John Stauber's News Articles

Wanted Immediately: An Editor for our Election Protection Work on SourceWatch

by John Stauber — September 2, 2008 - 3:21pm
  • Topics: Democracy

    • Background

    As the world learned in 2000 and 2004, the very integrity of the voting process in the United States has come under suspicion with dubious outcomes. Fair and honest elections with properly counted results that can be documented and trusted are essential to democracy. But can we really trust the results today? Who is watchdogging elections at the local, state and national level? Will hanging chads and unaccountable electronic machines determine the outcome of the 2008 vote?

    To help answer these questions, and to play a role in improving the process, we at the Center for Media and Democracy will soon be launching a new project on our www.SourceWatch.org website, our Election Protection portal. Watch for it in the weeks ahead.

    SourceWatch, our online encyclopedia of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda, will soon become a clearing house of vital current information, research and reports for examining the US election process. The new Election Protection portal will be a key "first stop" online resource for information about election officials, polling places, procedures and regulations.

    We're hoping to meet an urgent need. There has never to our knowledge been a central repository for this information, certainly not one that harnesses citizen journalism and the benefits of 'wiki' collaboration to stay up to date and accurate. The lack of such a website has been a serious hindrance to understanding and responding to problems on Election Day and to reforming voting procedures before the next election.

    Many organizations and individuals are working across the United States to protect our right to vote and the integrity of the electoral process. In the weeks ahead we will be drawing attention to their work and pulling it together in one portal in Sourcewatch. This is an experiment, it's not been done before. We're doing it in the spirit of our successful experiment earlier this year, the Super Delegate Transparency Project.

    Limited-Term Position Available to Work on the Election Protection Project

    Right now, we're looking for the right person to become the paid editor of our Election Protection wiki, beginning immediately. Below is the job posting. If you qualify, please send us an email. This is a short term position with no benefits, and it will be a demanding job, but it's an important position. We hope to fill this position by the end of the week, so please send this quickly to anyone you know who might be interested.

    Netroots Nation Convenes in Austin, True Blue and On Message

    by John Stauber — July 17, 2008 - 11:04am
  • Topics: Left Wing, Citizen Journalism, Activism, Internet, Pundits, Politics, War / Peace

    • Netroots Nation, the annual conference for thousands of liberal bloggers, Democratic Party activists and liberal advocacy organizations is underway today, July 17, and through the weekend in Austin, Texas. In the decade since then-First Lady Hillary Clinton railed against the "vast Right Wing conspiracy," Democratic liberals have woven their own with dozens of new think tanks, lobby groups, funders like the Democracy Alliance and George Soros, scores of consultants and hundreds of millions of dollars raised and spent to grease the wheels of collaboration, all designed this year to win the White House and solidify control of the Congress.

    Liberal bloggers are notorious dissenters and critics of mainstream Democratic policies, but there won't be much of that on formal display in Austin, nothing like the "Coffee with the Troops" which injected an unscheduled discussion of the Iraq War into last year's conference in Chicago. Potentially controversial issues including Dennis Kucinich's call for impeachment of President Bush, or the failure of the Democratic Congress to stop funding the war in Iraq, are off the official agenda at Netroots Nation.

    Stauber Interviews Sirota: The War, Dems, MoveOn and The Uprising

    by John Stauber — July 8, 2008 - 1:55pm
  • Topics: Left Wing, Iraq, U.S. Congress, Democracy, Politics

    • Sheldon Rampton and I could see it coming soon after the Democrats took control of the Congress in 2007. In March, 2007 we pointed out that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with the support of MoveOn, was advancing legislation that would fund the war in Iraq while giving Democrats PR cover, allowing them to posture against it while the bloody, brutal occupation of Iraq continues. We were attacked at the time by Democratic partisans, but unfortunately our analysis has proven correct and today the war in Iraq is as much of an interminable quagmire as it was when the Democrats took control of the House and Senate in January 2007.

    Democratic political activist, columnist and author David Sirota has also strongly condemned this failure of the Democrats and "The Players," DC's professional partisan insiders such as MoveOn. On May 24, 2007 he wrote: "Today America watched a Democratic Party kick them square in the teeth - all in order to continue the most unpopular war in a generation at the request of the most unpopular president in a generation at a time polls show a larger percentage of the public thinks America is going in the wrong direction than ever recorded in polling history. ... That will make May 24, 2007 a dark day generations to come will look back on - a day when Democrats in Washington not only continued a war they promised to end, but happily went on record declaring that they believe in their hearts that government's role is to ignore the will of the American people."

    This month, more than a year later, the Democratic controlled Congress once again gave the Bush Administration funding to continue the Iraq war well into 2009. David Sirota now has a new book out: The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. In it he expands on his criticism of the Democratic Party and its partisan, professional antiwar activists in the leadership of MoveOn.

    Sirota writes in his new book (page 82), "The absence of a full-throated antiwar uprising is tragic at a time when the country appears more skeptical of knee-jerk militarism than ever before. ...

    Pentagon's Propaganda Documents Go Online, but Will the TV Networks Ever Report this Scandal?

    by John Stauber — May 6, 2008 - 2:53pm
  • Topics: Iran, Iraq, Journalism, Pundits, Terrorism, Third Party Technique, Democracy, Ethics, Lobbying, Media, Politics, Propaganda, U.S. Government, War / Peace

    • Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

    Deja Vu: NYT, US Propaganda and War with Iran

    by John Stauber — May 5, 2008 - 2:11pm
  • Topics: Iran, Iraq, Terrorism, Third Party Technique, Propaganda, War / Peace

    • Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher notes that New York Times military reporter Michael Gordon, "who contributed several false stories about Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the U.S. attack in Iraq," has been writing about Iran's alleged involvement in attacks against U.S. service members in Iraq. Gordon's latest article, "Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say," is "based solely on unnamed sources," notes Mitchell.

