TRUTHOUT– On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency: photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.

GUARDIAN– The young marine lit a cigarette and let it dangle. White smoke wafted around his helmet. His face was smeared with war paint. Blood trickled from his right ear and the bridge of his nose. Momentarily deafened by cannon blasts, he didn’t know the shooting had stopped. He stared at the sunrise. His expression caught my eye. To me, it said terrified, exhausted and glad just to be alive. I recognised that look because that’s how I felt too. I raised my camera and snapped a few shots.

With the click of a shutter, Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, a country boy from Kentucky, became an emblem of the war in Iraq. The image would change two lives – his and mine.

I was embedded with Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, as it entered Falluja, an insurgent stronghold in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, on 8 November 2004. We encountered heavy fire almost immediately. We were pinned down all night at a traffic circle, where a six-inch kerb offered the only protection. I hunkered down in the gutter that endless night, praying for daylight, trying hard to make myself small. A cold rain came down. I cursed the Marines’ illumination flares that wafted slowly earthward, making us wait an eternity for darkness to return.

At dawn, the gunfire and explosions subsided. A white phosphorus artillery round burst overhead, showering blazing-hot tendrils. We came across three insurgents lying in the street, two of them dead, their blood mixing with rain. The third, a wiry Arab youth, tried to mouth a few words. All I could think was: ‘Buddy, you’re already dead.’

We rounded a corner and again came under heavy fire, forcing us to scramble for cover. I ran behind a Marine as we crossed the street, the bullets ricocheting at our feet. Gunfire poured down and it seemed incredible that no one was hit. A pair of tanks rumbled down the road to shield us. The Marines kicked open the door of a house and we all piled in.

Miller and other Marines took positions on the rooftop; I set up my satellite phone to transmit photos. But as I worked downstairs in the kitchen, a deep rumble almost blew the room apart. Two cannon rounds had slammed into a nearby house. Miller, the platoon’s radioman, had called in the tanks, pinpointed the targets and shouted: ‘Fire!’

I ran to the roof and saw smouldering ruins across a large vacant lot. Beneath a heap of bricks, men lay dead or dying. I sat down and collected my wits. Miller propped himself against a wall and lit his cigarette. I transmitted the picture that night. Power in Falluja had been cut in advance of the assault, forcing me to be judicious with my batteries. I considered not even sending Miller’s picture, thinking my editors would prefer images of fierce combat. The photo of Miller was the last of 11 that I sent that day.

On the second day of the battle, I called my wife by satellite phone to tell her that I was OK. She told me my photo had ended up on the front page of more than 150 newspapers. Dan Rather had gushed over it on the evening news. Friends and family had called her to say they had seen the photo – my photo.

Soon, my editors called and asked me to find the ‘Marlboro Marine’ for a follow-up story. Who was this brave young hero? Women wanted to marry him. Mothers wanted to know whether he was their son. I didn’t even know his name. Shellshocked and exhausted, I had simply identified Miller as ‘a Marine’ and clicked ‘send’.

I found Miller four days later in an auditorium in the city’s civic centre. Miller’s unit was taking a break, eating military rations. Clean-shaven and without war paint, Miller, 20, looked much younger than the battle-stressed warrior in the picture – young enough to be my son. He was co-operative, but embarrassed about the photo’s impact back home.

Once our story identified him, the national fascination grew stronger. People shipped care packages, making sure Miller had more than enough smokes. President Bush sent cigars, candy and memorabilia from the White House. Then Major General Richard F Natonski, head of the 1st Marine Division, made a special trip to see the Marlboro Marine. To talk to Miller, Natonski had to weave between earthen berms, run through bombed-out buildings and make a mad sprint across a street to avoid sniper fire before diving into a shattered store front. ‘Miller, get your ass up here,’ a first sergeant barked on the radio.

Miller had no idea what was going on as he ran through the rubble. He snapped to attention when he saw the general. Natonski shook Miller’s hand. Americans had ‘connected’ with his photo, the general said, and nobody wanted to see him wounded or dead. ‘We can have you home tomorrow,’ he said.

Miller hesitated, then shook his head. He did not want to leave his buddies behind. ‘It just wasn’t right,’ he told me later. ‘Your father raised one hell of a young man,’ the general said, looking Miller in the eye. They said goodbye and Natonski scrambled back to the command post.

For his loyalty, Miller was rewarded with horror. The assault on Falluja raged on, leaving nearly 100 Americans dead and 450 wounded. The bodies of some 1,200 insurgents littered the streets. As the fighting dragged on, the story fell off the front page. I joined the exodus of journalists going home or moving to the next story. More than a year and a half would pass before I saw Miller again.

Continue reading about the Marlboro Marine.

