Leslie Griffith

Genetically modified Mouthpieces

Published June12, 2008

The San Francisco Bay Guardian.

In 2003 when I was working as an anchor for a San Francisco television station, anchors and reporters across the country were asked by the White House to refer to the Iraqi invasion as Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). We were asked to call the war in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Operation Infinite Justice (OIJ) had a rocky start because most of America’s Arab allies were offended. Muslims believed only Allah could provide “Infinite Justice.”
Even so, with press releases in hand journalist’s repeated genetically modified words as if their DNA depended upon it.   Genetically modified language is when propaganda wins, journalist sell out and the public loses. It is when words are twisted and massaged and spun until an entire suit of lies is woven to cover the guilty and cloak the truth. The Genetically Modified language, in the case of Iraq, was full of false bravado and moral superiority, in attempts to turn lies into honorable causes our dear children were willing to go to war for. 

But nothing caught on like “The War on Terror.”  It was a White House propaganda bonanza! Whole networks built their news around swirling “War on Terror” graphics and anchors began stories with “Today in the war on Terror,” while most of the world considered Americans the terrorists. That’s when I pulled up lame and refused to dance the destructive dance. Most of us who complained are gone now after some pretty nasty break ups.

Journalists as conduits of mass manipulation. I was too naïve then to understand it was nothing new. The lies were as poisonous as the tons of saran, mustard and VX nerve agents President Bush told us Saddam wanted to use on us. But, as the lies began scrubbing the girl away and the woman’s eyes opened, I started seeing the media’s complicity in the pain and death that followed. I read every book on propaganda I could find. I quickly learned Genetically Modified language was one of Joseph Goebbels favorite propaganda tools. But the dopes got duped.

Even so, many corporate “journalists” eagerly grabbed an American flag pining it to their lapels. Rooting for the war is much easier than asking hard questions revealing a conflict based on lies and a country led by liars.  Hard questions lead to other hard questions. Linear logic in this case is frightening.

We all wanted desperately to believe the White House Mantras.  Many are still repeating subtle propaganda in the name of patriotism on our nightly newscasts today. That’s why I am writing this now.

As you most likely are standing in judgment, I offer up this sliver of attempted redemption.  Journalist like most Americans are patriots too, we don’t want to believe the government is lying, but as odious as it may sound to the “My Country Right or Wrong people,” finding and revealing those lies used to be our job.

“The fourth Branch” was created to watch the government and anyone else using lies to gain power and profit at the expense of the safety and security of the American people.

Also, I ask the American public to consider their own role in the Iraqi quagmire.

Five years ago, when President Bush likened Saddam to Hitler in order to justify going to war, questioning the President’s motives was considered by corporate America unpatriotic.  Corporations exist for one reason: to make money.

Patriotism and genetically modified language delivered to newsrooms directly from the White House was easy. The words were powerful because “War on Terror” not only sounds authoritative, it makes a great graphic! All the polls agreed!

The President’s approval rating was high when America invaded Iraq and the media corporations blow toward the money. More viewers= more money.  So Patriotism was served up instead of unbiased news.
The media corporations began buying anchors and reporters who did not understand their part in the body bags.  Anchors, producers and assignment editors who would go along to get alone were hired, and they got to keep their pay checks and health coverage. This is why Disney, Viacom, Westinghouse  G.E., Murdoch and Cox should not own newsrooms. They are often the very ones the press should investigate.

Cognitive journalists can now see that using the White House Genetically Modified language with unquestioning devotion is one of the many reasons we lost the public trust five years ago.

The fourth branch our fore-fathers envisioned is broken. We became stenographers. Does the red-tally light on that newsroom camera lobotomize us?  Part of the problem is putting corporate anchors in anchor chairs where reporters should be. Certainly experienced reporters would notice the genetically modified words and their own complicity when it seems completely lost on those covered in layers of lip-gloss.

Now that former Press Secretary and once staunch Bush ally, Scott McClellan is walking toward redemption and has found the courage to speak the truth, the “Deer in the headlights” look on his face as he turned in his resignation makes perfect sense. I knew something was up.
Practicing Prevarication for a living wears most people down.

Now that the president’s approval rating has plummeted, it no longer takes courage to toss the White House pompoms in the trash heap and the genetically modified language with it.

With Bush’s approval rating lower than a snakes belly, no commercials will be lost if journalists are brave now, but we have lost more than we ever imagined, “ the penultimate loss” nearly five thousand dead American soldiers.

I propose journalists stop repeating Genetically Modified White House language, but they also go a step further.  I am about to fall on my sword here, so please open your mind.

