DAN KENNEDY

The 11th Annual Muzzle Awards

DAN KENNEDY — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:37:24 GMT

Silencing free speech
Freedom of expression may be guaranteed by the Constitution. But it’s an idea we have to fight for every day.

[Correction, July 3 2008: Due to a reporting error, in a previous version of this story, Maine attorney general Steven Rowe's role was overstated in a case involving Maine's Freedom of Access Act. Rowe was not a party to a lawsuit aimed at forcing an independent commission Rowe had appointed to release documents it had compiled in the course of reviewing the conviction of Dennis Dechaine in the notorious Sarah Cherry murder trial. However, we continue to believe that Rowe should have ordered that the records be released, as we first argued last fall ("Freedom Watch," Portland Phoenix, October 10, 2007).]

The Muzzle Awards: Collegiate division. By Harvey Silverglate.

Past Muzzle Awards:
1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 |
2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007

Freedom of expression may be guaranteed by the Constitution. But it’s an idea we have to fight for every day.

That has never been more true than in the post–9/11 era. Just ask Adam Habib, a South African academic of Muslim heritage and critic of the war in Iraq, who’s been banned from speaking in Boston this summer because of secret — and, he insists, nonexistent — evidence that he has ties to terrorism.

The great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff once said that our sex drive pales in comparison with our urge to censor. It’s an urge that is played out in places high and low, encompassing both the serious and the absurd. Military veterans protesting the war are arrested in Boston and charged with disturbing the peace. An anti-abortion-rights activist in Maine borrows sex-education books from public libraries and refuses to return them. A legislative leader in Rhode Island — the head of John McCain’s presidential campaign in that state — compares anonymous critics to “terrorists,” and helps kill a proposal aimed at guaranteeing their First Amendment rights.

These are just a few of the cases highlighted in our Muzzle Awards, an annual Fourth of July roundup now in its 11th year. Since 1998, the Phoenix has been honoring those who’ve brought dishonor to themselves by trampling on the rights of free speech and personal liberties in New England.

The Muzzle Awards were inspired by noted civil-liberties lawyer and Phoenix contributor Harvey Silverglate, and are named after similar awards given by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression.

Still dissecting

DAN KENNEDY — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:48:34 GMT

Danny Schechter’s bid for media reform
A year after releasing his remarkably prescient film on the then-nascent financial crisis, In Debt We Trust , veteran progressive journalist Danny Schechter finally made it onto CNBC.

Highway robbery

DAN KENNEDY — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:25:37 GMT

Is Internet populism destined for corporate ruin?
Not long ago, the path by which the recent Justice Department scandal traveled from tidbit to tsunami would have been seen as an exotic trip through an unknown land.

Not long ago, the path by which the recent Justice Department scandal traveled from tidbit to tsunami would have been seen as an exotic trip through an unknown land. These days, it’s almost routine. A prominent blogger — Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo — posted an item last December about a US attorney who had been fired for mysterious reasons. Marshall asked his readers for help. And in the weeks and months that followed, they responded by sending him similar tales. Marshall and his posse of blogger-reporters kept the story cooking on Talking Points Memo and a companion site, TPM Muckraker. The mainstream media finally noticed that the Bush administration had been playing politics with federal prosecutors. Soon, the Justice Department was in full meltdown mode. And, in late summer, after many months of twisting slowly, slowly in the wind, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally resigned.

That this tale of media ecology now seems unremarkable says much about how rapidly the media have evolved in the Internet age. At a moment when the traditional media are hemorrhaging readers, viewers, and listeners, a new type of media — democratic, decentralized, grassroots, melding elements of journalism with political activism — is thriving. The animating idea behind the most innovative projects is that news is a conversation. No longer should readers, viewers, or listeners be seen as passive recipients of whatever the media feel like feeding them. Now we can talk back — and, more importantly, participate.

It is a remarkably open moment, similar to radio in the early part of the 20th century. As with radio, some corporations — in this case, the telecommunications giants — would like to bring that moment to a close by pricing small players out of existence. The threat is real; if “net neutrality,” the term for the equal access we now enjoy, is lost, we’ll be getting most of our online content from the same media giants that dominate broadcast, cable, and print. For now, though, the open Internet is enabling grassroots media on an unprecedented scale.

Consider this: were it not for YouTube, Virginia voters never would have seen Republican senator George Allen blurt out the vaguely racist word “macaca” at Democratic rival Jim Webb’s dark-skinned, video-camera-wielding aide last fall. Not only would have voters likely re-elected Allen, but today he might well have emerged as a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Instead, he’s back home in Virginia, wondering how it all went wrong.

