The Ehrlich Report

It has become traditional among those of us practicing punditry to look back over the year and to offer a sage analysis of what has transpired. In keeping with publication in the alternative press, I recount the assaults on the establishment press and the fairly successful attempts to control access to information by the Bush regime.
The easiest way for the White House to control information is to make it secret. According to This Week magazine, last year the feds spent approximately $7.2 billion classifying new documents and reclassifying old ones. For those items not yet declared secret, the Attorney General’s office issued a policy directive to federal agencies to limit the accessibility of public documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). As a result, response time to FOIA requests has slowed and the charge for retrieval has skyrocketed. In the case of the Army spying on Baltimore peace activists, they were told that the cost of retrieving the information they wanted under FOIA would cost them almost 2,000 dollars, about $23 an hour to copy their files.
If all these controls were not enough, the White House has seriously undermined the availability of routine public information by restricting access to unclassified materials in libraries, archives, and other “official” sources including government websites. This is all rationalized as a counter terrorism measure.
Many operations of the government which should be transparent have been hidden from us. The military prisons are an example. Information about prisoners, prison conditions, the location of prisons, and torture are not only hidden, but those revealing such information face trial, or at least public attacks for revealing “secret” information. One example in 2005 was the Pentagon and State Department’s attack on Newsweek for telling the story of a Koran being desecrated in the Guantanamo prison. Newsweek and the other news media that ran the story were accused of causing rioting in Afghanistan.
Last year the Bush propaganda machine paid hundreds of thousand of dollars to columnists to plug White House policies. Further, an estimated 20 federal agencies spent $250 million to produced fake video news releases which they distributed to TV stations nationally disguised as real news items. In one of the more bizarre ploys, the White House communications staff packed their news briefings with a phoney reporter. The “reporter’s” purpose was ostensibly to redirect critical questions and to lob softballs to the Press Secretary.
The Bush regime has extended its control to scientific publications when the findings of research did not support their ultraconservative beliefs. Administration spokespersons have lied about the efficacy of condoms in slowing the transmission of AIDS; about the dangers of mercury; about the safety of nuclear waste storage and the Yucca Mountain storage site in particular.
Intimidation was, of course, part of the Bush-Cheney media control tool kit. Reporters were threatened with jail, or in at least one case--New York Times reporter Judith Miller–actually jailed for refusing to reveal their news sources. At the end of the year, when the National Security Agency (NSA) was reported to be engaged in spying on American citizens by monitoring their phone, email, and snail mail, the response of the White House was to initiate an investigation of the news media for revealing the story. In another time and place, one might have expected that the illegal activities of NSA would have come under investigation.
Media control was expanded beyond our shores. In Iraq, the Army planted seeds of propaganda. They commissioned writers to fabricate news stories, to translate them into Arabic, and then to sell or otherwise distribute the stories as genuine local items. And, in his continuing attacks on the press, it was revealed this year that Bush attempted to recruit British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to go along with him in a direct military assault on the al Jazeera main offices in Qatar, the most frequently watched Middle Eastern TV newscasts which have been persistently critical of the American actions in Iraq. In England, the two Labour members of Parliament who revealed the transcript of the Blair-Bush meeting have been arrested.
There’s more, of course. The year saw the perennial attacks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, regulatory agency rulings against low-power radio and forcible seizures of unlicensed stations. Independent Media Centers in various cities have been harassed by the police and feds.
We surely can expect more of the same in 2006. At a personal level, we all have to direct more energy at acquiring the news. More than that, we have to build or at least support the alternative news media.