NPR's On The Media Corrects Report on The Infinite Mind: Apologizes for 'Lapse of Journalistic Judgment'

"NPR's "On The Media" has corrected and apologized for a report it aired last fall accusing the executive producer of "The Infinite Mind" public radio series of having known about ethically questionable behavior by the program's host, Dr. Fred Goodwin.

(PRWEB) March 22, 2009 -- NPR's "On The Media" this week corrected its November 28, 2008 report that accused the executive producer of "The Infinite Mind" public radio series of having known that the show's host, Dr. Fred Goodwin, had received $1.2 million in fees for giving marketing lectures on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, while he was hosting the program.

In its on-air correction (http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/03/13/05), "On The Media's" host, Brooke Gladstone, apologized for what she called the "lapse of journalistic judgment" in the report, which relied on an unnamed source to corroborate Goodwin's claim that Lichtenstein was aware of the speaking fees. In its correction, "On The Media" acknowledged that, contrary to what was originally reported by the show, the anonymous source says she has "no first-hand evidence that (Lichtenstein) knew of any fees." Gladstone added that "The Infinite Mind" says it "had always adhered to standard journalism practice in vetting guests and disclosing conflicts of interest."

"On The Media" also apologized for failing to seek a comment or response from Lichtenstein, who has maintained that he first learned about Goodwin's speaking fees from a November 22, 2008 article in the New York Times, and that Goodwin's activities violated the strict conflict of interest agreement Goodwin had with "The Infinite Mind." Gladstone said "On The Media's" failure to present Lichtenstein's and "The Infinite Mind's" side of the story was "a mistake, it wasn't fair and it didn't serve our listeners."

Despite "The Infinite Mind's" protests at the time of the broadcast, "On The Media" corrected the story only after the anonymous source came forward to say "On The Media" had incorrectly reported what she told the program. The source said she told "On The Media" that in 2003 "The Infinite Mind" was aware that host Goodwin gave educational lectures, but said she had no knowledge or evidence to support Goodwin's claim, as reported by "On The Media," that Lichtenstein or "The Infinite Mind" was aware that Goodwin was being paid to give marketing talks on behalf of pharmaceutical companies.

"On The Media's" report, which aired a week after the New York Times article was published, attracted wide attention as it represented the sole evidence that "The Infinite Mind's" producers were aware of the reported $1.2 million in speaking fees received by Goodwin.

Since the publication of the New York Times article in November 2008, Goodwin has shifted his position from stating that "The Infinite Mind" was aware of his activities, to maintaining in interviews with the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) and other publications that he did not believe there had been, in fact, a conflict of interest. "I frankly do not see these things as a conflict of interest . . . I always thought that if you have multiple relationships they sort of cancel each other out," Goodwin told the student newspaper at George Washington University, where he is on the faculty.

"The Infinite Mind" had previously announced it would, after 10 years, be ceasing production at the end of 2008. "The Infinite Mind" was independently produced and distributed to public radio stations, and NPR aired the series on its Sirius Satellite channel.

For a decade, "The Infinite Mind" was public radio's most honored and listened to health and science program, examining all aspects of the mind and the biology of human behavior. The program featured the leading names in neuroscience and mental health, along with appearances by renowned authors, musicians and actors, and was the recipient of 30 major broadcast journalism awards.

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See the original story at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/03/prweb2251624.htm

Please, just leave - Right-wing crackpots plot to abandon the union

By MIKE MILIARD
thephoenix.com
March 19, 2009

"What kind of revolution appeals most to you?" read the now-deleted poll question on Sean Hannity's message board: "Military Coup, Armed Rebellion, or War for Secession?"

The next four to eight years are gonna be some fun!

Barely two months into the Obama administration, wing-nuts across the land are frothing at the mouth, talking feverishly of secession, violent revolution, tax revolt, "going Galt," and national divorce. It would be hilarious if it weren't so creepy.

We all had a good laugh this past December when Igor Panarin, dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats, predicted that the financial crisis would eventually lead to widespread unrest, martial law, and, by 2010, a civil war in the US — the end result of which would be a motley collection of rump states like "Atlantic America" and the "Texas Republic," that then glom onto countries such as Canada and Mexico. It's an absurd idea.

