Is the New York Times Offering A Misleadingly Bleak Depiction of Status of “Herd Immunity” in New York City?

Today's New York Times front page featuring a petri dish chart for its home city of New York, saying that those with antibodies in the city are scarce, while it describes the potential of herd immunity as a "distant objective" and cautions that there is no safety from the spread.  But,the presentation of its NYC statistic is suspiciously inaccurate.

[NOTE: This article was updated July 2, 2020 to refer to the estimated lag times it takes for Coronavisrus antibodies to develop thus making it important to look back and consider April's random testing of New York City residents as being a snap shot of the status of the infection's spread earlier in the month of April.] 

Front page, above the fold, upper right there is a big prominent chart in the physical copy of today’s New York Times to go along with the headline: “In battling Outbreak, Herd Immunity,  Remains Distant Objective,” by Nadja Popovich and Margot Sanger-Katz May 28, 2020.  (The Times internet version of its headline is currently “The World Is Still Far From Herd Immunity for Coronavirus”)

That chart has a dramatic petri dish-looking dot diagram labeled to say that it shows that in New York City 19.9% of the population have covid antibodies and in the smaller print adding “May 2nd.”  The chart has its own bold headline label: "Still not Safe From The Spread."

The print version of this article provides this text:

In New York City, which has had the largest coronavirus outbreak in the United States, around 20 percent of the city’s residents have been infected by the virus as of early May, according to a survey of people in grocery stores and community centers released by the governor’s office.

But, in actuality, the study results just described by the New York Times as fixing this percentage in “early May,” were reported in the New York Times April 23rd: "1 in 5 New Yorkers May Have Had Covid-19, Antibody Tests Suggest" By J. David Goodman and Michael Rothfeld, April 23, 2020-

In New York City, about 21 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey.

That article also stated:

State officials said the test had been calibrated to err on the side of producing false negatives — to miss some who may have antibodies —

That April Times article didn’t say then when in April the study had been conducted, perhaps an unusual skip, saying only that the study had involved tests conducted “over two days, including about 1,300 in New York City, at grocery and big-box stores” that had then been “sent to the state’s Wadsworth facility in Albany” and generated an announcement about its results on Wednesday, April 22, 2020 (publicly discussed by NYS Governor Cuomo the next day).  All of this would push back somewhat the unknown date that the random study was actually conducted.-- 

-- Pushing things back further in assessing things is that antibodies for Covid are not said to develop for one-to-three, or even more weeks after becoming infected.  That means that the random sample snap-shot involves a lag.  If you push things back two weeks plus a few days to compensate for all this, that means that the snap shot may best reflect a date of about Friday, April 3rd.  The "confirmed case" for New York City count the New York Times gave on April 2nd was 52,000.  May 29th the New York Times gives a "confirmed case" count figure of "205,854."

While the results of that mid-April random study were intriguing, there seems to be no hint of another updating random study since.

Reporting on rates of coronavirus infection is a moving target.  The virus is capably of spreading at an exponential rate, which is clearly what it did in the beginning in many locations including New York City.  At about the time of the NYC random study it had been reported (April 15, 2020 on Democracy Now) that the milestone of 10,000 deaths from the virus in New York City had just been reached.  The death toll in New York City is now more than double that number at about 21,000.  Increases in and accelerations of the infection rate precede the reported death rate.

So, if random testing were done, now, at the tail end of May, probably about six or more weeks since the last random tests were conducted, where would the current antibody detection rate in New York City be?  That would have to take into consideration that April, followed by the first half of May was the month during which the virus was spreading most rapidly in New York City to create new infections.  Would it be more than double the April random test figure the Times splashed on its front page incorrectly saying the figures were from May as it based it article on that?  The charts below, from the New York Times itself, are elucidating in considering this:

Remember, when looking at these charts, that although the numbers are consistent for what they are, the "confirmed case" figure is always just a tiny fraction of the number of the people who have actually contracted the virus.  That's something that is widely acknowledged.  So, for instance, the April 2nd date when there were a reported about 52,000 confirmed cases is the approximate date when random testing indicates that probably about 21% of New Yorkers had had the virus.  By the May 29th date that the New York Times gives a "confirmed case" count figure of "205,854" for one can expect, following at least somewhat proportionally, a fairly major increase in the actual cases.
 
So the question I ask is: Is the New York Times offering a misleadingly bleak depiction respecting the possibilities of when the protections of herd immunity may be kick in for those who live in New York City, the Times' home base?  Still a "distant objective" that new Yorkers are "far from"?

How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”

How to listen to Democracy Now? The options that are multiplying make it complicated, but we are about to tell you.

Democracy Now is a very good place to get a lot of news.  You’ll get a get dense, comprehensive, very intelligently compiled overview of most world and national events every week day.  It's an hour broadcast every day.  The fast paced headline coverage that starts the program generally runs from about 12 to 19 minutes, depending on what's happened.  (Appropriately, there's usually more to catch up with on the Monday mornings that follow the weekend .)

Democracy Now covers news and issues that corporate media typically shuns such as the climate chaos catastrophe (including how mankind and the fossil fuel industry are causing it), corporate malfeasance in general (its coverage of the Boing 737 max crashes was better than anywhere else), misadventures of the U.S. military, and U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Democracy Now will not shy away from telling you about the plight of disadvantaged members of our society whose rights are being ignored and abused.  It will tell you what the powerful are tying to get away with.  Their coverage of issues such as the recent Supreme Court nominees under consideration (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) sets standards that, by contrast, made clear how embarrassingly inadequate coverage by NPR and the New York Times is. It almost seemed that the NPR and the Times, with a modicum of objection, were smoothing the way for eventual acceptance of bad outcomes.

