tvol is Timothy Vollmer. I'm a bicyclist, cook, and policy guy living in Oakland, CA.
This work by tvol is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
HARRY SHEARER: Before we get into the details of the pretrial proceedings, one more question about that. As you sit there day after day working your way through these proceedings and creating these transcripts, what’s your best guess as to why the rest of the press isn’t covering this?
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I think this has multiple layers to it. I think on one sense, if we look at it purely from the bottom-line perspective, is that WikiLeaks represents a challenge to the market power that the mainstream media organizations have over audiences. And of course you know it costs a lot of money up-front to produce news and especially investigative journalism and entertainment. It costs relatively little in the digital age to distribute it. And so therefore control of audiences is very, very important as these media organizations enter this new era. So I think that they’ve taken a defensive posture towards WikiLeaks because of that fundamentally, and I think also it’s a question of access to information. I mean, WikiLeaks, the reason why it’s so revolutionary is that it allows the janitor to leak and not simply the high-level Obama administration authorized leak to, you know, Bob Woodward, so to speak, to sell war or a particular political agenda of the elites. So there’s a lot going on here that is reason for them not to cover it.
The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.
Glenn Greenwald, “Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent”
springtime salad with peas, carrot, radish, homemade basil pesto, slow-cooked egg
Jeremy Scahill Dirty Wars talk in Oakland (at First Congregational Church of Oakland)
