Follow Up on the News
At a July 12th public hearing on the project the town hall was jam packed with valley residents, townsfolk and even a representative of the New York State Council of Trout Unlimited who appeared to drop the bombshell that the organization, which has a membership of several thousand, opposes the project. Literally all present, estimated at over 170 strong, demanded the board deny the application by Andrew Poncic to truck water out of the valley via tractor trailer twice a day five days a week.
The planning board, which will decide on the matter next month, has the authority to deny Poncic’s project. Should they do so, it would break a long held precedent of approving pretty much any application for a special permit laid on the table before them. Not since the 1980s has anything been denied regardless of controversy.
Also in terms of precedent, valley dwellers fear future applications for not just water harvesting but rock harvesting. Landscapers throughout the region as well downstate are quickly learning of the appeal of the creek stone that lies in abundant supply in Woodland and other valleys in styles that vary as much as snowflakes. Should Poncic be granted permission it is fared there would be little defense against any other plan involving trucking treasures out to parts unknown.
Resident Dakin Morehouse said that Woodland Valley residents are not the only ones who should fear the ripple effects of the Poncic plan if it’s approved.
“It appears no amount of appeals from his neighbors will sway the applicant,” Morehouse said. “Not the 700 signatures on the petition, the 91 officially recorded letters, nor the house packed with concerned and impassioned residents – from all over the township - for if passed, this would set a precedent which will be felt in every hamlet and hollow of our town. Our zoning code will be regarded as a farce and it will only be a matter of time before all our taxpayers will have their dollars going into maintaining the quaintly narrow road, a collapsed culvert or bridge and perhaps even an accident leading to a costly lawsuit against our town for negligence. “
Planner Gerry Setchko tried to convince the audience that even though the board was accused of ignoring information they have indeed read and reviewed everything submitted.
“Any decision we are making on this we are not taking lightly,” he said.
So unified was the opposition at the hearing that even Poncic himself did not raise his hand when valley resident Rolf Reiss asked if there was anyone in the room that supported the project.
For three hours citizens that ranged in age between nine and 90 took three minutes each to convince the planners that the plan would destroy quality of life along the 6-mile dead end road.
The session was always civil, but frequently disrupted by loud applause after speakers made their points.
And in case the planners needed reasons to deny the application, the speakers provided ample amounts. Some quoted town law, children said they would no longer be allowed to bike ride, mothers said they could not safely stroll their babies along the thin windy road, engineers challenged the technical claims of the applicant and lawyers challenged the planning board’s authority to even consider the project in its present form.
One man summed it up to just one issue. Noting that the board was charged with protecting the health safety and welfare of the public, Peter Bosch said it was clear that the project would not benefit anyone in anyway, except the applicant himself.
“That’s the only question that needs to be asked,” he said. “Where is the public good?”
The evening included lighthearted moments, as when valley resident Wendy Grossman noted the irony of the need to close the meeting hall doors on such a hot and steamy evening because tractor trailers were shooting past town hall, overpowering speakers with too much noise. There were a few gasps as well when Woodland Valley Association President Howard McGowan stretched out a long tape measure to show that the trucks planned for the water hauling would be longer than the meeting hall itself.
There was even an enlightening videotape presentation showing the journey of such a tractor-trailer through the valley, unable to stay within the traffic lane.
The strongest audience reaction came at the end of the session when Marcy Meiller, who has been at every meeting about the project for over six years, thanked everyone for speaking out. She noted how at one ill attended session planner John Horn remarked that the project could not affect the community character because Woodland Valley has none.
Gesturing to the audience, Meiller disagreed with Horn’s notion and said, “THIS is community character.”
Everyone gave Meiller a thunderous standing ovation and clapped and stomped their feet for about one minute.
Morehouse, who noted that the only beneficiary of the project would be Poncic himself, urged the board to weigh that against the how many would suffer.
“One is reminded of the touching scene in Star Trek,” he said. “ The coldly logical Mr. Spock is dying inside the radiation contaminated engine room when he puts his Vulcan hand against the glass and weakly states; “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”.
The Town’s Tax Revolt
The first is an Article 78 proceeding seeking to reverse 2005 tax assessment changes pushed through as part of supervisor Bob Cross Jr.’s push to raise the taxes on state lands in the municipality. The other consists of three civil rights complaints, seeking damages of $3 million, based on charges that Cross’s involvement in the tax changes were for political gain, to punish his opponents, to benefit friends, and served to lessen the value of the plaintiffs’ lands.
The original Article 78 lawsuit, filed by 22 local landowners on October 31 of last year, asks for a reversal to 2004 assessment figures based on their charges that their 2005 tax assessments had been raised by town assessor Rosalie Boland to $600 an acre for all undeveloped properties in town owned by residents with over 20 acres in holdings, no matter the circumstances of individual lots.