On the very day it was leaked that Scott McClellan’s book reveals the country went to war based on known lies, the sweetest shiniest, dimple faced, airbrushed Bay Area Murdoch girl began a broadcast by announcing:
“Another American has given his life for his country today.”

Here is the falling on the sword part.

I was once that girl, but girls someday grow into women. Today I know that soldier was one of thousands who bravely believed in what the president said and died believing a lie the press helped promote.
I propose to this anchor women, who I imagine to be a nice person, read this instead:

“Another American has died in Iraq today, he was a beloved brother and child and he was number 4,084.
Then perhaps follow that with the number of wounded Iraqi veterans 30,329.
  In an attempt at truly unbiased  journalism end with the number  1,217.892 Iraqis who have lost their lives.

If this war, as McClellan says, and dozens of other experts have pointed out, was based on a great lie, let’s honor those who were brave and honorable and willing to believe the lie by bringing them home alive and stop repeating Genetically Modified words that glorify a conflict American journalists could have helped prevent by putting their pompoms down.

A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall

My next door neighbors are watching Chinese television. I self-consciously look up from time to time for a peek at them as they stare at Chinese news learning of the country they once fled. I watch with admiration and a thimble full of envy. Three generations under the same roof anxious to learn if anything had changed. The head of the family is known as the most competent builder in the Oakland Hills of California.

I am packing to return to Texas for a few weeks. My learning curve will be intense, but I don't know it yet. The lesson begins when the cab driver pulls up in my driveway.

The cabbie is from Africa. He says he is one of the few thousand allowed to come to America from Ethiopia because of U.S. State Department lotteries. He drew a lucky number. In the short ride to the airport it's clear he's funny, smart, and grateful for my business. He loves America, but during the ride he complains about Iraqi cab drivers at Oakland Airport. He says they take prayer breaks and consider that part of their job. "We all wait in line for the next fare, why cannot they?" he wonders. The practice of praying on the job and then cutting in line is not fair, he says. I tell him they are new immigrants, and they'll get the hang of things soon. He laughs and says he sure hopes so. He says he wants them all to be friends.

Arriving in Austin, the first kind face to great me is the African American hotel desk clerk who welcomes me with a warm smile and self confidence I rarely witnessed in African American men his age when I was growing up. He is the level head at the reception desk. We begin talking about the local headline in the newspaper.

Dell computers was laying off eight thousand eight hundred employees world-wide and the Austin area was about to get a high voltage jolt of present day reality. I ask the elderly gentleman about Dell and the fallout.

"Nine hundred jobs gone from here," he says. "Gone, just like that." He raises both shoulders and both arms in a gesture of empathy for those injured by this evolving global market affecting all our lives. It will be a hard hit for the local economy. Realtors quoted in the paper said residents fear they will have to sell their homes for the price of the remaining mortgage.

"Yep," I say. "Dell has a history of making hay while the sun shines and skippin' town when the going gets tough and the taxes get too -- well, taxing." I had read that Dell has moved plants to China, Ireland, Africa and India, just to mention a few countries with low paid workers and few labor unions. Apparently Poland is desperate for jobs now, so Dell is expanding there.

With fewer jobs, anger was running rampant through the psyches of those in the Austin area. It is anger born of fear and the inevitable by-products followed. Fear leads to arrogance. Fear leads to bullying. Fear leads to military buildups. Fear inflates egos and Texan egos are already legendary. Besides the size of the state itself, the oil industry made a lot of self- indulgent billionaires. Tennessee Williams would have had a wealth of good material here. Remember the television series Dallas in the eighties? Remember J.R?  But that was then: this is now.

My next stop is the 7-11 store owned by an Iraqi man who is itchy and anxious and his fingers never leave the cash register. He nearly jumps out of his skin when a group of Mexican day workers come in to purchase some sub-par nourishment for dinner. Some have worked as illegal labor all day mowing lawns and working construction. Their eyes are dark and tired and their clothes are worn. I stare at the calluses on their hands. They are hard workers. No one disputes that.

I begin the drive to my sister's home in Marble Falls, Texas, about an hour-and-a-half away. When I pull over for lunch I see a nail salon. Inside are about twenty mostly underage female workers from Thailand waiting to scrape the dirt from underneath the toenails of women with thick southern accents and big hair. The young women watch like abused animals for glances of displeasure from the clients. If the boss sees a dissatisfied customer, I get the impression the consequences could be grave.

Back on the road, I remember I have forgotten my e-mail ticket home and call United Airlines for help. I cannot understand the ticket agent on the other end of the line. He is in India.