The 10th Annual Muzzle Awards

DAN KENNEDY — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:16:47 GMT

Silencing free speech
Mitt Romney will say or do anything if he thinks it will help him become president.

Click here to read highlights from the first nine years of Muzzle Awards. Or pick a year below to read the full articles

1998 | 1999 |2000 |2001 | 2002 |2003 |2004 |2005 |2006 |

Mitt Romney will say or do anything if he thinks it will help him become president. We made that observation this past year at this time, and since then the former Massachusetts governor has only accelerated his assault on freedom of speech and civil liberties.

In 2006, Romney led the pack of honorees for his excessive zeal in pursuing terrorists, calling for the wiretapping of mosques and the monitoring of foreign students .

Now he’s back, for refusing (when he was still governor) to provide security — even though it had been requested by the State Department — for a speech by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami at Harvard University. And that wasn’t all, as you will learn.

Romney epitomizes how the Muzzle Awards have morphed since their debut in 1998. In that more innocent time, shutting down a community radio station and removing newspaper boxes from an urban neighborhood was about as bad as it got.

Such stifling acts still take place, of course, and they still matter. But the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ushered in an era of unprecedented repression. Nationally, the crackdown has been led by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with their contempt for constitutional protections such as habeas corpus and their embrace of secret detention and torture.

Nor has Congress provided much of a check. In April, the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that Bush had used — and abused — presidential signing statements to ignore hundreds of bills passed by Congress, including a mandate to report on how the FBI was using its expanded police powers, and a law allowing accused terrorists to see the evidence against them.

This police-state mentality has permeated New England, as well. For instance, Muzzles this year go not only to Romney but to the Maine Department of Corrections, which has allegedly covered up its abuse of prisoners by ignoring federal consent decrees requiring prison officials to allow inmates to communicate with reporters; and to Rhode Island governor Donald Carcieri, for apparently backing a proposal that would allow law-enforcement officials to inspect private records without having to go to the bother of obtaining a court warrant.

Jeff Cohen on the weird and disturbing world of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC

DAN KENNEDY — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:30:07 GMT

Cable nit
In his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media , Jeff Cohen writes about his years with cable news channels as a pilgrim who’s returned from a strange and hostile land.

In his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media (PoliPointPress), Jeff Cohen writes about his years with the cable news channels as a pilgrim who’s returned from a strange and hostile land.

The founder of the left-liberal media-watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), Cohen was invariably miscast. Oddly enough, he calls his stint at Fox his happiest: it was easier to work with out-and-out conservatives than with executives at CNN and MSNBC, who lived in constant fear that they would be accused of liberal bias.

Cohen left Fox for what he thought would be a dream job: working as senior producer for his friend and fellow progressive Phil Donahue, who bucked the conservative trend by landing a show on MSNBC in 2002. With the war in Iraq drawing closer, Cohen writes about terrified “Suits” pushing the program to the right, alienating its liberal audience while failing to attract new viewers. Donahue’s minuscule ratings were, nevertheless, higher than those of any other MSNBC show when it was canceled in early 2003.

Cohen describes cable news’ flaws as “a drunken exuberance for sex, crime and celebrity stories, matched by a grim timidity and fear of offending the powers-that-be — especially if the powers-that-be are conservatives.” (Better yet, he calls Ann Coulter “something of a cross between Joan Rivers and Eva Braun.”) He discussed the state of cable news in a recent interview. An edited transcript follows.

You make a strong case for how dysfunctional the three cable news channels are. But how will your book reach anyone who doesn’t already agree with you? Once it gets around — especially at MSNBC, and somewhat at Fox and CNN — I suspect that people will be passing it to each other. Reporters and producers are very thin-skinned and self-absorbed.

By the time I left Fox, it had a lot of esprit de corps. There was a lot of, “Wow, we’re on the march, we’re happening.” And spirits were higher.

Of course I didn’t know that O’Reilly was making lewd phone calls.

He didn’t make any to you?
No, he sure did not. But then I got over to MSNBC, and it was complete backbiting and gossiping and it was just not a healthy environment. And I assume that this book will get passed around there, and a little bit at CNN. I’ve got some good stuff in there on Fox, too.

I don’t think people have to agree with my political outlook, especially the insiders, to want to thumb through this. I assume the index is going to be worked over.