They term the reassessment was done in “an arbitrary and capricious manner” that “lacks any rational basis in law or fact.”
The plaintiffs further charge that the town’s actions amount to an unofficial revaluation, that individual assessment hikes show a disproportionate rise in taxes for second-homers, and that by making such changes unannounced, the town has pushed most of those effected, and subsequently suing the town, from being able to address the actual tax hikes, as well as what they see as a faulty process denying them due process, because they were not sent notices in a timely fashion.
Plaintiffs include Mark Byer of Windy Ridge Farm on Route 28, Edward Bennett of Route 42, Randy Mann of Branch 7 Bergen Co. on Rose Mt. Road, Sharon Umhey Callahan of Chichester, John Costa of Stony Clove Road, Stephen Courtney of Crump Road, Bushnellsville, Robert Cruickshank of Lasher Road in Big Indian, Walter Crump of Crump Road, Cutrite Tree Farms of Old Route 28, John Mann of Lost Clove Road’s DA Center in Big Indian, William Dilg of Broad Street, Joseph Friedel of Moon Haw Road in West Shokan, Pierre Levesque of Brown Road, Stanley and Karen Moculeski of Hinkley Road, Amy Wax-Orloff of Kelly Road, Miles Parker of Oliverea, this paper’s publisher, Brian Powers of Chichester, Jerry and Mary Sarlos of Oliverea, the Upper Esopus Creek Fish and Game Club, and Peter Vinci of Rose Mountain.
When the town, through its Poughkeepsie-based attorney David Hagstrom of the top gun Hudson Valley law firm Vandewater & Vandewater (suggested by Dean Gitter and others in town), answered the first Article 78 with a Motion to Dismiss — based on the fact that the plaintiffs had not included “the other involved parties such as the county and school district” — their original complaint was amended as of January 6 by their attorney, David C. Rowley of Albany-based Cooper, Erving & Savage to include those parties, and limit the town’s defendants to the assessor.
It has been pointed out that with the town’s equalization rate at 28 percent due to Shandaken’s not having completed a townwide revaluation of its tax rolls since the early 1980s, the actual tax hikes involved need to be seen in terms of real value, nearly four times the $600 an acre amount being talked about of late.
At the time they were made, it should be added, no mention was made of the uniform assessment rises. According to a press release released by Cross on July 29, in the midst of what would turn into a very close election, he “brought home the bacon for his township” by ending the lawsuit filed against the town’s assessment office by New York State, charging that Shandaken had been over-assessing state Department of Environmental Conservation lands since 1992 with his land value talk. At the time, talk of raising the state’s tax rate from $400 to $600 an acre for a four year period was seen as the gravy of what the supervisor called a “win-win situation”
The plaintiff’s subsequent civil lawsuit against the town, and Cross in particular – filed April 14 as a complaint with summons to all defendants – charges that the supervisor’s actions were “an abuse of their taxing authority over a period of years constituting a pattern of discriminatory conduct which culminated in a selective reassessment,” and that their taxes were raised “for the purpose of achieving a settlement with the State of New York,” as well as “furthering the political aspirations of Town Supervisor Robert Cross, Jr.”
More importantly, the suit seeks changes to the system of what it sees as random assessment hikes instead of a standardized, process-oriented, open government form of reval as practiced recently in the neighboring towns of Olive and Woodstock, among others. They call what happened, “based upon a discriminatory rationale and resulting in gross disparities between owners of similarly situated properties” and singled out that town assessor Rosalie Boland had stated that her $600 an acre assessment figured was based on info given her by the town supervisor, “because Robert Cross knows about timber.”
Hideki Onoue, Henry Williams, and Copperhood Inn owner Elizabeth Winograd are also part of the Civil Suit seeking damages.
Cross is quoted in the lawsuit as having said he computed the per-acre tax figure based on “a computational formula that he devised that incorporated timber value, stumpage value and a third proprietary element that he did not disclose.” He said this week, in one of his only comments on the suit, that he had gotten comparable figures for his calculations from John Horn, a planning board member who made an unsuccessful bid for an open town assessor’s position running on a slate with Cross last year.
Vinci said this week that he had worked to withhold news of the suit from the media, and consequently the public, as he negotiated with Cross in what he thought was a best-faith process. But that came to a halt, he added, when Hagstrom answered the Civil Suit on July 6 by asking for depositions from all plaintiffs.
Vinci adds that although the town approved the hiring of the Poughkeepsie lawfirm to handle the Article 78 lawsuit last autumn, there was no mention of the subsequent civil suit by Cross, in any open, or official, town meeting. Furthermore, he said, it turns out the town has no insurance for such matters. He said Cross’ negotiations, which involved four lunches and two dinners with Vinci, were “done on his own” and had not been discussed in executive session with the rest of the board until the recent July 10 meeting, at which point everyone agreed that further negotiations were needed.