I pull over thinking the connection must be bad, and if I can get out of traffic, and turn off the engine, I will be able to hear. There is a delay on the phone line that is so frustrating we spend the first few minutes in bizarre overlapping conversations that sound much like talking on a two-way radio. Is it the distance or the phone companies recording the conversations at the U.S. government's request? Reluctant admissions of such events had recently been made.

Either way, after five minutes of trying to understand one another, I eventually feel as if my brains are about to explode and exit via my eye-balls. I begin screaming at the ticket agent who is trying to help me as he sits in what I imagine to be a cheap fabricated cubicle near a busy road in New Delhi. I hear loud diesel fuel vehicles passing by. I am crazy with impotence. No matter how frustrated he is, it does not show. He has a script he has been taught to follow, and he is unflappable as long as the answers are in the script.

"I need my reference number," I speak much too loudly and condescendingly into the phone. I wait for the pregnant pause to pass so I can hear his answer.

"Yes, ma'am, your number is R-ruh, P-uh, R-ruh." At this point I am torn between the liberal guilt I feel for being angry and the impulse to break the phone into little pieces by assaulting the dashboard with it.

I finally ask for his supervisor. His voice raises several octaves. "Am I not pleasing you ma'am? If you will hold on, I will get another agent." I remember my manners and say, "No, let's try one more time." He begins again. This time the combination of numbers and letters contains what I think he is calling a "B." I'm not sure, so I stop him for the umpteenth time.

"Is that a 'B' as in bunny or a 'P' as in pony?" He is off script now and therefore completely lost. I finally ask him to hang on a moment. I let the phone go limp from my hand into my lap and wait a few moments while fighting back tears of frustration. I pick up the phone and spend another ten minutes pulled over on the loud busy roadway trying to understand this very kind, patient man who most likely considers his job a blessing from God.

I cannot wait to get back to Northern California. When I finally do, I stop by my favorite coffee shop in Oakland run by a Cambodian woman whose life story is too horrible to share. She will only say the Khmer Rouge "hurt her family."

I want to get to my house and spend as much time there as possible. I am considering selling it, but the "downturn in the economy," is in full swing in my neighborhood, and it is not a good time to sell. I manage a smile as I think of my southern brother saying, "All Californians ever do is brag about the cost of their real estate!"

I begin asking a friend at the coffee shop how homes are selling. A realtor within ear shot of our grievances about our nest eggs getting fried chimes in. "Advertise in Dubai, the new financial capitol of the world...there are plenty of millionaires there who will buy a home here!"

When I finally walk through my front door, I go directly to my Dell computer. It's dead, and showing no signs of life. I call the help line and reach India. As usual, a very well-mannered man answers, ready to walk on hot coals to help me.

There is a sea change occurring in America and we are now a world connected, whether we like it or not. So we must ask ourselves, how can we survive? Is there a way to build bridges? How can we take this potentially explosive mix of chaos and find the promising essence of it?

Will we react by alienating some? Will America become isolated? Will America create more wars in order to remain a "Super Power" while the country is run by third world workers? Or will America re-invent itself and raise diplomats and economists and entrepreneurs and react with wisdom? Will pragmatism win over nationalism?

A hard rain is falling, as Bob Dylan sang. Will America's great thinkers gather the droplets and be part of a bountiful bouquet, or will the nation become dehydrated, and stuck in archaic thinking that could lead to continual drought?

Lions for Lambs -- America in Need of Reporters

Lions for Lambs and a velvet censorship exposed

The movie Lions for Lambs damn near brought on the Post-Traumatic- stress that is someday inevitable for most reporters. Our eyes have to comprehend images that can never be erased and any sane person would never commit to a job that includes witnessing targets of tragedy and hate on a daily basis

We learn to cultivate ice in our veins until the PTS rolls in like fog.  But Lions for Lambs doesn't drift, it jolts. As jolting as sticking a tongue into a light socket.  My hair felt as if it was on fire, and the heartburn in my stomach moved into my throat. My daughter sitting next to me kept asking,  "Mom is this the way it was, is this the way it is?" I bowed my head, felt the ice in my veins melt and began weeping.

Finally someone understood and put on record "America's velvet censorship."

Tear ducts aren't anatomy parts used much by reporters.  Crying is debilitating, inconvenient and unprofessional. If one is unlucky enough to be an anchor as well as a reporter, it makes the eyes and nose red, and viewers are ruthless with rumors. "Could she be stoned, perhaps she's an alcoholic?" Cruelty is an epidemic in America today. You've read the tabloids, its ugly out in the open. Everyone's taking a shot.