I generally recommend Democracy Now as a good starting place where you can get about 85% of the important national news, versus the maybe the 20% and inevitably misleading stuff you may get if, for instance, you watch NBC's nightly half hour of advertising-interspersed national news.  Democracy Now's hour is free of commercial interruptions.  It runs on listener support.

I say you can get about "85%" of the news from Democracy Now, because, valiant and comprehensive as it is, there is some news that Democracy Now seems to treat as off limits.  (For instance, there was one significant story involving the Kennedy, King and Macolm X families joining with a number of respected notables that was- perhaps oddly?- covered in January, very thoroughly and respectfully by the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post, but Democracy Now never mentioned or reported it at all.  Of course Democracy Now wasn't alone, NPR didn't report on it and it went unreported just about everywhere else as well. . .  And Washington Post Coverage didn't provoke the New York Times or anyone else to follow in its footsteps.  .  .

 . . . To be fair, perhaps once upon a time (and just once), Democracy Now, way back in 1997, did previously report one aspect of that particular story-- There's a link extant for some June 18, 1997 coverage!-- Ah!  The internet giveth!  Isn't the internet amazing with respect to what it can do?-  It can take you all the way back to 1997!   However, if you click on the Democracy Now video link to hear and see the video link reporting of that story, the link is broken.  Yikes! The Democracy Now reporting is not there to be found (frown).  The internet taketh away!

How do you get news from Democracy Now?  There are lots of ways and this article will fill you in.  Following that instruction we have a few cautions to offer about the future.  Those cautions concern the internet.

Democracy Now began with WBAI radio.  WBAI is the New York City Pacifica Network radio station that once was a home to Amy Goodman, Democracy Now's principal host, and it is the home out of which Democracy Now was incubated and able to emerge.  WBAI is still a way to listen to Democracy Now.  Here, starting with WBAI, are the ways you can plan to be informed by getting the comprehensive news Democracy Now furnishes.

Tune in and listen on WBAI FM radio, where it all began, where the show was incubated.

1.    Listen to a terrestrial broadcast of WBAI radio in New York weekdays at 8:00 AM as Democracy Now is first being broadcast.  WBAI radio has a strong signal so you can listen up in Westchester and New Jersey, all the environs immediately surrounding the greater NYC metropolitan area.

2.    Listen to WBAI’s live internet stream station broadcast.  Like most radio stations these days, WBAI also streams its broadcasts on the internet.  The internet giveth!

The internet live stream straight from Democracy Now's website is an interesting alternative, and there is video to provide a visual, but you may find the live stream cuts out (the faltering is very trying during election night coverage).

3.    Listen, or even watch, directly at 8:00 AM ET on the internet by going to the Democracy Now website, where you can get both an audio and a video stream of the show.  Plus you can get special Democracy Now broadcasts like election night coverage.  It’s almost like TV, you know the kind when you cut the cable?  The internet giveth!  The vexing problem with the live video stream however is that the video often cuts out.  In our household, the cutting out of the video stream was especially pronounced one night when we were trying to watch the 2016 election night coverage.  Otherwise, Democracy Now would have been almost as convenient as watching any of the major corporate network coverage that night.  I am told that, since, in Brooklyn Heights, we sit atop a Spectrum (formerly TimeWarner) trunk line, internet bandwidth should not have been a problem and should not have been causing the halting of the stream.   The internet taketh away!

There are others now following in the footsteps of Democracy Now to launch, using the internet, what are essentially their own television broadcasts.  Mid-July (July 12, 2019) the alternative website Consortium News launched CN Live to start such video broadcasting.   It's an appealing idea, being able broadcast video over the internet that could be as satisfying in quality to the viewer as anything the major networks put out over cable or the airwaves.  The internet giveth!  Just as it launched its CN Live broadcasts, Consortium News tweeted (July 15, 2019) "Our website is completely down. Our media host said we have been attacked by malware. . .  Every article published since 2011 now gets a 404 Not Found. They are working on it. Problem started slowly on Friday first day of CN Live!"  . . . Oh my!: The internet taketh away!

Pacifica Radio app

4.    Listen to WBAI at 8:00 AM using the Pacifica Radio app that plays an internet live stream of all five Pacifica Network Stations (WBAI from NYC, KPFA from Berkley, California, KPFK from Los Angeles, KPFT from Houston, WPFW from Washington D.C.) plus one Pacifica affiliate station, WQRT from Madison, Wisconsin.  Since KPFT, the Houston station, broadcasts a second signal using its HD capacity (high definition radio), the Pacifica app actually affords a choice of seven streams to listen to Pacifica Network content.  The app can play on your phone or can play of your iPad tablet. The internet giveth!

Democracy Now phone app- It used to work on an iPad too, but doesn't now.

5.    Listen to or watch a Democracy Now live internet stream on your phone via the Democracy Now phone app.  Listening live, the same cautions apply about how the show may cut out as you listen because there isn’t enough bandwidth.  The Democracy Now app also once worked on the similar Apple iPad Operating systems– That was until Apple introduced a new operating system.  Now the app still works on iPhones, but not on the iPads any longer.  The internet taketh away!