Cross admitted that he then called off those negotiations after sending a videotape of the meeting where Vinci brought his case into the public eye with passion to Hagstrom, who recommended against any further discussions with the plaintiffs.
“It’s in the attorney’s hands,” he said this week, talking about his bout of fisticuffs with the landowner who has become spokesperson for the two lawsuits. “Mr. Vinci’s actions the other night ended any chance at negotiations.”
Hagstrom said that he was expecting Judge Michael Kavanagh to rule on his Motion to Dismiss the Article 78 proceedings within the coming month… after having held off the motion over the recent weeks since the civil lawsuit was filed. His motions tend to rest on the fact that the plaintiffs had recourse via the normal grievance process, whose dictates they have not followed, and should find other ways of voicing their problems with the town’s process.
Joe Hesch, spokesperson for the state Office of Real Property Services, said this week that towns can assess pretty much any way they want, and be able to safely say they tried giving residents a chance to grieve by sending out their notices ten days prior to Grievance Day. It wasn’t necessarily right, but it was legal, he said. Matters of processes whereby tax rates were set using non-open means, he added, were a gray area between tax law and Freedom of Information laws, and best addressed by court opinions.
Hagstrom agreed, saying that even if the plaintiffs had a valid complaint about process, they may be going about it the wrong way. “But they should have a good sense of how to do it by reading the briefs I’ve filed,” he added with a little laugh.
A majority of the plaintiffs, it turns out, did file grievances on time this past year, and after having them turned down because they were process and not amount-driven, have started through yet another appeals process against the town. To date, their actions represent more movement in terms of assessment grieving than most local towns have seen in years, even with revals.
Vinci, an inventor who dabbles in land investments, said that the reason some of the town’s largest landowners have not complained along with his 20 fellow plaintiffs against the town to date may be because they’re looking to sell property at raised values.
“Someone’s seeding their bed for land sales,” he said. “I’ve heard Cross tell me he’s revaluated 70 percent of the town with John Horn. But why?”
And what about a real reval?
“That’ll all come out in court,” answered Cross, enigmatically.
Stay tuned…
Onteora Surprise
Meanwhile, the board also decided to re-open their search for a new superintendent following a growing negative response to its two finalists, recently presented at public meetings in late June.
The vote to appoint D’Orazio occured after trustee Rita Vanacore nominated Patterson as president for a second term but he declined the spot. Patterson said, “Rita I would like to thank you for your confidence in my leadership, but after being contacted by a couple board members expressing their lack of confidence in me and that my leadership would not be in the best interest in the district, I have to decline your nomination.”
O’Connor and Mary Jane Bernholz supported Patterson as president in 2005, but turned their vote for board president to D’Orazio this time, along with newly re-elected board member Herb Rosenfeld and newly elected trustee Maxanne Resnick of Shandaken, who was sworn in at the Tuesday night meeting.
Patterson and Vanacore voted against D’Orazio for president.
Vanacore also lost her seat as board Vice President to the board to fellow Olive resident Bernholz, with Patterson the single vote against her. Resnick replaced Lev Flournoy who chose not to seek a second term as board member. Trustee Herb Rosenfeld was also sworn in for a second term.
The school board then voted unanimously to rescind the special education staff cuts that were made to assure a low tax levy for the voters during budget hearings… against much opposition, and resulting in a previous 4-3 split of board votes. The audience, nearly full of special education employees and their supporters, met the decision with loud applause.
Positions being restored so far are a full time teacher of the deaf, a part time to full time social worker, and two part time to full time and one full time special education instructors.
Business administrator Victoria McLaren said, “I will be bringing a resolution to the board in August to take care of this because we will have to increase the budget to accommodate these…”
She added that once the re-hiring of employees is completed they would be using the two percent appropriated fund balance.
“That is what the fund balance is meant to be used for, these types of situations where we had planned on a certain level of staffing and due to unanticipated levels of staffing and due to unanticipated IEP needs-where we are required to service students.”
Interim Superintendent Jack Jordan, who was not employed in the district during the budget hearings, said, “We have revised data…and this is based on the annual reviews and recommendation to the committee on special ed and in order to meet the needs of our students, this is our recommendation.”
O’Connor noted, “It was painstaking for everybody and the people that were involved, the people that had to be laid off, the people that spoke and I am not against this at all, if this is what we need to do, we need to bring some of the positions back, but to me there seems to be a way that we should have known this earlier. I guess I am asking if this could have been prevented.”
