “remarkable symmetry” which he observes in Guatemalan history give the impression of order and inevitability.

Multiple instances of history repeating itself under different guises are cited within the reading. For example, the civilian patrols made in the 1980s to seek out subversion were said to echo the militias formed to protect colonial Spanish landowners, each fighting its own specter of threat, and the model villages maintained by the army in the Mayan highlands, also in the 1980s, reflect the strategy of the colonial Spaniards to fracture indigenous communities to facilitate their control and exploitation. Each individual element may pass away but the author appears to be illustrating that same roles run throughout history. There is always an oppressor and an oppressed who engage in essentially the same actions across time. This is where the notion of history as a permanent confrontation emerges; these roles involve asserting dominance, quashing threat, overthrowing old regimes with new ones. As the captain from the Guatemalan army unequivocally states, “the war against subversion is total, permanent, and universal”(82).

The historical perspectives discussed above are extremely problematic because they rob certain groups of agency and deny the possibility of change, as well as set up the framework for excusing historical wrongs and perpetrating new ones. If a human nature is posited which inherently creates social differentiation and seeks dominance over others, there is always an acceptable other and underdog. Even though power changed hands over the centuries of Guatemalan history and the perceived threat to the established order changed, a state of victimizers and victims endured, with the indigenous communities as the perpetual victim. This perspective of history is clearly one that will perpetuate violence in all of its manifestations because it necessitates conflict and naturalizes the aggression and prejudice of a dominant group over a non-dominant group which they have posited as inferior and/or threatening.

Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.

tag: last301

Bitter Crop

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

If you imagine South America instead of the American South, where Abel Meeropol wrote this poem in 1939 after seeing a photograph of the lynching of two black youths, it could be describing the plantations of the same era in Guatemala. The impoverished workers endured terrible abuses at the hands of landowners, where it was not uncommon for the bodies of those who dissented to be burned or hung from trees, a bitter crop amongst those which they laboured to harvest.

Poem found on this page:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=66&ItemID=11517

tag: last301