Now that Lions for Lambs is on HBO, enough time has passed, and I believe I can write about it while avoiding too much sappy sentiment.

I don't always wait for credits after a movie, but when Lions for Lambs ended, sitting in a deserted theater in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, I could not leave the chair. I was dumbfounded. Considering all that I had witnessed in the last seven years since 9/11, I sat with my mouth open in a catatonic cantaloupe stupor. I could not move from the chair if I had wanted to. I needed to honor Robert Redford, and I needed to see who wrote it. I had to commit the name to memory. "Fire!" my daughter said playfully trying to get me to move. I would not budge.

Lions for Lambs was written by Matthew Cornahan and produced and directed by Robert Redford who reaches into the depths of human nature and knows how to pan the fool's gold from the nuggets that are real. He is a keen observer of human nature, and he was brave to do this film. The Bush administration is vindictive. The older Redford gets, the deeper he is drawn into the heart of any matter. And this film matters.

When I got home, after a menopausal outburst in the shower(as not to frighten the kids,) I pulled it together and Googled Matthew Cornahan.  I could not find out much about his personal background.  Was he a politician? Was he a reporter? Was he a college Professor? Could he have been a soldier?  How did Cornahan and Redford understand every nuance of what a velvet censorship is like? Had Carnahan lived under a dictatorship?

Meryl Streep played the part of the seasoned reporter who wakes up to find she has to chose between stenography and propaganda, and writing what she knows from her experience to be true.  I will not  give the ending away, but the reporter Streep plays has a choice to make. Does she do what she is trained to do, or does she regurgitate a press release and let the manipulators put more lives at risk?

Matthew Cornahan and Robert Redford 's knowledge of the events following the invasion of Iraq is nothing less than brilliant. "The Velvet Censorship" was a complicated erosion of values and the turning points are right there on screen to witness.

Now that the film is out on HBO, I took a deep breath and decided to watch it again.

As I did, I thought of the journalists who recognized the censorship and refused to play a role in it. I thought about the corporations running newsrooms today and how they censor by encouraging infotainment. I thought about today's reporters who don't know their history and are incapable of helping viewers put things in perspective. I thought about the corporations who now own once great newsrooms -- corporations who curry favor with the White House to keep gobbling up more Television and Radio stations. I thought about the courage it took to speak up knowing it could cost careers.

Fear is a powerful sedative, but there are many town criers (reporters) who refused to report only what the White House told them to. This is for them. They are American heroes.

Helen Thomas: Who would have thought after all those soft ball questions all those years lobbed at every President since John f. Kennedy, she would turn out to be a pit-bull? I am ashamed I did not see it before. I want to thank her for insisting the President tell the American people what he was up to. She never did get many answers, and she certainly fell from grace at the White House, but she showed more gumption than anyone else in the White House Briefing" room. "Mr. President what is the mission?" "Mr. President how did Afghanistan turn into Iraq?" " Mr. President the military still hasn't captured Bin Laden." On she went with countless questions which turned the President's face crimson.

I will forever call her Mt. St. Helen.

Dan Rather:  The last of the big boys. He is one tough Texas SOB. CBS and Viacom needed to win favor with the White House and Rather, who breathed life into CBS for years, and earned -- EARNED -- America's trust was thrown out like yesterday's garbage. He is now suing CBS. Rather refused to join the George W. Bush PomPom Brigade, he lost his job and now says he cannot get another one. We are talking about Dan Rather here folks. Then came the accusations against him. I cannot wait to hear his version of how CBS sabotaged his career after he criticized George Bush. I hope he has the fortitude to keep plugging. The world needs to understand what CBS did to him and how the "Tiffany" network is forever tarnished. Dan Rather is an American hero.

Paul Steiger was managing editor of The Wall Street Journal until Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. Steiger has formed an independent- non-profit- news organization called Propublica with some of the best reporters in the country on board. Steiger plans to deliver news to Americans without fear of retribution from commercial interests. He is a journalist in the true sense of the word. He is a stellar example of a man who still believes in the "Fourth Estate." Without it, citizens are uninformed and there is no democracy. Steiger is a patriot.

I thought of mark Ash, the director of Truthout.Org.  His on- line news service has been subjected to every shenanigan imaginable. His paper has been re-directed to subscriber's spam boxes with alarming consistency and his fortitude fighting to deliver alternative views to the American people makes him a present day revolutionary. When this velvet censorship is over Mark Ash should be honored.