Other school board members voiced similar concerns. O’Connor requested to see the data that caused the change and asked if Independent Education Plans (IEP) could be completed earlier. Patterson requested to look into a policy where the annual reviews could be done earlier to budget hearings, if complied with the law.
addressed Patterson, “Dave, if we really want to be easy on the parents and the children and the employees, what we do is keep increasing the budget. When you cut positions, which is the way you reduce the budget, you are going to run into this kind of a thing,” said Director of Pupil Personnel Barbara Boyce. “Frankly, this year is not the first year we did a major cut in special ed, it was actually the second year but last year we did not cut things that were directly tied to staff, so it makes a difference.”
Boyce said she encourages the staff to try to get their referrals for special education before the budget, but law does not allow a set time frame. Although staff can make projected recommendations on special education, referrals are usually done later in the year because the programming is recommended for the following school year.
The decision to restart the Superintendent Search was announced after the meeting, and an Executive Session on the subject, in a press relkease from D’Orazio.
“ The Board of Education wishes to announce that the negotiations with the finalists for the Superintendent’s position did not ultimately prove fruitful and that, therefore, we are continuing our search for our Superintendent and that Interim Superintendent Jordan will remain in place and fulfill all of the duties of the Superintendency pursuant to Board policy,” read the release.
The board was considering Granville schools Superintendent Daniel Teplesky and Cherry Valley-Springfield Superintendent Nicholas Savin. Onteora has been without a permanent superintendent since February, when Justine Winters stepped down because of health problems. Winters, who was hired in 2004, died in May after a battle with cancer. Peter J. Ferrara, a former Ellenville superintendent, was hired as an interim successor to Winters but resigned a short time later after the Onteora board learned of civil rights violations in the Ellenville district during Ferrara's time at the helm. Jordan, a former Sullivan County superintendent and current resident of the Onteora district who ran unsuccessfully for a school board seat in 2005, was given the interim post after Ferrara left.
In what was meant to be business as usual, with the school board voting on the creation of various committees, a heated exchange arose with D’Orazio dissolving all committees… at least temporarily.
The debate started with several board members asking for changes in the wording of committee responsibilities, at which point D’Orazio, in his renewed position as board president, noted how angry the board’s management of committees had made him over the previous year, stating that he is against “micro-managing.”
Vanacore requested that the board create a restriction where only a school employee can only be head of the technology committee. Patterson questioned the responsibility of the Future of the District Commission and asked it be removed from the agenda. Vanacore questioned the facilities committee responsibilities regarding the capital projects and asked to limit their input.
D’Orazio becoming angry and said, “From now on, the board is going to tackle these issues in open forum.”
Bernholz requested that all discussion of committees be removed from the agenda and discussed at a future meeting.
“It is not the board of educations job to micro-manage the life of the committees said D’Orazio. “The committees know what they are dong; you just tell them to go out there and do something, the way they set themselves up and they report back to the board. I do not think it is our job to lay out specifically what they do or what they are. I just don’t want to get involved with that!”
The board voted five-to-two, to remove the committee’s from the consent agenda.
D’Orazio followed by apologizing for his outburst, blaming it on his Italian heritage, his passionate nature, and the recent winning of the World Cup by his heritage nation’s team.
Later during public be heard, Communications Committee president Kathy Hochman, a former trustee, suggested the board keep the committees broadly defined.
Woodstock resident and parent Gordon Wemp added that he would like to see the school board tap into the education channels available on public access television. According to him, all towns in the school district must have Time Warner contracts in place and Shandaken has yet to complete their part. He offered to help set up the establishment of the link.
Athletic director Mike Kocher addressed the school board on community “misconceptions,” regarding the hiring of a school varsity football coach. “At the beginning of the year, it was determined by this district that Onteora suspend it’s varsity football program for the near future thus fielding only a junior varsity and a modified team for the 2006-2007 school year,” said Kocher, “This decision was based on the lack of participation by upper classmen of this school and the opportunity to rebuild the once flourishing program.”
He noted that the next steps were to, “increase participation and find a qualified coach to achieve this goal.”
On the agenda he pointed out the recommendation of Christopher Kasprzyk as Junior Varsity head coach.
The school board has set an additional meeting on August 10 for the sole purpose of a community-be-heard session regarding the Large Parcel legislation. The school board must vote in favor or not in favor of enactng the controversial bill no later than August 22. The meeting will take place at 7pm at the Middle/High School.
Indeed, lively conversations in the hallways outside the auditorium presaged the prevailing view of the event’s speakers that today’s mainstream media has drifted far from the role envisioned for the press in a free democracy when the nation’s Constitution was framed 230 years before this holiday weekend. The theme of the evening, Media Responsibility In Time of War, as presented by U.S. Congressman Maurice Hinchey and media experts Danny Schechter, Jeff Cohen and Amy Goodman, brought most of the cheering throng to their feet several times during the discussions.