6.    Now it’s 9:00 AM ET and Democracy Now has finished its one hour weekday morning broadcasts.  What if you missed it?  You can listen via the Pacifica App and hear it broadcast again on KPFA from Berkley. (It’s 6:00 AM California time!)  The Democracy Now show always begins with host and anchor Amy Goodman reading the headlines, which, will, as noted, in ten minutes or perhaps just under twenty, cover about three times as much news as the corporate networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) cover in their half hour evening news broadcasts.  It means Amy is speaking very fast.  If you are not fully awake, there is no quick rewind.  It's best to be fully awake when you listen.  Maybe that's what some Californians thought--  Pacifica’s KPFK from Los Angeles just moved Democracy Now from a 6:00 AM California time slot to an 8:00 AM California time slot which means you can hear it again in New York at 11:00 AM ET.  All the Pacifica stations carry Democracy Now and the twin Houston stations carry it differing times.  So there are lots of options using the Pacifica app.   The internet giveth!

For a while, after the 9:00 AM hour, the only way to listen is WBAI's archive

7.    But what if its after 9:00 AM ET and, hungry to catch up on the news (particularly the headlines?), you’ve missed the beginning of Democracy Now?  Anytime after 9:00 AM you can go to the WBAI archive and listen to the previous broadcasts of Democracy Now.  In fact, for a while, after 9:00 AM that’s the only way you can listen to it.  The internet giveth!

8.    Still later in the day (it could be as late or later than 11:00 AM ET), Democracy Now will make its program available on demand on the internet.  At that time, it will be available for listening or watching from Democracy Now from its website or, alternatively through its Democracy Now app.  Plus, the broadcast Democracy Now show is an hour; but, on the internet, Democracy Now posts extra “web exclusives,” extensions of on-air interviews if you are interested in hearing more and going into greater depth on the subjects covered.  The internet giveth!

Two day's Democracy Now Show segments

9.    Still later in the day, Democracy Now will start dividing its broadcast up into different segments, so you can pick and choose portions of the show to listen to specifically.  And you will be able to share links to specific content that way too.  The internet giveth!

When the text transcript of show content like this goes up like this, it is more likely that Google will, for example, help you find out that an unusually long lasting sustained drought in Honduras is one of the things driving refugees away from their homes (that is if Google's algorithms are in the mood to let you know).

10.     Eventually, later in the day, there is another way to take in Democracy Now.  That’s when the text of the segments for the day get written up and posted.  That also makes the content searchable on Google.  The internet giveth!  But has Google been adjusting its algorithms to make Democracy Now content harder to find, the way that Google has been spiking the algorithms of many alternative news sites?  You will probably find that Democracy Now content does not Google as high as it should . . . The internet taketh away!  But if Democracy Now behaves . .?

Amazon’s Alexa

11.    At some point during the day it has become possible to ask Amazon’s Alexa to play that day’s Democracy Now program.  Command "Alexa: Play Democracy Now," and the show starts!  For now, without looking into it, we’ll assume things work much the same way with Siri alternatives that listen to your home commands: Google Assistant, Cortana, Mycroft, whatever.  The internet giveth!  (if you want these kinds of things in your home.)  Asking a willing Alexa to play Democracy Now was, we observed, possible for a number or weeks. . .  For a number of weeks, that is just up until recently: Now, if you ask Alexa to play Democracy Now it has found a substitute program to play.  Alexa now refuses to play Democracy Now.  The internet taketh away!

Democracy Now on cable TV via the CUNY station in New York

12.    Want to watch Democracy Now as good old fashioned cable television?  In New York City, wait until 6:00 PM and you will find it broadcast on the local city university CUNY station.  However, if you want to capture it reliably for time shifting on your Tivo, you will have to deal with the fact that CUNY TV and Tivo haven’t been coordinating on exchanging programming information the usual way so you will have to set up a specified word “wish list” program to capture the show rather than a Tivo "season pass." These electronics are all so reliably smart and dependable, until they are not.

13.    Don’t like old fashioned cable television?  Do you think that YouTube is the answer?  Democracy Now also goes up on YouTube, which allows you to subscribe to it there.  The internet giveth!  One thing we must note, however, about content that is put up and made available on YouTube: Sometimes it gets taken down by YouTube for reasons that seem totally inexplicable, or, if those reasons are explicable, then for reasons that are downright scary.  (Ditto Facebook.) 
The internet taketh away!
  

14.    You can also listen or watch Democracy Now in Spanish because it gets translated.

The iTunes audio Podcast

15.    Prefer everything via podcasts?  You can get podcasts of the audio through iTunes
Google Play, and Spotify.  And iTunes also has podcasts of the video too.

PART II: A Few Cautions About The Internet

With such a mind boggling multiplicity of options, it certainly seems like there is cornucopic wealth to the variety of ways in which you can access the news that Democracy Now will provide. The internet giveth!  However, the illusion fades when you realize that almost all of these options that seem to afford such liberating choice come through just one spigot: the internet.  There are hands ready to turn the handle on that spigot.  They could turn it off entirely, or just adjust the flow.

The Federal Communications Commission under Trump appointed chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer and telecommunications industry corporate lobbyist, is determinedly doing away with net neutrality.  Net neutrality is the principle that lets Democracy Now and others compete with the conglomerate telecommunication giants that consistently stream government friendly news-- even when those telecommunication giants don't want that competition.

The elimination of net neutrality isn't the result of democracy.  Quite the opposite- "poll after poll after poll shows that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or any other party: Overwhelming majorities of people in the United States support net neutrality rules."  So it is not as if democracy can be counted on to protect us from this change.  Instead, with 83%, perhaps more of the public, wanting net neutrality, the FCC's elimination of it is just one of the most extreme examples of how on issue and after issue democracy is being overridden to give corporate and moneyed interests and other powers in charge the things they want instead of the things that the vast majority of the public, supermajorities, want and should by all reason be allowed to have.  The internet taketh away!