    An article from McClatchy's Baghdad bureau also contradicts Gordon's New York Times piece. McClatchy reports that the Iraqi government "seemed to distance itself from U.S. accusations towards Iran." Iraqi government spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh said the government had formed a committee to find "tangible information" about Iranian activities in Iraq, instead of relying on "information based on speculation." Al-Dabbagh also told Agence France-Press that there is no "hard evidence" of Iranian support of insurgents in Iraq.

    Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner has seen this sort of poorly-sourced reporting before in the New York Times as part of the propaganda campaign that led America directly into the disastrous quagmire in Iraq.

    Pentagon, TV Networks Fear Debating Iraq Propaganda Scandal - Stauber vs. Zelnick on NewsHour

    by John Stauber — April 25, 2008 - 12:31pm
  • Topics: Internet, Journalism, Iraq, Ethics, Propaganda, U.S. Government

    • I debate Bob Zelnick on PBS NewsHour

    This Sunday's stunning, front-page New York Times revelations of the Pentagon military analyst program have been met with a wall of silence and cover-up on network television news. America's TV networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and FOX -- are where most Americans get most of their news, and they are the main culprits in allowing Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clarke to turn them into the primary propaganda tool for selling the Iraq war to the public.

    PBS NewsHour covered this issue in a televised debate April 24 pitting me against Robert Zelnick, former ABC Pentagon correspondent and now chair of the Boston University journalism department. (Zelnick is also affiliated with the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank.) No one from the Pentagon would agree to appear on the PBS show, nor would anyone appear from any of the guilty TV networks.

    My debate with Zelnick is now on YouTube, where you can watch it yourself. The NewsHour report on the Pentagon pundits that preceded our debate is also online, and if you have a slow internet connection (or if you find my face and voice too irritating to tolerate), you can also read the online transcript.

    Embedding Military Propagandists into the News Media

    by John Stauber — April 22, 2008 - 4:47pm
  • Topics: Journalism, Propaganda, U.S. Government, War / Peace

    • David Barstow of the New York Times has written the first installment in what is already a stunning exposé of the Bush Administration's most powerful propaganda weapon used to sell and manage the war on Iraq: the embedding of military propagandists directly into the TV networks as on-air commentators. We and others have long criticized the widespread TV network practice of hiring former military officials to serve as analysts, but even in our most cynical moments we did not anticipate how bad it was. Barstow has painstakingly documented how these analysts, most of them military industry consultants and lobbyists, were directly chosen, managed, coordinated and given their talking points by the Pentagon's ministers of propaganda.

    Hillary Stands By Her Man, But Colombia Dumps Mark Penn

    by John Stauber — April 5, 2008 - 2:17pm
  • Topics: U.S. Congress, Corporations, Human Rights, International, Labor, Lobbying, Public Relations

    • Mark Penn runs the labor-busting PR giant Burson-Marsteller and is the top strategist and pollster for Hillary Clinton's campaign for president. His mixed loyalties have been a continuing image problem for Clinton, to the degree his conflicts makes the news.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported, on April 4, that Penn had "met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. on Monday to discuss a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact the presidential candidate (Clinton) opposes." Burson-Marsteller "has a contract with the South American nation to promote congressional approval of the trade deal."

    The New York Times later noted that Penn apologized for his conflict of loyalty saying "the meeting was an error in judgment." But that was not enough. Saturday, April 5, Colombia fired Penn (and B-M his company) for his embarrassing bumbling. Still, Hillary Clinton is sticking by her man Mark - for now.

    YouTube Wars - Freedom's Watch vs. IVAW. Which is Real Grassroots, Which is a Front Group?

    by John Stauber — August 23, 2007 - 9:22am
  • Topics: Astroturf, Internet, Front Groups, Terrorism, Politics, Propaganda, War / Peace

    • What's the difference between a slick pro-war front group exploiting Iraq veterans to pour gasoline on the fire in Iraq, and a grassroots group of Iraq veterans leading the battle at home to end Bush's war of occupation?

    Watch these YouTube videos and decide for yourself.

    The latest addition to Bush's pro-war lobby is Freedom's Watch, and they have

    The Pro-War Lobby's Latest Addition is Freedom's Watch

    by John Stauber — August 22, 2007 - 8:27pm
  • Topics: Right Wing, Iraq, Front Groups, Pundits, Terrorism, Lobbying, Politics, Propaganda, War / Peace

    • The business of pro-war propaganda is booming as "Freedom's Watch" joins Vets for Freedom, Move America Forward and other pro-war advocates for a stepped up war in Iraq in line with the Bush/Cheney Global War on Terror.

    Ari Fleischer, former White House PR flack who jumped ship into the private sector shortly after the 2003 US invasion, is the public face and a founding board member of Freedom's Watch, which is being rolled out this week with emotional advertisements featuring wounded veterans imploring Americans to keep the money flowing for the occupation.

    One such advertisement is up on YouTube. Once again the war in Iraq is being falsely linked to and justified by the terror attacks of 9/11, one of the Bush Administration's Big Lies that was was used to mislead America into war. In the Freedom's Watch advertisment on YouTube a war vet with prosthetic legs beseeches:

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