© GUARDIAN, 2007

TIMES ONLINE– Doctors in southern China are working around the clock to fulfil a government goal to sterilise — by force if necessary — almost 10,000 men and women who have violated birth control policies. Family planning authorities are so determined to stop couples from producing more children than the regulations allow that they are detaining the relatives of those who resist.

About 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions in towns across Puning county, in Guangdong Province, as officials try to put pressure on couples who have illegal children to come forward for sterilisation. The 20-day campaign, which was launched on April 7, aims to complete 9,559 sterilisations in Puning, which, with a population of 2.24 million, is the most populous county in the province.

A doctor in Daba village said that his team was working flat out, beginning sterilisations every day at 8am and working straight through until 4am the following day. Zhang Lizhao, 38, the father of two sons, aged 6 and 4, said that he rushed home late last night from buying loquats for his wholesale fruit business to undergo sterilisation after his elder brother was detained. His wife had already returned so that the brother would be freed.

Mr Zhang said: “This morning my wife called me and said they were forcing her to be sterilised today. She pleaded with the clinic to wait because she has her period. But they would not wait a single day. I called and begged them but they said no. So I have rushed back. I am satisfied because I have two sons.”

Thousands of others have refused to submit and officials are continuing to detain relatives, including elderly parents, to force them to submit to surgery. Those in detention are required to listen to lectures on the rules limiting the size of families.

On April 10 The Southern Countryside Daily reported on about 100 people, mostly elderly, packed into a damp 200sq m (2,150sq ft) room at a township family planning centre. The newspaper said: “There were some mats on the floor but the room was too small for all people to lie down and sleep, so the young ones had to stand or squat. Owing to the lack of quilts, many cuddled up to fight the cold.”

Among those being held was the 68-year-old father of Huang Ruifeng, who has three daughters. Mr Huang said: “Several days ago a village official called me and asked me or my wife to return for the surgery. Otherwise they would take away my father.” He said that he was too busy to go and did not have confidence in village medical techniques. In any case, he wanted his wife to give birth to a son first.

An official at the Puning Population and Family Planning Bureau, who declined to be identified, told The Global Times: “It’s not uncommon for family planning authorities to adopt some tough tactics.”

In Puning county couples with illegal children and their relatives who apply for permits to build a house are rejected. Illegal children are refused residency registration, a penalty that denies them access to healthcare and education. Authorities have discovered, however, that those methods have less success than rounding up relatives. One official said that an investigation would be launched to establish whether authorities in Puning had exceeded their remit.

A state-level regulation stipulates that couples who violate the family planning policy must not be punished without proper authorisation and family members may not be penalised to put pressure on couples. In the years after China launched its strict “one couple, one child” family planning policy in the late 1970s abuses such as forced late-term abortions, sterilisations and even the killing of newborn babies were widely reported. Such practices have diminished in recent years, as the policy has become more widely accepted and exceptions have been introduced.

Officials in Puning are under particular pressure, however: they risk failing in their bid for promotion to a second-tier county if they cannot meet all quotas. That includes keeping the number of births within government limits. The county is under criticism from Guangdong authorities, who want to slow a population growth that is reflecting badly on the entire province. One reason for Puning’s large population is that families in the mainly rural region often have up to three or four children.

Many of those with extra children have left to find factory jobs along the more developed coast, taking advantage of being away from local government surveillance to give birth outside the quotas. Rules in Puning, as throughout rural China, allow farmers to have a second child if the first is a daughter. After that couples must stop. By the morning of April 12 Puning officials said that they had achieved, in a mere five days, about half of their sterilisation goal after their “education” persuaded people to comply.

Family planning

• China is the world’s most populous country with about 1.3 billion people. By 2025 the population is expected to exceed 1.4 billion

• The birthrate is low at 14 births per 1,000 people every year but the infant mortality rate is also low, at 20.25 deaths per 1,000 live births

• The single-child policy, referred to by the Chinese Government as the family planning policy, was introduced in 1978 to ensure that China could feed all of its people

• The policy stipulates that couples living in cities can have one child, unless one or both are from an ethnic minority or they are both only children. In most rural areas a couple may have a second child after a break of several years

• Despite the policy, it is common to find couples in the countryside, where 80 per cent of the population live, with a large number of children

• Many couples get round the law by sending pregnant women to stay with relatives, then claiming that the baby was adopted or belongs to a friend or relative

• Critics say that the policy has led to the killing of female infants because of the traditional preference for boys

Sources: BBC; CIA World Factbook

© COPYRIGHT TIMES ONLINE, 2010

Photo by Flickr user Benoitflorencon

TRUTHOUT– Media justice organizers at the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and MAG-Net have recently produced a brilliant campaign plan (“The Campaign for universal broadband”) to win three policies crucial for just and democratic communication: network neutrality, universal broadband and universal service fund reform.

Considering the renewed struggle required to win these goals, and to protect them afterwards, two questions seem particularly important. First, to win media access rights, social justice movements need media access.