There are all sorts of ways that the internet can take things away: Things can disappear, they can just get lost or buried, they can become unfindable, the enabling technology by which they are accessed might not keep up to date or it may fail, tech product interfaces foe accessing content can be withdrawn, you can be steered or warned away from things, or things can be censored.  From early on, the model of the internet has been to lure people in by offering up things seemingly for free.  The internet giveth! But that doesn't mean those things will stick around or are that they are actually free. 
The internet taketh away!

I was one of the many who was heavily solicited by Google to become a trend-setting first adopter of Google+ when Google launched Google+ as an alternative, perhaps preferable in certain ways, to Facebook.   Google shut down Google+ this past April deleting all its users' accounts and posts.  Google+ was a favorite means of sharing information and content of Yoko Ono.  I could show you what I mean by linking to her posts, but they have all been deleted.  In a sense, these deletions were also a re-erasure of John Lennon's presence in our lives, assassinated in 1980-- many of Yoko's posts were about John.  The internet taketh away!  Google announced its plans to end the Google+ (originally launched in June of 2011) in October.

Google's October announcement of the Google+ withdrawal was contemporaneous with Facebook's October shutdown of more than 800 mostly anti-war, anti-authoritarian pages, including things like popular Black Lives Matters and police watchdog sites.  The October Facebook shutdowns occurred during the run up to the mid-term elections and involved coordinated action with other social media giants like Twitter.

Scary?  Wondering why this is something that people know so little about?  Here is something scarier.  When this was breaking as news, in a brilliant bit of nonreporting and disinformation the New York Times ran a contemporaneous story about the Facebook deletions that made you complacently think you knew what was going on.  The Time story communicated `not to worry . . . everything is under control.'   The report of the Facebook take downs was hidden, Purloined Letter fashion, on the paper's front page.  The Times article made it seem like mainly that Facebook was taking down pernicious, maliciously motivated  right wing disinformation sites.   The article's headline?: Made in U.S.: Untruths Infest Social Websites- The Right and the Left Try Russia’s Methods, By Sheera Frenkel, October 11, 2018.

The Times October 12, 2018 front page from the internet (The internet giveth!): Prominently displayed, but escaping notice, an article about how Facebook took down more than 800 web page sites, mostly anti-authoritarian and anti-war.

The main example the Times article led with and gave considerable focus to was what it described as a sketchy conservative right wing blogger publishing “several false stories” about Christine Blasey Ford as she was accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.  Eliminating such “false stories” doesn’t seem like it would be upsetting to Times readers.  The sketchy blogger's "Right Wing News" site gets a total of 19 mentions of it by its full name in the Times article.
        
Or maybe the front page Times article successfully escaped much notice because readers were turned off and very bored, and didn't read the damned thing because it sounded so much like just another of the endless run of Times' articles harping on "Russiagate."  . . . The article simply characterized the rest of Facebook take downs being about another manifestation of the conspiracy theory that "state-backed Russian operatives" swung the 2016 election to Trump, albeit that in this case the Times pontificated that we were dealing with the "spreading of disinformation started by Americans, for Americans . .   emulating the Russian strategy of 2016."  "Americans, for Americans"?  The article said that "such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right."

If you are trying to go back in time find the Times article about the Facebook take downs without knowing exactly what you are looking for, it is very hard to find because the online headline for the article makes the article sound even more like it is just another Russiagate story: Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.  (The Times frequently uses different headlines for its web edition than it uses for its print edition- It's one of the vagaries of what we think the internet documents and preserves for posterity.)
        
The Times article quotes two seemingly impartial third parties for perspective.  One of them is presented as "Ryan Fox, a co-founder of New Knowledge, a firm that tracks disinformation" who assures that the Facebook take downs don't present a worrisome free speech issue with these words: “These networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus — that’s crossing the line over free speech.”  You might catch in that statement something altogether too coy: "manufacturing consensus."  It's a virtually and obviously synonymous with "Manufacturing Consent" or "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."   That is the seminal and now key reference book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 that explains the propaganda model by which the government and those in power in our society manipulate and control public opinion in a "democracy."

The Times does not explain that Ryan Fox was at "New Knowledge" (does "New Knowledge" sound Orwellian?) having just come from the National Security Agency where he was  an “Intel Analyst,” nor does the Times indicate how that probably also tells you a lot about "New Knowledge."  On his LinkedIn profile Ryan says the New Knowledge mission is "to secure the integrity of public discourse."  For good measure, please know that Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council to determine which web pages it will censor.  The internet taketh away!  That is not mentioned by the Times article.

Ryan Fox's LinkedIn info and more information (The internet giveth!): "Ryan spent 15 years at the NSA championing next-generation SIGINT solutions, driven to support national security interests. Prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT partners, he served under U.S. Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), as a CNO Analyst for the U.S. Army."

To be clear, the Atlantic Council has been described by Peter Phillips as the unofficial policy-making and consensus-building arm for the transnational corporate elite as they seek to protect their interconnected capital investments throughout the world.  Phillips is the author of the new reference book "Giants - The Global Power Elite," that, identifies, boiling down to a very few people, about 300, controlling most of the world's wealth.  He furnishes the bios of 199 directors of seventeen global financial Giants controlling $50 trillion of the world's wealth- $41 trillion in 2017.  He furnishes estimates that overall world wealth is about $255 trillion two-thirds of which is U.S. and European.

As noted, while the prevailing model of the internet is to lure you in for free, much of it is here today, and (The internet taketh away!) gone tomorrow.   My central storage hard drive device came with the option of using a free program that allowed me (my family too) to stream and listen anywhere to any of the music I had stored on my computer, a large music collection.  Did that console me for the fact that my once upon a time "lifetime" purchase of the Music Match music player meant the "lifetime" was only that of the corporation owning Music Match, not my own?   Eventually, my ability to stream and listen to my music collection anywhere via the program from my hard drive device maker simply ended as well without warning or fanfare.  Now, I think we are all supposed to be uploading our music collections to the Amazon cloud, or using streaming services like Spotify where the security of my being able to access that music in the future is dependent upon my ability to pay future rent.