Or is it? Perusing some of the sheer insanity spewed on rightist blogs, message boards, and comment threads — the pitchfork-shaking anger directed at this so-called socialist government — one has to wonder just what's percolating in this country. Maybe the big break-up is coming sooner than we think? ...

ut protests do only so much. More and more, it seems, nothing less than outright secession will satisfy some of these cranks. The right-wing Web is all atwitter over a recent open letter, spreading from blog to blog like a hanta virus, by one "John J. Wall, Law Student and an American." In it, Wall puts it plainly: he wants a divorce.

"Let's just end it on friendly terms," he writes. "We don't like redistributive taxes so you can keep them. . . . Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA, and the military." (What they'll do with all the guns he doesn't say.)

Ironically, when not busy fomenting revolution or concocting a plan to carve up the continental US, conservatives act a lot like the "hippies" that Wall went on to lambaste in his letter — thumbing their nose at authority and threatening to drop out of society.

It was reported on military.com last month that a soldier, First Lieutenant Scott Easterling, who is stationed in Iraq, has balked at following orders: "Until Mr. Obama releases a 'vault copy' of his original birth certificate for public review," he declared, "I will consider him neither my commander in chief nor my president, but rather, a usurper to the office — an impostor."

And the latest bit of in(s)anity making the rounds in conservative circles in is the notion of "going Galt," in which angry rich people protest Obama's fiscal policies by following the lead of John Galt —übermensch protagonist of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged — and removing their ostensibly valuable productivity from society. ...

http://thephoenix.com/Providence/News/78501-Please-just-leave/

BOSTON GLOBE'S ALEX BEAM - SON OF A NAZI/CIA COLLABORATOR - DEFLECTS ATTENTION FROM HIS OWN FAMILY BY WRITING ABOUT QUISLING FRANCES GOULD

By Alex Constantine

Alex Beam

AC Note: I've written about Jacob Beam, Alex Beam's father, in the past. Jacob was chairman of Radio Free Europe at one time (in which capacity he was cozy with the CIA and earned his "Mockingbird" psyop wings - inherited and currently sported by his "journalist" son), a carded member of the ultra-conservative Committee on the Present Danger, and a close friend of native Nazi Charles Lindbergh (I know, I know - the media have cleaned up his image) - and together they were pampered guests of the Hitler regime in Nazi Germany.

Alex Beam, a columnist at the Boston Globe (and a vicious "Mockingbird" propagandist who reviles "conspiracy theorists" who get too close to the truth about fascism in domestic politics - in the pages of the most widely circulated daily in New England) distances himself from his roots by doing us all a favor - he has written an opinion piece excoriating philanthropist Frances Gould for her Nazi liaisons in France.

By posing as a freedom-loving anti-fascist, Beam apparently hopes to allay any suspicions concerning his fascist roots and (CIA-sponsored?) "journalism career":

The BSO's Tainted Donor
By Alex Beam
Boston Globe
March 17, 2009

Now a new book from Yale University Press states that the late Florence Gould - benefactress of the Symphony's Florence Gould Auditorium at Tanglewood, whose foundation bountifully subsidizes programs at Harvard, Milton Academy, the Boston Public Library, the Boston Camerata, the New England Conservatory, UMass-Amherst, and elsewhere - was a dyed-in-the-wool Hitlerite and bigot. "She was a Nazi sympathizer and a terrible anti-Semite who cohabited with the most appalling figures of the German occupation in Paris" - including the head of the Gestapo responsible for dynamiting synagogues and deporting Jews to the death camps - according to the book's author, Frederic Spotts.

Who was Florence Gould? She was a French divorcee and dancer who caught the eye of Frank Jay Gould, son of the famous robber baron Jay Gould. Her husband spent World War II on the Riviera, but she "quickly returned to Paris," according to Spotts's book, "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation," "and in no time was cultivating Wehrmacht officers and Gestapo officials."

Spotts writes that Gould became a "collabo [collaborationist] queen" who hosted a ritzy salon "while Sylvia Beach [American founder of the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Co.] and some three thousand British and American civilians languished in an internment camp." According to its most recent tax filing, the Florence Gould Foundation donated $10,000 to Shakespeare & Co. in 2007.

The anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine was fascinated by the woman he called "Madame Frank J. Gould, the wife (the 5th! I also knew the 2nd quite well) of the old American railroad billionaire . . . a former manicurist, French by birth (Lacaze), flighty and not at all dumb, a snob." Celine wrote that "she was enormously compromised with the Luftwaffe - where she had at least three young lovers and was very much at home in the German military headquarters." Gould's main squeeze was Ernst Junger, a German cultural official, World War I war hero and writer who had dabbled in anti-Semitic propaganda in 1930, according to an article Mehlman published in Modern Language Notes in 2007.

You know what they say: Money doesn't care who owns it. "She's not the first outrageous person to give money away," Spotts told me in a telephone interview from his home in the south of France.

Gould died on the Riviera in 1983, at age 87. She had no heirs and her legacy is the $100 million - those are 2007 endowment dollars - New York-based foundation in her name that makes extraordinary gifts to cultural institutions. Most recently reported recipients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art ($250,000), Lincoln Center ($100,000), Cornell medical school ($200,000), and so on. The Clark Art museum in Williamstown, founded by the American fascist and Parisian expatriate Sterling Clark, received $20,000 from the foundation.

The French Institute Alliance Francaise operates a Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan and there is a Florence Gould Theater in San Francisco.

BSO spokeswoman Bernadette Horgan said the Tanglewood auditorium was built in 1990 with a gift from the Florence Gould Foundation. The recently reported details of Mrs. Gould's biography were news to her. Foundation president John Young did not return my call.

Encore

Three of the four best books I read last year were novels by Justin Cartwright; the fourth was "Cost," by Roxana Robinson. The plot of Cartwright's "Masai Dreaming" disturbingly evokes the world of Florence Gould. A Jewish doctor has survived the Nazi occupation of Paris by ministering to patients in a Jewish hospital. His daughter returns to Paris to warn him to escape, before the last group of Jews is transported East, to the death camps. But he insists that he is out of danger; the Allies have landed in Normandy, and he has achieved a modus vivendi with the more enlightened elements of the German administration.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Alex Beam's e-dress is beam@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/03/17/the_bsos_tainted_donor/
••••
PS: NOTE TO ALEX BEAM ...

CARE TO COMMENT?

From: "Alex Constantine"
To: beam@globe.com
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 8:14 PM

Dear Vermin:

Here you are, in all your CIA-Nazi glory:

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2009/03/boston-globes-alex-beam-son-of-nazi.html

March 20 Update: Mr. Beam did not respond to my request for a comment above. I also contacted some half-dozen editors and reporters at the Boston Globe. None of them acted on the information re Alex and Jacob Bean, and no response has come from any of them.

I interpret this silence as confirmation.

Is the Internet killing the news media?

Pew report on state of American journalism paints bleak picture
'Net Insider By Scott Bradner
Network World - 03/16/2009

The latest Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism report on the state of the U.S. news media makes for sobering reading if you are a student thinking of pursuing a career in journalism or if you are already in the business. The bottom line is that the business is toast unless you are in the Internet side, and even there it's toast.

The report's first few sentences tell most of the story:

• Newspaper ad revenues are down more than 20% in the last two years.

• Twenty percent of the journalists who worked in newspapers have lost their jobs in that time period.

• Ad revenues were down last year in local TV news more than 5% (even in an election year).

• The traffic at the top news sites went up more than 25% last year.

• The ad-based model for funding journalism is unlikely for the future.

STORY CONTINUES
•••••
" ... All over America, as newspaper revenues plummet – by the end of 2008, ad sales were down about 25 percent from three years earlier – publishers cannot seem to shed editors, reporters and sections of their papers fast enough. ... "

The Conversation: What do you lose if newspapers don't survive?
The New Republic
MAR. 01, 2009

... More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.

Even before the recession hit, the newspaper industry was facing a mortal threat from the rise of the Internet, falling circulation and advertising revenue, and a long-term decline in readership, as the habit of buying a daily paper dwindled from one generation to the next.

The recession has intensified these difficulties, plunging newspapers into a tailspin from which some will not recover and others will emerge only as a shadow of their former selves. The devastation is already substantial.

At the Los Angeles Times, the cumulative effect of cutbacks has been to reduce its newsroom by half – and that was before its parent company, Tribune, declared bankruptcy. Another company weighed down by debt, the McClatchy chain, which includes the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and 28 other dailies, has laid off one-quarter of its work force in the past year; according to one executive, the editorial downsizing is under 20 percent but is now cutting "close to the bone."

