Sunday, September 23, 2007

CounterSpin: radio comedy with plenty of laughs







Last week in "United for Peace and Some Justice?" we noted that Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting allowed Phyllis Bennis to state the following on CounterSpin (CounterWhen?) unchecked:




Now apparently they're making body counts. So nobody has asked them, "Excuse me, general, when did you start doing body counts?" From the beginning you told us 'We don't do bodycounts.' When did that [tracking the number of Iraqis killed] begin? When do these figures start from?




As we noted, we were howling with laughter as Bennis claimed that the count had suddenly appeared with no questions being asked -- no one ever asking when the count started.




Janine Jackson and Steve Rendall co-hosted that broadcast and they remained mute -- either because they were as uninformed as Bennis or because they didn't want to correct her.




It needed correcting. Bennis was completely wrong.




Bennis questions asked the week before last were answered in June 2006. In fact, on June 26, 2006 which is the first time Nancy A. Youssef's report made the papers. It was noted in the June 26th "Iraq snapshot" that day. It was noted repeatedly afterwards.




It was repeatedly noted at The Common Ills and other community sites (including this one) because, pay attention Bennis, Rendall and Jackson, it was NEWS. In fact, reviewing the lows and really lows of 2006, C.I. again mentioned Youssef's report in "2006: The Year of Living Dumbly" in a long list of Iraq related news that independent media couldn't be counted on to report in the summer of 2006:




Or how about the fact that the US military was keeping a body count on Iraqi deaths? Nancy A. Youssef broke that story, that the US military had been doing that for almost a year, in June. That news lost out to elections . . . in Mexico -- what independent media was all geared up to make the summer story until they dropped everything to head off to the Middle East.




Over a year after Youssef reported it, three months short of a year since C.I. included it as one of the most under reported stories in 2006, along comes Bennis to, with assist from Jackson and Rendall, demonstrate just how hopelessly out of touch little media remains as though they're still recovering from their vacations during the summer of 2006.




As noted in last Monday's snapshot, Bennis, Jackson and Rendall had "ass on their face." In the same snapshot, someone at ABC News pointed out that CounterSpin would issue no correction, "They never do. It's always do as I say not as I do with them." Call us crazy, but if you're a media critic claiming "FAIR"ness, we're not really sure that's the rep you should be going for.




But it's the rep they earned with the latest installment of CounterSpin (hosted by Janine Jackson and Peter Hart) where they avoided issuing any correction although maybe that wouldn't have left time for the brava performance of a chat show host during "this week's headlines"? (A performance that the network in question says was far more dramatic in CounterSpin's Cops' like reenactment than when the original was broadcast -- again, there's that issue of "FAIR." The network pinned it off on the frustrated acting ambitions of FAIR.)




Now if the CounterSpin players and Bennis can pay attention for a moment, we'll flashback to inform of them of what they either do not know or wish to pretend they don't know. From Youssef's June 21, 2006 article:

U.S. officials previously have said they don't keep track of civilian causalities, and Iraqi officials stopped releasing numbers of U.S.-caused casualties after Knight Ridder reported in September 2004 that the Iraqi Ministry of Health had attributed more than twice as many civilian deaths to the actions of U.S. forces than to "terrorist" attacks during the period from June 2004 to September 2004.
Chiarelli declined to release the numbers, but he said that U.S. soldiers are killing and injuring fewer Iraqi civilians this year in so-called "escalation of force" incidents at checkpoints and near convoys than they did in July of last year, when officials first started tracking the statistic.




Bennis maintained that the body count just suddenly appeared and no one had asked about that and no one had ever asked when the count started being kept. Obviously, Bennis was wrong. By their continued refusal to correct the record, they continue to have "ass on their face."




But don't worry CounterSpin Players, your theater troupe is providing many laughs for big media and isn't that the point? It's not. Oh well.




As one news producer laughed of Bennis remark's, "She made a big deal over the US military's statement that they don't keep bodycounts. What she demonstrated was FAIR doesn't do research." Harsh? You have only yourselves to blame. On the up, you had a lot of big media listening in on Friday to hear whether or not you'd issue a correction. When you didn't, the laughter was so loud that we'd suggest you hone your comedy chops.


How does that line in Rogers & Hart's "Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" go? Because the laugh's on who? Sing it, FAIR, sing it.
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