Much of the fitful starting and stopping with which the lure of free internet convenience has proved undependable has to with the acquisition and consolidation of the internet companies into increasingly few giant tech monopolies.  Music Match was subsumed into Yahoo.  Yahoo faded, pushed aside by the dominance of other fast growing companies.  Eventually, Yahoo's remnants were picked up by Verizon to be administered alongside Verizon's previously acquired AOL so that the AOL and Yahoo email services became clones, both subject to new simultaneously implemented restrictions on promulgation of information through email distribution lists.

While the lure of the internet may often be things that seem to be free, the provision of those things is far from free at all: The other recognized key to the standard model of internet provided services is the prevalence of data scraping.  Would I have a right to expect that, with the internet music services I just mentioned, those services will not be tracking and collecting data about my music preferences, listening and buying habits?  When was the last time you read or bothered to understand the "terms of service" agreement according to which you got a computer or internet program?

Of course we all know how some of that generally expected data scraping results in our being micro-targeted with advertisements tailored very specifically to us after we looked into the availability of a product.  Or did I express interest in that product writing in an email or mention it on a Facebook post?  Even if I disregard or chose to like this volunteered assistance from the internet, including the way it reduces my need to think, in other contexts it can be creepier.  What if what this kind of surveillance notes that I seem to be paying a lot of attention to stories on Democracy Now about mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers at the boarder?  About ICE misconduct?  And what if the follow up to that is that someone micro-targets me with links to stories that convey a mistaken impression that immigration at the border involves a flood of immigrants at unprecedented levels and an insoluble crisis?  Or what if the follow up is simply to ramp up the distractions being offered with more Russiagate conspiracy theories?

You may put yourself at ease by saying to yourself that no one is likely to want to pay attention to your little needle in the big haystack out there, and you may virtuously feel that to the extent you get fed distracting or misleading stories you have the strength of mind and mental acuity to think for yourself no matter what.  If so, you'd be right be right in one respect: Most of the surveillance methods sweeping up data tend not to focus on the individual; they focus broadly on interconnections and relationships throughout cyberspace.

If your emerging individual political predilections were lonely and aberrant they'd hardly be a concern for those seeking to maintain power and control.  What is more to be worried about is something the internet and the data collection surveillance systems are designed to do very well: Keep track of where groups of people and their ideas are swarming.  So when you and your neighbors in your extended political community all start paying attention to, for example, certain Democracy Now stories and reports, you may find that you and your neighbors all get headed off and deflected in similar ways.  Algorithms may do a lot of the work and those algorithms again may smartly incorporate informed instincts of what is the best and most tailored way of deflecting you and like-minded neighbors to other modes of thought.

Would any of the big internet monopolies take actions that steer public discourse (the way that their sister corporate media giants do)?  Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been doing very well recently despite the way that the corporate media has been working to shut out her anti-war themed campaign.  Right now Gabbard is suing Google for halting and refusing to accept her campaign advertisements.  Is she likely to win?

Nor is it necessarily good when we teeter on the brink as politicians finding fault with the biases of Facebook, et al. threaten to regulate the internet giants as common carriers (the giants assuredly control what has become the public square) without actually doing so. . .  Because then those ongoing unconsummated threats become a vehicle for coercing political favors and bias that could not be demanded of entities that were actually, in fact, regulated by the government.

The internet, created by the U.S. government, was privatized in the mid 1980's without fanfare and with virtually no discussion about that privatization as Yasha Levine notes in his book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  Also as Levine notes, the original purpose of the internet when the government created it had a lot to do with surveillance and information control.  Lawrence Preston Gise, the mentor and maternal grandfather of Amazon's Jeff Bezos was involved was involved with DARPA (originally ARPA- which he helped set up and he worked)  in setting up the internet.
 
The privatizing of the internet is an interesting thing.  Legal distinctions of what is permissible mean that those who control the internet privately have not been subject to the same restrictions on surveillance to which the government itself was theoretically subject. But the convenience of that distinction does not prevent data collected by private firms from being sold to politically active individuals (where is the dividing line really?), nor, probably, at least as a practical matter, to private firms hired to work for the government.

As noted, almost every way to get the news from Democracy Now involves information that flows through the interruptible spigot of the internet.  The two exceptions are the evening CUNY cable television broadcast and listening to Democracy Now via terrestrial radio such as the broadcasting of the WBAI NYC radio station that helped incubate and give birth to the Democracy Now program.

It is nice to think about cable as affording one of the backstopping alternatives to the internet, but the cable services owned by private communication conglomerates like TimeWarner (Spectrum) and Verizon can’t be relied upon for secure access to information either.  Just as internet access to content and ideas can be choked off, so can access through cable.  The Supreme Court, in the very recently decided DeeDee Halleck (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) case written by new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ruled that cable TV companies, even in the case of channels regulated for the purpose of providing “public access,” are not subject to  First Amendment free speech constraints and requirements and that the cable companies as private entities can censor and deny transmission to whomever they want.  So for instance, as with Halleck, they can cut you off if you raise questions about broadcasting access or the economics affecting the content provided by the public access channels.

If internet access to information and content is choked off more in the United States than it is now (and other countries like China provide examples of just how choked off it can be), would we be able to rely on Newspapers for more robust information flow as once was the case?  Newspapers once wielded the power of printing press production linked with their own channels of very effective distribution.  It was a huge, very powerful physical infrastructure for information delivery that, now supplanted by the internet, is getting dismantled.