Olive’s gifted singer-songwriter Amy Fradon drew thunderous applause herself by opening the proceedings with a stirring rendition of her own composition, "Here’s My Flag," a song highlighting freedoms represented by a banner for "right and left and rich and poor." Fradon commented that she was moved to write the song after experiencing censoring cautions from club owners and concert organizers not to refer to the war in Iraq on stage.
The evening’s guest emcee, Alan Chartock, president and CEO of WAMC radio and publisher of the <i>Legislative Gazette</I>, said in his opening remarks that it was fitting that it was the Fourth of July weekend since "So much of this centers on the very essence of the government brilliantly crafted by out nation’s founders. They saw, clearly, that an informed populace would be able to govern itself in an enlightened way while ignorance opens the door to tyranny."
Chartock first introduced Danny Schechter (the "news dissector"), a former Emmy Award-winning producer of ABC’s "20/20" news digest, author of <i>The More You Watch, the Less You Know</I>, founder of Mediachannel.org- the largest online network devoted to media interests- and producer of <i>In Debt We Trust</I>, a recently released documentary from the Globalvision independent film company he co-founded.
The announcement bringing Amy Goodman on stage drew a lengthy standing ovation, much to the chagrin of Chartock, who has long resisted carrying Goodman’s national (and now international) radio program <I> Democracy Now</I> on his station. Goodman is co-author of the best-seller <i>Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them.</I>
Also warmly welcomed was founder of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (F.A.I.R), Jeff Cohen, familiar to tv audiences as the former co-host on CNN’s <i>Crossfire</I> and as a panelist on Fox News’ <i>Newswatch</I> program. Author of the forthcoming <i>Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures In Corporate Media</I>, Cohen was also a prominent pundit on MSNBC prior to the Iraqi invasion.
The introduction of Rep. Hinchey sparked a standing ovation to rival Goodman’s and he earned further cheers with his remark that it was "encouraging to know that there are so many people concerned about this issue- which, frankly, I think is the most important issue that we confront in our society. Maybe that’s always been the case because it’s part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, so it must have been seen as critical back in the 18th Century...but it’s even more critical now because we have a conspiratorial government working to suppress information...."
Hinchey, who founded the FAM (Future of American Media) Caucus in the House of Representatives, was in the forefront of the fight against the FCC’s (Federal Communications Commission) efforts to "reform" media ownership rules in 2003 and had his media "p’s and q’s" honed to a point. That was apt since each speaker was afforded only an initial ten minutes to make their essential points.
"The broadcast spectrum is owned not by any individual nor by any corporation but by the American people," Hinchey said, drawing reference to the original regulations governing spectrum use in the 1920's and 1930's and the "Fairness Doctrine" that was a key component of the rules until eliminated under the Reagan administration. Noting that the doctrine was applied partially in response to the way the new medium was being employed by fascist regimes in Europe, he added that "in those days, in order to be licensed to broadcast on the radio, you agreed that if you have a political opinion to express, you may do so but, if someone else has a different political opinion, they should be given the right to express that as well."
Hinchey said that the Fairness Doctrine was scrapped by the design of people advancing a "particular philosophy that did not want that equality to exist." It was an early "overt example" of what we call the neo-conservatives, or neo-cons, "trying to control information that people have access to," he added.
There are only two ways to rule- by consent and by fear, Hinchey declared, blaming an administration whose fabrications are accelerating and a "rubber-stamp" Congress for creating and advancing a "culture of fear" in the country and abroad. He spoke rapidly of pre-war speeches by Bush Administration figures, an intimidated media, legal actions against media for writing about illegal NSA domestic spying programs, monitoring of banking records and internet activities, disinformation and designed media leaks to push an aggressive agenda, links between neocons of the Reagan and Bush eras and, of course, the besieged Bill of Rights.
"This is supposed to be a nation of law based upon the fundamental founding principles in the Constitution," Hinchey summed up. "We all need to stand up against this administration and the things that it is doing because those things are illegal- because they impinge upon the rights and freedoms and privileges and opportunities of all Americans and they are doing it in a programmatic, planned way. None of this is serendipitous or accidental. It is all intentional and it has a clear, planned-out objective to maintain and solidify political power against the basic principles of our country. We are facing, today, one of the most critical moments in our nation’s history and we need to win this battle against these repressive, despotic people who want to control this country on the basis of fear."
Jeff Cohen opened his remarks by noting how good it felt to be in a "reality-based community" as opposed, he implied, to the world of network news.
"There are half a dozen media conglomerates sitting on the windpipe of the 1st Amendment and I’ve taken a paycheck from three of them," Cohen confessed impishly before speaking of his experiences as a pundit with the Phil Donahue prime time show on MSNBC before it was terminated 3 weeks before the invasion of Iraq by an owner (General Electric) poised to "profit handsomely" from the war.