So, how do we get the kind of access that can allow us to succeed? Second, as net neutrality and universal broadband are not ends in themselves, but rather the means to enable a just and democratic media system, who should produce that system? Open access to a media system controlled by the status quo will not provide the necessary means for disadvantaged communities and social justice movements to change power relations.

To win and protect the three central policies of the MAG-Net plan, media justice movements must have allies at radio and TV stations – the leading sources of news for most people, especially those without the Internet (Pew Center for People and the Press). Mainstream commercial channels will not provide that access as they are also agents defending corporate power and driving social justice movements to the margins. So, what about public media?

The problem is that too often public broadcasting outlets have boards populated by elite and corporate representatives, who historically have used their power to filter out the very perspectives we seek to extend. However, a movement of active publics could restructure governance at public media and demand democratically elected boards. This change could enable representatives from diverse communities to make decisions about programming and provide new access for marginalized and oppressed social groups to shape and produce content, self-organize and build just social relationships.

So, like network neutrality and universal broadband, should social justice movements also consider control over public media to be a racial and economic justice issue? In the effort to constitute a just and a ubiquitous public media system, should a high priority be to demand direct, democratic community governance of publicly funded outlets, especially local NPR and PBS affiliates? Though flawed, badly funded and commercialized, CPB outlets are the material of an existing system that could – if under community control – be a new means for self-organization by diverse publics.

What do you think the priority is or should be for synergizing isolated community print, online, radio, PEG and other media producers into a new public system – creating a publicly controlled, radically reorganized, public media system that could enable social justice movements to change social conditions?

There are excellent reasons to conceive of network neutrality as a social justice issue. The Center for Media Justice made particularly important contributions to this understanding with their document “Network Neutrality, Universal Broadband, and Racial Justice,” as did CMJ’s Malkia Cyril and co-authors Joseph Torres and Chris Rabb with their statement, “The Internet Must Not Become a Segregated Community.” Both works powerfully clarify that the Internet system envisioned by corporate and state officials would create first- and second-class Netizens. As the net neutrality struggle continues to demonstrate, diverse publics must communicate and act on their own behalf to establish and preserve a policy for digital technology based on equal access.

However, marginalized communities must not hope that a neutral Internet will build a media system to meet their needs. It is time to give up any remaining illusions of technological determinism. There is no political orientation inherent in technology – not even a neutral digital network. Only the creative labor of our communities and our movements can produce the spaces we need to collaboratively create new understandings of ourselves and our purposes; to communicate, coordinate and act. Lacking creative action by our communities and movements, universal broadband would only enable widespread access to a system dominated by the same corporate and racist forces that dominate the current system. After all, war and injustice continue irrespective of Facebook, Twitter and Digg. Though perhaps it seems obvious, it is crucial to remember that it was primarily the culture of the producers – not the users – that shaped the Internet medium (Castells, The Internet Galaxy, 2003).

Historically marginalized communities now, at this crucial juncture, could wield power as producers to shape the Internet into a new media network to increase equity in media access and political participation. Movements for media justice could struggle to develop the Internet as a platform where marginalized communities can speak to themselves and to wider audiences.

As the CMJ’s statements on network neutrality and universal broadband remind us, social justice movements cannot simply trust professionals employed by either corporations or the state to decide which social groups get broadband access or what digital content we can access once online. That same critical logic applies to control over public media and public news production. Unfortunately, it is evident that professional journalists and their allies are organizing to create a revitalized public media system that they, state officials and corporate, elite, station trustees will largely control with little or no role for historically marginalized communities as decision makers or as content producers.

Professional news models of production are collapsing – or rather transforming. Professional journalists themselves are engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain their social position as elite interpreters of daily life through controlling access to the occupation of reporting. As professional journalists seek to reconstruct their gatekeeping authority over online news production, they are also rebuilding barriers to access that historically excluded people of color, the poor and working classes, political dissidents, LGBT communities, and other groups. In short, virtually every emerging model to “save journalism” presented by commercial – and public – media professionals (as well as some academics) reproduces old hierarchies that exclude disadvantaged communities from decision making.

For example, in December of 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop deep within the beltway titled “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” These meetings attempted to make sure that journalism’s future will be market based. Of course, when market forces shape news production they inevitably shape the content and the political meaning of news. Renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow acknowledged as much when he warned, if “news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don’t care what you call it – I say it isn’t news” (Speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) convention, Chicago, 10/15/1958). Murrow’s concern over corporate influence on news did not seem to be shared by the many FTC participants, who, instead, struggled to find ways that the government could help shore up the declining commodity value of news.