The internet has given us ready access to information like we once got from newspapers, including information from the remaining newspapers that still survive (The internet giveth!), but, disruptively, the internet has largely demonetized the newspaper business. That demonetization includes the advent of services like Craigslist, which has diverted all of the classified advertising revenue that previously supported those papers.  The internet taketh away!

The demonetized newspapers can now be bought up for a pittance by wealthy individuals (like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post) interested in their propaganda value.  That's what will generally happen with the legacy papers whose great names still afford branding value for propaganda.  The lesser papers are simply going out of existence-- or maybe they become meaningless by just simply republishing corporate press releases.  The internet has worked brilliantly as a disruptive force to slice and dice things in a way that the production of content, going every which way, has become untethered from monetary streams.

Unless you have independent resources, monetization and access to monetization is obviously important.  Because there are also controls and levers with respect to monetization on the internet it is another way that content on the internet can be regulated and controlled.  YouTube, owned by Google under its Alphabet umbrella, demonetized The Jimmy Dore Show videos when The Jimmy Dore Show was putting out facts about how reports of chemical attacks attributed to Assad's government in Syria were probably false and designed to draw the Unites States into further conflict there. In retrospect, as opposed to the uniform and unquestioning incendiary reports of the corporate media, it appears clear that Dore, while suffering this kind of censorship, was correct. . . 

. . . This is why the model of donor-supported news production is becoming increasingly critical.  Among other things, speaking in old fashioned terms, it eliminates one of the "filters" that Herman and Chomsky identified in  "Manufacturing Consent" as a hurdle blocking the content reaching the public: Advertising and sponsorship.  The Jimmy Dore Show now supports itself through donor support from the show's fans coming in via Patreon.  Like Democracy Now, the radio show version of the Jimmy Dore Show plays on the Pacifica Network radio stations, including WBAI in New York.

With cable being unreliable, if the internet damps down to throttle a news broadcasting show like Democracy Now, the terra firma that remains to which Democracy Now could return will consist only of publicly owned independent terrestrial radio stations like Pacific Network stations, a fittingly poetic homecoming to its origins.

How firm is that terra firma?  Would Democracy Now continue in such a future and is it assured that WBAI would still be broadcasting in New York, able to provide Democracy Now with a future within its embrace?   As is obvious from the production values when you watch Democracy Now, it is a show with ample resources and very well funded.  In fact, its budget may now dwarf the entire budget of WBAI radio.

It should also be noted that a good number of all of the internet options for watching Democracy Now that were described at the beginning of this article involve mechanisms (accompanied by appeals) by which those watching and listening to Democracy Now can support the program by donating directly to it.  The internet giveth!  At the same time, all of the separate multiple ways the internet furnishes for donating directly to Democracy Now represents ways in which supporting Democracy Now and other shows on Pacfica radio stations like WBAI that also have alternate incarnations on the internet (The Jimmy Dore Show is another example) have become untethered from supporting the terra firma of terrestrial radio.  The internet taketh away!

Stations like WBAI and the other Pacifica network stations rely on listener donations just does.  Thus, in a sense, the stations are almost being asked to compete with shows like Democracy Now for donations.  Much like the untetherings that the internet caused to occur in the newspaper industry, that untethering of the stations from shows that are spread through the internet is weakening the guarantee of terrestrial radio as an alternative and backstop that may be turned to if the increasingly few hands controlling the internet spigot impede further information that threatens existing power structures.

If the information traveling through the internet that is critical of power is further damped down in the future, maybe Democracy Now will still be around because it will continue to broadcasts via terrestrial radio.  Or maybe Democracy Now will adapt and mange to stay around because it will simply broadcast less of the news than it currently does.  Nevertheless, Democracy Now, broadcasting over the internet, might even position itself as being still nominally critical of the government.

Does Democracy Now already pull any of its punches with respect to what it reports? 

Democracy Now covered the issue of Facebook censorship, albeit, somewhat gingerly, in September 2018, when the website ThinkProgress (which is somewhat middle-of-the-road politically despite its name) was peculiarly censored by Facebook for reporting about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's position with respect to overturning Roe v. Wade (yes evidence is Kavanaugh has such instincts).  That September 17, 2018 Democracy Now reporting was just weeks before Facebook’s massive censorship take down of more than 800 pages, but Democracy Now never followed up that ThinkProgess story to report on Facebook’s subsequent big take down.

Facebook censors a story about Brett Kanaugh's Roe v. Wade position-  Are there any other stories that relate to this?:  Only a 2012 story about the effect of media consolidation on journalism?

If you go to the Democracy Now page reporting the censorship of ThinkProgress's reporting of Kavanaugh's Roe v. Wade position, Democracy Now offers up as “related” a soon-to-be-vintage January 12, 2012 story: Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism. . . . . Not linked to on their site was a more confusing pre-Facebook-take-down August 1, 2018 Democracy Now story that was even somewhat sympathetic to Facebook. It was about how Facebook was then taking down just a few sites that Facebook said had “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to “undermine democracy.” 

If you'd absorbed that August 1st Democracy Now story beforehand, it probably would not have prepped you to be alarmed when reading the New York Times front page story published in October.

. . .  As we noted, Democracy Now is a good place to get about 85% of your news, not a full 100%. 

PS (8/11/2019): After this article was written and posted, there was this breaking (August 9, 2019) news- “leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.” 