Cohen said that in the "run-up to the war" he witnessed how corporate media abides "rule by the worse- a system in which those with the least principle rise to the top and those who challenged evidence that Iraq was a threat were spat out of the corporate media system.
"Those who echoed the official deceptions have largely seen their careers flourish," he continued. "There’s not a single tv executive that I’m aware of- or an anchor or a pundit or a correspondent or a so-called expert that lost their job over getting the huge story of Iraq so totally wrong, as almost every one of them did."
Cohen sketched a comparison between his own experience of not being able to "discuss even the weather without being balanced by at least one fire-breathing right-winger" and the treatment of "military advisors and so-called weapons experts who never required any balance whatsoever" because "the rule was ‘They’re independent.’ ‘They’re objective.’ The head of CNN even boasted that he went to the Pentagon to get approval of his military analysts for on and off the air advice and, yet, virtually everything these weapons experts said, without balance throughout the media, turned out to be wrong."
While itemizing the post-invasion excuses offered by the experts, typified by "I certainly thought the administration was telling the truth," Cohen commented that the tv audience had no way of knowing that the retired general, used then and now by MSNBC as chief military advisor, was on the payroll of a military contractor making millions for his work on a tank model deployed in the invasion.
Any time the Donahue show wanted to book a guest with an anti-war perspective in the months prior to the war, Cohen noted, MSNBC insisted that 2 pro-war guests had to be included and that when film director Michael Moore was suggested as a guest, management said he had to be "balanced by THREE right-wingers!" Cohen quipped that the show’s producers knew better than to mention a guest like social commentator Noam Chomsky simply because the studio wasn’t large enough to accommodate the opposition he would require.
Toward the close of his statements, Cohen quoted an internal MSNBC memo mentioning the need to dispense with dissenting views and head into full-time "flag waving" in support of the invasion as a reason for ditching the show. He said that it was his observation that when journalists were too busy "waving the flag," they don’t do their job to help stabilize the checks and balances of a democratic government.
"They don’t ask the tough questions before our young men and women are sent overseas to kill and be killed," he said to loud applause.
Cohen closed his segment with a Good News observation that "In the last few years, millions of people have aggressively sought out alternatives to corporate media. That’s why independent media and blogs and community radio, Democracy Now, Common Dreams.org are booming. "Media activism is going through the roof," he said, urging audience attention to savetheinternet.com and the closely looming threat to that urgently vital resource of public information. "Don’t take the media lying down," he said.
***
Although there was a sprinkling of familiar faces from Olive in the crowd, no one in the town has yet to take advantage of provisions in the local cable contract to found an Olive public access tv station- a "compensatory" option provided by the 1996 Telecommunications Act (legislation which has led to the concentration of the majority of U.S. media into the hands of five major corporations and which was widely denounced at this gathering by speakers and attendees alike). Public access is also an option the Telecom giants are now working hard to eliminate. Without a local access station, media in Olive (excepting this newspaper, of course) is largely confined to the informational feed provided by national and regional sources; a news stream with a paucity of independent voices, at least in the view of these media experts.
The next two speakers, taking an even tougher stance against a news and entertainment system "totally dominated by corporate interests," questioned rights of access and non-corporate presence in the kinds of information massively disseminated in the mainstream press and on the "public" airwaves. Both Schechter and Goodman stressed the crucial role of media outlets in shaping public opinion and effecting the kind of world in which we live.
Danny Schechter, who shares some of Michael Moore’s rough-hewn and rounded persona, prompted a wave of laughter by observing the "funny thing" that happened to neo-cons who studied the Soviet Union during the Cold War- namely that they decided they wanted to <i>be</I> like the Soviet Union- and have, in the past few years, been introducing Soviet-style laws and conditions. He charged that media "sold" us the Iraqi war, saying that out of some 800 experts presented in its prologue, only six questioned it at all. He recalled that at the international tribunal at Nuremberg following the Second World War it was ruled that war of aggression was an even worse war crime than the holocaust. The key role of the dominant Nazi propaganda system of the era, he said, was found at Nuremberg to be an integral part of the criminal activity leading to war.
"A dominating propaganda system (in place of a socially responsible media) is not simply something to denounce but should be regarded as a criminal enterprise," Schechter said, citing more recent examples in history, such as genocides in Rhwanda and elsewhere, where the role of media in a war helped lead to massive fatalities. He urged that such media manipulations be viewed "not merely as a bunch of mistakes but in terms of a crime against the American people, a crime against the world and a crime against truth."
Amy Goodman, whose <i>Democracy Now!</I> program was founded in the same year as the Telecommunications Act and grew from a few Pacifica listener-sponsored stations to an independent entity (still affiliated with Pacifica) heard and seen on over 450 radio and tv stations in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. She said its popularity springs from its attention to the voices of the powerless and marginalized many she called "the silenced majority."