I also thought about the dozens of journalists from all over the country who have written me with stories such as this one: "There's a military base right across the street from our television station where soldier's bodies are brought home. We were told never to point our cameras in that direction or ask questions about what's going on there."

Lions for Lambs is for those journalists -- not who tried to stop the war -- but who tried and continue to try to get truth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the public. There are many, many others. Perhaps you can make your own list. The names of those -- many black listed today -- who refused to become stenographers or spread propaganda -- no matter how much we all want the lies to be true.

Seven years after 9/11, and a little more than two weeks before Memorial Day not much has changed. The mission in Iraq is still unclear. With few embedded journalists there, there is no way to know for sure who is telling the truth. PBS' Frontline recently did a story featuring one platoon who video-taped themselves doing their duty just in case the American people had forgotten them.

See: here

If only journalist would be allowed to do their jobs again, Hollywood, soldiers and others would not have to.

There are many journalists who have refused to cheer for the administration and read its press releases without checking for facts. But perhaps this film will help American citizens recognize  manipulation and think twice before keeping quiet.

Ode to Katie Couric and Dan Rather

May 9th, published on The Huffington Post and The Bay Area Guardian.

 

When Katie Couric was given the title of "America's Sweetheart" it was a death knell. America relishes devouring its sweethearts.

If the news magazines and newspapers are correct, Katie Couric's career at CBS, much like Dan Rather's, is toast. But the last chapters of this complex and revealing human drama are not written yet. Even so, the plot, the sub-plots, the lawsuit, the public's perverse interest, and the motivations are nothing if not Shakespearean.

Two years ago, Couric was the first woman to anchor one of the "Big three" networks' evening news broadcasts. On that day, I was called by local reporters for a quote. My own career in television began 26 years ago, about the same time as Couric's. "It's about time," I told the newspaper reporters, clearly focused on Couric breaking a glass ceiling and becoming a "first."

Couric and I have a few things in common. Bay Area viewers watched as I grew up before their eyes just as Katie Couric grew up in full view of the nation. Wives use to say in various ways, "You are the only other woman I will let my husband bring into the bedroom!" The intimacy of television is still very real, but the truth tellers of old are becoming history .

Couric's story certainly includes sexism, ageism, feminism and perhaps other isms. But to focus on those age old problems is to miss the big picture. And the big picture reveals what happens when broadcasting becomes just another business run by people with little or no concern for anything but profit. In this case, Westinghouse, Viacom, and CBS.

The new sales people in charge of many of today's commercial conduits of broadcast news want happy faces on the young women who "read" the news. When the chirpy attitudes evaporate and the young woman grows up -- the order is placed for fresh meat. It's pliable and can be controlled. That's both sexism and ageism. It's certainly nothing new.

In editorial meetings across the country probably at this very moment some male manager is delivering a good ole condescending nose- snort directed at the smartest woman in the room. The woman whose experiences with the new corporate media's lack of public concern and relentless pursuit of profit--has made her void of anchor charm.

It's a peculiar problem for a woman such as Couric in television news because women as objects of desire or objects in general is certainly becoming more popular again. Couric let the network photograph her legs, and use photo- shopped pictures for her publicity shots. Not a good move on her part.

But, that's nothing compared to some of today's female anchors who appear to enjoy being objectified. Farah Fawcett hairdos, layers of lip gloss, and air brushed make-up can make the most determined journalist give up. One recently posed in a bikini.

But perhaps the real focus should not be the "first" female aspect of this drama at all. It should be the relentlessly predatory and unfaithful way in which the new corporate media treats its talent--much like it treats the public. It does not care for either. If CBS believes someone else can bring in more revenue and less controversy, it's out with the old and in with the new. The once revered "Tiffany" network is irreversibly tarnishing itself by eating its own.

Westinghouse, Viacom and CBS were giddy with desire for Katie Couric when she was perky, effervescent and full of mischief. But that fades fast when it becomes clear the stockholders and corporations who buy commercials are the real objects of desire, and those sitting in that chair are not pleasing them. Often times those are the very entities committing crimes against citizens. Hopefully you understand the inherent contradictions in that.

The look on Couric's face these days resembles what I imagine a Christian must have looked like standing naked in the coliseum when the lions were turned loose. It's gut wrenching to watch.

It reminds me of the look on Dan Rather's face while bearing witness to his final days. It was brutal. He was a deer in the headlights appearing to be genuinely stun-gunned into a stupor.

As the most recent CBS-Viacom-Westinghouse drama unfolds and the curtain opens -- Americans are getting a view of the "Tiffany" network now controlled by a false wizard who has taken up residence in what was once the Emerald City.