Out In Theaters Now: “Shock and Awe” A Film About Suppression of Anti-War News Journalism That Itself Seems Like It Is Being Suppressed– So You’ll Have to Hurry To See It

Two film reviews that came out last week are poles apart: One is the New York Times review of Rob Reiner’s new film “Shock and Awe,” a true story about investigative beltway reporting.  It’s about the run-up to Iraq war.  The other was the review of the same film that appears in the Village Voice.

The New York Times review of the film is disgraceful: It reviews the film dishonestly treating it as essentially a non-movie.  It short-shrifts it with a few mostly dismissive paragraphs.  Likely to be overlooked by most readers, the message was clearly: `nothing to see here, move along.'

Conversely, the review in the Village Voice was way beyond respectful. It was an engaging one that would likely encourage most readers to see the film.  Oddly, the Village Voice review, initially very easy to discover in an internet search just hours after it was posted, was soon almost impossible to find by Googling.  That is one indicator of a question that needs to be discussed: Whether the film is being suppressed.  The New York Times review, on the other hand, continues to be easy to find.

Ben Kenigsberg, who wrote the Times mini-review, probably telegraphed what he was up to when he wrote in the first paragraph that the film insults the abysmal quality of news coverage that the New York Times offered during the run up to the Iraq war.  And truly, part of the fun of the film (as the Village Voice review recognized: Rob Reiner’s “Shock and Awe” Takes on Bush’s War and the “New York Times” — and Wins) is how thoroughly the film lambasts the New York Times as an unconscionable conduit of propaganda for the powerful who doled out access in return for the publication of the false stories they want the public to swallow.  The inspiring part of the film is how diligent reporters working at the Knight Ridder newspaper chain were, without high-level access, able to see through the deceptions and get the story right.  Its main characters, journalists working for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, are Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, and later Joe Galloway working under their Washington bureau chief John Walcott.

In the film, that propaganda is the fake news that the George W. Bush administration manufactured and deceitfully handed out in 2003 as an excuse to go to war in Iraq.  As such, the film is ever so relevant to today, particularly from a potentially anti-war standpoint, as we presently listen to the drumbeats urging the U.S. to start up new wars around the world on multiple fronts, Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Yemen, Venezuela. . .  Two of those countries, not yet attacked by us, Korea, and Iran, were, alongside Iraq, included in G. W. Bush’s original 2002 rhetoric about a tripartite “Axis of Evil.”— Venezuela is the country that Trump very recently questioned whether we could invade. . .  Thus, it is perhaps not surprising if the film is being suppressed in various ways, as appears may very likely be the case.

In his New York Times review, Kenigsberg ignores those ways that the film is most likely relevant and manages to invert the way he concludes that the film “feels more timely than it might have,” by instead linking its potential relevance to a “current president” who “routinely dismisses the accuracy of reporting.”  In other words, Trump is the enemy again and if you have the notion that the New York Times publishes fake or unreliable news then that puts you in the Trump camp?

Kenigsberg concludes his review by saying of the film:

It also captures an aspect of journalism not often portrayed: the fear of being wrong when the conclusions of your reporting break from those of your competitors.

That almost sounds like a humorously offered defense of the New York Times for getting it 100% wrong in the run up to the Iraq war, as if instead of incredible sloppiness on the part of the Times, there was just a difference of opinion between competing journalists about what the news actually was with the Times and Judith Miller having the commendable courage to get it wrong.

The film is a significant addition to the expanding canon of films about real journalists reporting about real events and issues.  Some of them are documentaries and others, like this and “All The Presidents’ Men” are dramatized versions of what happened.  To include its release, National Notice has just updated a list of such films ordered according to the chronology of the real events concerned: Time To Update Our Timeline Presenting Movies About Real Journalists Covering Real Public Issues and Events (To Include “Shock and Awe” and “Risk”), Sunday, July 15, 2018.- 

One important subject of “Shock and Awe” is about the working of mainstream media and how the reporting of the Knight Ridder team of journalists which, essentially anti-war because of its rightful skepticism, was suppressed.  The on-target and in retrospect very valuable stories published by the Knight Ridder chain were not treated as news or picked up by New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media.   As the films puts it, those media outlets, as in the wake of 9/11, acted as “stenographers” for the Bush administration’s propaganda.  One of the things the film sadly depicts is how the Philadelphia Inquirer, one newspaper in the Knight Ridder chain, defected, refusing to publish the accurately skeptical Knight Ridder stories and replaced them with the stories by Judith Miller for which the New York Times ultimately had to apologize because of they were so abjectly false.

The film was discussed in a segment of this week’s On The Media. On The Media introed its coverage of the film (at 11:46) with: “What if great investigative journalism falls in the forest and doesn’t make a noise: Fifteen years later it becomes a movie.”  Unfortunately, we could now add to that bleak epigram: “A movie that nobody sees.”. . .

. . . People are tweeting about how the film only made an absolutely paltry $41,000 its opening weekend, calculating that this must work out to about five tickets being sold per showing of the film.

This astoundingly poor showing doesn’t seem exactly like an accident.  I was eager to see the film as soon as it came out, but finding out where it was playing and how to get tickets was next to impossible when I tried.  The incomplete information Fandango offered was inaccurate.  There was only one theater in New York City where I could see the film at unless I wanted to travel to Coney Island late at night.

The apparent suppression of the film now, and thus, once again, the underlying story that is so very relevant to right now, is very meta.

The film also addresses concerns beyond mere journalism that are less vanilla and increasingly relevant to today.  I could offer a “spoiler alert” concerning what I am about to describe, but the film is so subtle in one respect that I think the way it pitches one point is likely to go over the heads of almost everyone.  “All The President’s Men” has its scene where reporters Woodward and Bernstein realize that their lives may be in danger and that they may also be the subject of surveillance.  “Shock and Awe,” has a very comparable scene that takes place between Woody Harrelson playing reporter Jonathan Landay and Milla Jovovich playing his wife.  Based on her experiences when her country of Yugoslavia disintegrated, she warns Landay that he needs to be concerned for their lives and about surveillance.  She does so when he tells her that he is working on a story about how the Bush administration is stove-piping intelligence up to a newly created senior unit at the top of the U.S. intelligence agencies for cherry-picking and manipulation purposes.