(On Friday, the Rocky Mountain News, owned by E.W. Scripps Co., published its final edition. Earlier last week, the Hearst Corp. said it will close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle if it can't cut expenses.)

Newspapers are also shrinking in numbers of pages, breadth of news coverage, features of various kinds and home delivery of print editions.

All over America, as newspaper revenues plummet – by the end of 2008, ad sales were down about 25 percent from three years earlier – publishers cannot seem to shed editors, reporters and sections of their papers fast enough. And there is more pain to come. According to a December forecast by Barclays Capital, advertising revenue will drop another 17 percent in 2009 and 7.5 percent more the year after.

Who should care

Some observers, confident of the blessings of technology, refuse to shed any tears for the traditional giants of journalism, on the grounds that their troubles are of their own making and of little consequence to the general welfare. In this view, regardless of whether newspapers successfully adapt to the Internet, new and better sources of news will develop online, and they will fill whatever void newspapers leave. Others are so angry at the mainstream media – the reviled "MSM" – that they see the economic misery of the press as a deserved comeuppance. Let the bastards suffer.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism.

This is no time for Internet triumphalism: The stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere.

Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country.

Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran 70 stories a day, counting the national, local and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to 100), whereas a half-hour of television news included only 10 to 12.

And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth. ...

FULL STORY

CNN's Yellin failed to identify CPR chairman as ex-CEO of scandal-plagued hospital firm

Vampires (who want the decimation of all health care proposals) this way come:

Summary: CNN's Jessica Yellin identified Conservatives for Patients' Rights chairman Richard Scott as someone who "runs urgent-care clinics" and the leader of "a media campaign to limit government's role in the health-care system." But Yellin did not note that Scott resigned as chairman of the nation's largest for-profit health-care company in 1997 amid a federal investigation into the company's Medicare billing, physician recruiting, and home-care practices.

Story at MediaMatters.org

Polish media bill targets former neo-Nazi head of TV

By Gabriela Baczynska
Reuters
Mar 12, 2009

WARSAW - Poland's center-right ruling party and leftist opposition unveiled Thursday plans to reform the state television broadcaster which would allow for the removal of its controversial head who has a neo-Nazi past.

Piotr Farfal, a onetime skinhead and former editor of a neo-Nazi magazine known for its anti-Semitic, homophobic views, became acting chief executive of Polish Television (TVP) in late 2008 after an internal power struggle at the broadcaster.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government needs the new bill to oust Farfal, a member of the right-wing, staunchly Roman Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR).

Farfal says he has renounced his youthful association with extreme rightwing ideas, which are particularly controversial in Poland, which lost millions of its citizens, including Jews, during Nazi Germany's brutal wartime occupation.

The bill would force a shakeup in the TVP management, scrap Poland's national television and radio licensefee and prepare TVP for digitalization.

Tusk's Civic Platform says the bill would also reduce the scope for political meddling in public-owned media.

"Today we are presenting a joint project aimed at reforming the public media," said Jerzy Szmajdzinski, deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament and a member of the small leftist SLD opposition party.

Tusk needs SLD support to overcome an expected veto of the bill by President Lech Kaczynski, a conservative who blocked a similar attempt to reform public broadcasting last year.

Kaczynski is twin brother of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland's main opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS), which led a coalition government in which Farfal's LPR also served until Tusk's party defeated them in elections in October 2007.

Farfal and many others in the state television hierarchy owe their positions to that period of PiS-led government and, under current rules, cannot be easily dislodged.

Public media in Poland has remained vulnerable to political interference since the end of one-party communist rule in 1989.

In deference to leftist insistence that TVP should continue to receive public funds to support its 'educational' mission, senior Civic Platform lawmaker Zbigniew Chlebowski said a "public mission fund" would replace the current license fee.

It was not immediately clear how the new fund would work.

Parliament is expected to approve the media bill by early June, Szmajdzinski said.

(Writing by Gareth Jones; editing by Katie Nguyen)

http://www.reuters.com/article/televisionNews/idUSTRE52B4CG20090312

Jon Stewart vs. CNBC

You've most likely seen this video of Jon Stewart dissing CNBC. But in case you missed it, here it is.