Sticking to the topic of media’s role in the Iraqi War, Goodman cited a study of the four major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS) by Cohen’s FAIR organization which indicated that of 393 war-related interviews televised during the period of the study only three featured leaders espousing anti-war views.
"That is no longer ‘mainstream media’," Goodman declared to a burst of applause, "That is an ‘extreme media’ beating the drums for war!
"Media are the most powerful institutions on earth and the pentagon has deployed the media. We have to take it back," she continued. "The public airwaves are a national treasure with the responsibility to bring out a full diversity of opinion and if they don’t, they should have their licenses revoked!"
Cutting into a level of sustained applause, Goodman spoke of the stark differences between the reportage of "embedded" journalists covering recent invasions and the spontaneity exhibited during a week of unindoctrinated reporters in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Despite advisements not to show bodies in the devastation, news reporters in the waters with victims sometimes found such gruesome floating displays unavoidable, she said, adding that the unsanitized views of the tragedy enraged many against the government’s handling of the situation.
"If, for just one week, we saw those images in Iraq, unembedded- those babies dead on the ground, the women with their legs blown off because they stepped on a cluster bomb in the wreckage or the old men or the dead and dying U.S. soldiers- if we saw those images, I really do think that Americans are compassionate people and they would say ‘no- war is not an answer to conflict in the 21st Century."
Calling a corporate-based, government-embedded substitute for journalism a "conveyer belt for lies," Goodman said she saw the media as "a huge kitchen table that stretches across this country, that we all sit around to debate and discuss the most important issues of the day- issues of life and death, war and peace. Anything less than that is a disservice to the service men and women of this country."
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The Q&A session which followed produced a number of highlights that included Jeff Cohen’s enthusiastic remarks about the event’s turnout.
"The alternates to corporate media are being built in this room," Cohen bubbled. "I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been in (media) for decades. We’ve got to bring more <i>Democracy Now!</I> to this region," he continued to further applause and to Alan Chartock’s chagrin. A little later, when Chartock was reading Cohen a question about how independent media could be promoted in the area, a loud voice from the audience cried out "By putting <i>Democracy Now!</I> on WAMC!", prompting loud cheers and an admonishment to the audience to not embarrass their emcee which issued from conference organizer Andi Novick, who has, herself, lobbied WAMC to do so.
To Chartock’s credit, it should be observed that his station not infrequently affords a platform to critics of the current administration which ranges from dissenting weapons expert Scott Ritter to David Ray Griffin, author of <i>The 9/11 Commission Report Omissions and Distortions</I> and <i>The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11</I>. But, since most of the station’s funding comes from corporate underwriting despite their impressive listener fund drives, a glaring clash exists between his station and the insistently non-corporate Pacifica franchise. The obvious problem in this standoff presents a microcosm of the national media debate- WAMC dominates the dial for public radio in the region, covering parts of seven states, broadcasting from ten separate locations which could otherwise provide an opening for a public station that <i>would</I> carry a program like Goodman’s.
As for the rest of the radio dial, of the 40 commercial stations in this listening area at least 24 of them are owned by San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications (CCC operates at least 1,225 radio stations in the U.S. and, with international partners, hundreds more in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and Europe) or Atlanta-based Cumulus Media Partners (343 U.S. stations), both corporations have close ties to the current administration and have staged pro-war rallies throughout the country and banned artists from their airwaves for expressing sentiments which divert from that focus; a censorship effectively blocking the airwaves from the expression of dissenting political opinion.
During the build-up to the Iraqi invasion, for instance, CCC, which is the home of syndicated shows by Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger and other stars of the political right, distributed a blacklist to its chain of stations, banning songs like the Youngbloods’ 1960's classic "Get Together," which "seditiously"urges people to "smile on your brother...try to love one another" and 157 other tunes they frowned upon. Cumulus has staged CD-smashing events that featured the public destruction of albums by the Dixie Chicks- a country group that expressed disapproval of the President from the concert stage. (Clear Channel’s television stations have also refused to accept advertizing with an anti-war message).
When it is noted without precision that "at least 24" stations out of 40 in this listening area are owned by CCC or Cumulus it is because companies like Concord Media Group, which are listed as "independent" in ownership inventories such as one compiled by the nonpartisan, non-profit Center for Public Integrity are, upon closer inspection, run by Clear Channel. Also, according to <i>In These Times</I> magazine, evidence was submitted to the (conglomerate-friendly) FCC which indicates CCC "illegally ‘parks’ or ‘warehouses’ radio stations it’s not allowed to own, by selling them to front, or shell, companies... These front companies would allow Clear Channel an easy way to buy back the stations if the FCC were to further reduce ownership limits." Clear Channel CEO, Mark Mays, has indeed been lobbying Congress to increase by 50% the amount of stations one corporation can own in major market areas.