Immediately after this concern is expressed, another scene follows where the New York Times  scoops the Knight Ridder team on that same story, but does so in a way that neutralizes and defangs the point of what Knight Ridder would have reported, inoculating the intelligence agencies against any future disclosure of information the new special unit formed to skew the intelligence.  The implied question that is likely to go by too many viewers is whether the Bush administration fed the scoop to a cooperative New York Times to protect itself.  Essentially the question is whether the Times acted yet again, in yet another way, as an extension of the Bush administration’s push toward war.

The Kenigsberg review suggests that this is not a film that intelligent or informed people will want to see saying that “the writing . . . has more interest in reaching the least-informed viewers than in realism.”  In other words, saying that the film is pedestrian and didactic: But there is a lot in the film that most viewers will not know.

It is fair to say that the film, is aspirational about edifying and educating and therefore sticks fairly close to facts.  The On The Media segment noted that it therefore must deal with a story that is a bit of "a downer."  It also therefore necessarily falls short of checking the standard formulaic boxes for success as mindless entertainment or even infotainment.  There are bad guys, but no car chases or super-heroes throwing enormous objects as they fly through the air.  The bad guys also get away with their scheme in the end. It is nonetheless a good and inspiring film, very worth seeing, that could critically educate a large segment of our population.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t necessarily engage in some streamlining when it comes to the facts, something it perforce almost has to do.  The film starts by establishing the events of 9/11 as backdrop to the story that partly explains the lack of criticism of the government by the media at the time.  To emphasize how off track it was to blame Iraq for 9/11 it keeps its focus on Osama bin Laden as the 9/11 perpetrator who is, as a result, getting off the hook.  The film does not detour into the unpursued involvement of the Saudis.

Although the film’s courageous protagonists don’t get to follow the standard arc of today’s mythically-presented and godlike movie superheroes (some are actually Gods of ancient myth– and the Times in its movie reviews takes them more seriously), it sent me scurrying to research one of the great enduring myths of all time, the Greek Myth of Cassandra. In their ancient story telling, the Greeks (e.g. Sisyphus) have a penchant for exquisite frustration: Cassandra was granted the gift of accurate prophecy sequestered in the curse that whatever she predicted would not be believed.  The plight of the film’s reporting team is much the same.

The reporters in the film are able to see and accurately report that the Bush administration was lying and cherry picking intelligence, and they are able to foresee the many ways that going to war in Iraq would ultimately be exactly as extremely costly and counterproductive as it was.  They do so, not through prophecy, but by digging to come up with well-founded documentation.  Part of their strategy is to cultivate, as sources, lower level government officials rather than rely on access to top officials looking for media conduits to prostitute themselves.  (The reason that Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to have her prophecies never believed was that she would not go to bed with him.)

Another difference between the true story the film offers and the Cassandra story is the centrality of how the Knight Ridder reporters were not merely predicting the future, but trying to unmask liars crafting a concocted story.  But, in similar fashion, Cassandra was also predicting wars that would be disastrous to the civilizations involved, and at one point she too is dealing with and seeing through deception: When the Greeks deliver their Trojan Horse to the city of Troy, Cassanda knows it is a trick.  When she tries to destroy the horse herself, she is stopped by the people of Troy who degrade her for not appreciating the Greek gift.  The Greeks inside the horse were amazed at her perception.

Is there a lack of helpful attention and coverage that is suppressing this film?  Are reviews like the Times review intended to help bury it quickly?  Admittedly, the film makes almost all the newspapers and news magazines in the country look bad, and now it is up to those same news media outlets to publicize, praise or excoriate the film and help it find its audience.  It is not surprising that the film is getting little help from these quarters.  There are also serious questions about what does and does not get elevated in importance, or conversely what gets suppressed, by Google and Facebook algorithms.  (This article about the film may not Google well.)

If the film is being suppressed, I think that the best antidote is to build legs for it by noticing the suppression.  The film is reasonably good by any standard, and the only things that make it less than a perfect entertainment or work of art are the things that also make it a more important film in other respects.  Certainly, at the very least, anti-war sites should publicize the film and its apparent suppression.

We will have to conclude with some ironies.  The false information promulgated by almost every mainstream media outlet in the United States during the George Bush administration’s bellicose run up to the war is being cited by people like Aaron Maté for reason to be skeptical about all the Russiagate charges that Russia is an enemy of the Unites States interfering with our elections, especially since special prosecutor Robert Mueller heading the FBI in February 2003 was one of those Bush administration officials giving congress misleading information about Iraq  (at 9:11 in video).  Mueller, who started in office as head of the FBI a week before 9/11, is also one of the people in our government who inexplicably did not pursue the evidence linking top Saudis to 9/11.

But, on the other hand, yesterday in my email I got a request from Rob Reiner, the director of “Shock and Awe,” asking me to sign his petition demanding that President Donald Trump:

meet with special counsel Robert Mueller and answer his questions about possible conspiracy with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election and obstruction of justice to cover it up. It’s imperative that federal investigators have all the information they need to get to the truth.

Frankly, the timing of the petition email from Reiner is just too weird.  And, if I were someone like Aaron Maté, I’d say that it hardly squares with the rigorous skepticism and caution about people in government that Reiner’s new film really ought to encourage.