Even a workshop panel that explored noncommercial options, “Public- and Foundation-Funded Journalism,” (starts at about the 1:18:00 mark here; transcript starts at page 23 here) raised little criticism of corporate influence on news production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the panel also displayed some of the same exclusions that media activists have critiqued for years, namely a lack of diversity: seven white men, two white women, and one male of color. This translates to 90 percent white, 80 percent male. Lacking representatives from disenfranchised communities, and entertaining no questions from the audience, there was almost no consideration of the issues important to historically marginalized social groups. It was almost as if the panelists had never read the Carnegie Commission report that founded public broadcasting and were unaware of the central role it defined for such groups. The Carnegie report called for a system that will “bring into the home” people’s “protests”; “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard”; “increase our understanding of the world, of other nations and cultures, of the whole commonwealth of man”; and “help us to see America whole, in all its diversity.”

This is not to say that the word “diversity” was missing from their vocabularies, but that they used the word in restricted ways. The panelists did support a greater diversity of audiences and content. Panelists also advocated for “technological diversity” and the need for government money to fund it, as well as the need for new productive relationships with software developers. But never did they consider the possibility that the diverse communities they view as audiences also have a legitimate role to play making decisions about public media. Nor did panelists consider opening up new productive relationships – and, thus, career paths – to historically marginalized communities.

There was a little critical discussion about the influence of powerful commercial or state funders, but there was virtually no discussion about the difficulty of making journalism accountable to diverse publics. Instead, some of the most powerful representatives of journalism on the panel argued that the old system simply “worked,” and all that’s needed is more public money for journalists and technology. The best kind of accountability, they claimed, was for journalists to govern themselves using professional ethics and a strong “firewall” between the newsroom and funding.

To most of us, a firewall is that impenetrable metal barrier that protects the driver and passengers in a car from a conflagration in the engine compartment. There is no such physical divide when it comes to news production, as evidenced by decades of academic research, the work of groups such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and common experience. Instead of the mythical firewall, a more honest depiction should acknowledge a historic and ongoing social struggle among publishers, journalists, designers, and powerful sources to shape the news to their own vision. Lacking power, disadvantaged communities are largely excluded from this struggle.

Panelist Jon McTaggart, the senior vice president & COO of American Public Media (producer of NPR’s MarketPlace), said, “I think that any serious news organization has a fire wall in place where organizational funding is certainly distinct from the activities of the journalists themselves.”

NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller went farther and argued that firewalls truly do provide genuine accountability: “Advertising subsidizes the newspaper and all commercial media. You know, does that mean that newspapers have pulled their punches about those advertisers? Certainly not.” Astoundingly, she even claimed that there has never been “any instance in the history, at least, of NPR where a story has been slanted or, you know, favorable to a foundation funder.”

Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, also argued that the old system successfully held commercial news media accountable. “It’s about professional ethics. And one of the great things about the commercial newspaper industry is how many hundreds of major newspapers have fantastic codes of ethics that they do hold each other accountable for and the professional organizations and journalism schools do hold them accountable.” He even made false and misleading claims that libraries and schools rely on professional ethics and self-governance to be accountable to their communities. Citizens in voting booths looking at their ballots may disagree. Publicly elected boards often govern public libraries and schools.

Even Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, did little to challenge the clearly self-serving assertions raised by news producers and industry representatives, but, instead, reinforced their frames and ideas. For example, his statement, “we have to know that the firewall is rock-solid” accepts that firewalls could actually be “rock-solid,” that professional ethics and best practices could truly be a concrete substitute for public participation. Other statements he made further reinforced a conceptual division between expert professionals and the public, this time casting the FTC participants as legitimate decision makers over community needs: “[W]e need to figure out … what do communities really need” so that “we” can “really engage the public.” Who is this “we” that stands apart from the public, yet decides what that public truly needs?

As the only representative from a media activism movement on the panel, Silver should have defended public participation in the public media system. Instead, Silver’s only suggestions for “structural change” were for better ombudsmen, a different appointment process for CPB board members and an abandonment of the appropriations process. But as none of these ideas expose professionals or officials to any meaningful consequences from diverse publics, these ideas would in fact continue to structure public media as a domain of elite control. These changes would, he said, help to insulate public media from too much politics – and on this point he has it all upside down. After all, limiting decision making over public media to officials and insiders is to ensure that it is their political culture that will shape the medium. Should not media justice and democracy activists instead increasingly expose public media to the politics of economic and racial justice and democratic participation?

We need a media system that is partial to justice and the health of our communities. The media justice community and its allies need to critically analyze proposals to remake public media – most importantly those from the Knight Foundation and from Schudson and Downie. Despite the claims of media professionals, industry reps, and some academics, we cannot leave the development of public media to their expertise alone. Professional journalists, corporations, and state officials seem poised to produce a system that represents the relationships they need – not what marginalized communities and social justice movements need. They will give us a marketplace of their ideas and call it just.

(This article was published 4/12/10 as an op-ed at the Editor & Publisher web site.)

Article by Scott Owens and James Sanders

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.