The Ninth Annual Muzzle Awards

DAN KENNEDY — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 15:41:11 GMT

Our annual New England roundup of those who undermined freedom of speech and civil liberties. But first, a word about George W. Bush.
Nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, our political culture has been warped beyond recognition.

Nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, our political culture has been warped beyond recognition. Fear and repression are the two ingredients that fuel the Bush White House, and anyone who dares say otherwise is branded as unpatriotic at best, a traitor at worst.

The Ninth Annual Muzzle Awards, presented every Fourth of July since 1998, single out enemies of free speech and civil liberties in New England. There’s plenty this year to be alarmed about: Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s presidential pandering to anti-Muslim sentiment; a decision by Fourth of July parade organizers in Maine to ban an anti-war group; Rhode Island middle-school officials’ calling in the Secret Service to interrogate a seventh-grader who’d written an imaginatively violent essay.

But all of this pales when compared with the regime of shadows and secrecy presided over by George W. Bush. From the National Security Agency’s no-warrant wiretapping program to CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, from prisoner abuse at Guantánamo to the endless war in Iraq, Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have transformed our country into something that would have been unrecognizable before they took office.

Consider just a few under-publicized examples of Bush’s contempt for freedom of expression and civil liberties:

• Librarians in Windsor, Connecticut, went to court last August rather than turn over their patrons’ records to the FBI. But under the onerous terms of the Patriot Act, they were not allowed to protest publicly or even to reveal their identities until this past May, when a judge finally removed the gag. “Being allowed to speak now is like being allowed to call the fire department after the building has burned to the ground,” said George Christian, executive director of the Library Connection of Windsor. The fight to keep the library’s records confidential continues.

• The NAACP and All Saints Episcopal Church, of Pasadena, California, two outspoken opponents of the Bush administration and its policies, have been subjected to audits by the Internal Revenue Service. In Pasadena, the audit came after the Reverend George Regas delivered a sermon titled “If Jesus Debated Senator Kerry and President Bush.” According to reports, Degas said at one point, “Mr. President, your doctrine of pre-emptive war is a failed doctrine.”

• At the Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI director Robert Mueller circulated an e-mail saying that one of their “top priorities” is to create an anti-pornography squad in order to keep tabs on what Americans are viewing in the privacy of their own homes. “I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,” said one anonymous (and disgusted) FBI agent.

The wrong stuff

DAN KENNEDY — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 22:03:47 GMT

These should be the best of times for Democrats. So how will they blow it in 2006? Let us count the ways
You can’t blame Democrats for feeling optimistic. In 2005, George W. Bush staggered through as rough a stretch as any modern president has experienced.

You can’t blame Democrats for feeling optimistic. In 2005, George W. Bush staggered through as rough a stretch as any modern president has experienced. From his botched response to Hurricane Katrina to mounting American casualties in Iraq, from his refusal to outlaw tortureto revelations that he authorized no-warrant wiretapping in probable violation of the law, Bush is looking battered and vulnerable. Surely the Democrats can take advantage of that in 2006 by grabbing back one or both branches of Congress. Right?

Well, don’t get your hopes up. Last week, as the furor over the wiretapping story was reaching a crescendo, the results of the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll were released. Believe it or not, they showed that the president’s approval rating had actually leaped up, from a Nixon-esque 39 percent in early November to an anemic-but-definitely-breathing 47 percent.

How could this be? Bill Clinton — a Democrat who knows how to win — put it best. “When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have somebody who’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right,” he said at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Unfortunately, there’s little question that many Americans today see Democrats as weak, if not necessarily right. And thank you, Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller, for reminding everyone of that when you whined pathetically about how you’ve been troubled by the wiretaps all along but didn’t think you could say anything.

Still, at both the national and state levels, 2006 is shaping up as the best opportunity the Democrats have had in a long time to make significant gains. If the party is going to turn opportunity into success, though, it’s going to have to change its ways — and, so far, there’s little sign of that happening. Believing that 2006 will be a good year for the Democratic Party may not be completely irrational. But as Samuel Johnson once said, it amounts to the triumph of hope over experience.

THE SURVIVOR

Columnist Richard Reeves created a stir recently when he wrote that a survey of nearly 500 historians revealed that the overwhelming majority believe Bush is a failed president — and that 50 rate him as the worst ever. It turned out that the survey, conducted by the History News Network, was some 19 months old. But surely few of those surveyed would have been likely in the interim to revise their opinion of the Bush presidency upward.