Clear Channel’s industry-leading tour management division has been fighting lawsuits from groups which represent recording artists who claim CCC coerces low artist fees for concerts by threating not to play their work if they don’t meet the company’s terms. Musical playlists are centrally composed for distribution to stations across the country with local call letters spliced in to give the appearance that the station’s region has local representation.
While their executives scorn charges of illegal monopoly practices, Clear Channel has also been under legal fire for anti-trust violations and is being eyed in ongoing payola investigations (including Eliot Spitzer’s) and has recently been ordered to pay a $90 million for anti-competitive practices (less than the "golden parachute’ arranged for CCC-founder and Chairman Lowry Mays and his two sons. Also in the Mays family is Lowry’s son-in-law Michael McCaul, who was elected to Congress in Texas’s 10th District with no Democratic opposition after Tom Delay’s 2003 redistricting in the state. McCaul is up for re-election this year but 80% of his district’s voters will be using electronic machines manufactured by a company in which Clear Channel’s vice-president, Thomas Hicks, is a heavy investor.) Meanwhile, CCC continues to expand, with its outdoor billboard division announcing its purchase of Interspace this month, which advances its presence in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific Rim at the same time it is establishing a strategic alliance with GIIR Inc., Korea’s second largest advertizing firm. Other divisions are busy gobbling up newspaper and magazine distributors in the U.S.
What’s left for local media consumers hoping for untilted news coverage is a patchwork of smaller stations largely dependent on mainstream network news feeds and the overriding presence of Chartock’s WAMC, which carries the NPR news packages that distress many of the attendees of the NCRM event. Charges that the daily massage of programs like "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" is a slickly manipulated "PsyOps" (psychological operations) campaign was fodder for discussion in the hallways of the auditorium if not upon its stage.
Such accusations link directly to NPR president Kevin Klose, former Moscow bureau chief for the <i>Washington Post</I> in the Reagan era before becoming head of U.S. government overseas propaganda organs Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia as Director of International Broadcasting for the CIA-linked U.S. Information Agency. Stir in the underlings and associates Klose brought to NPR, which reaches 22 million listeners a week, to help "manage" the news and add the Public Broadcasting Corporation’s head, Robert Coonrod, who oversaw Voice of America operations and Radio Marti, which targets Cuba with U.S. programming (as well as its tv division) and you begin to see why some listeners, who call Klose NPR’s "propaganda czar," are upset with the network’s handling of news.
The Pentagon’s announcement at the outset of the current conflict in Iraq, that it would "embed" reporters and manage the flow of information (or disinformation) during the engagement, didn’t specifically refer to intelligence assets in the media but some observers have noted the implications.
Robert Parry, a former reporter for the Associated Press, <i>Newsweek</I> and PBS’s <i>Frontline</I> series, devoted a book (<i>Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture Conventional Wisdom [1992]) to the "Vietnam Syndrome"- which was a perceived reluctance on the part of the American people to initiate wars since the misadventures of Vietnam. The Pentagon and war industry hawks of that era, including current administration figures like Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, blamed the syndrome on the American media and, according to Parry’s research, vowed to co-opt that element of "media damage" during any further military ventures. Parry currently operates a media watch website at Consortiumnews.com
Klose has also been active in the suppression of licenses for low power radio (10 to 1000 watts) stations (operating as ‘Class D’ non-commercial FM stations) which were ironically outlawed by the FCC in the late 1960s shortly before National Public Radio was cemented as a national entity that has expanded its corporate sponsorship stealthfully ever since. Coonrod, as president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was also instrumental in the takeover of the Pacifica Foundation’s executive board in 2001, months before Goodman struck a deal to turn her program into a separate (but linked) nonprofit organization.
A deeper view of media mergers and manipulations in recent years can only widen the concern for a democratic media (small ‘d’). CCC’s vice chairman, Tom Hicks, made the current president a multimillionaire by purchasing the struggling Texas Rangers baseball franchise from him and turned over control of funds for the University of Texas Investment Management Company (which he founded before putting Lowry Mays on the board of directors) to Bush-linked companies like the Carlyle Group. Colin Powell, whose son was appointed head of the FCC, was on the corporate board of America Online, which merged with CNN owner Time-Warner. Carla Hills, a AOL/Time-Warner board member, was also on the board of Chevron Oil (along with Condoleeza Rice) and had been trade representative for the current president’s father, who was also a Carlyle Group board member. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a board member of the Tribune Company, which operates the <i>Chicago Tribune</I>, <i>Newsday</I>, the <i>Los Angeles Times<i> and numerous other newspapers and television stations. J. Richard Munro, a director of Exxon-Mobil, was also a Time-Warner board member. And on and on...
The point is- can listeners, viewers or readers expect a unbiased view of world events when a board of directors member for the <i>New York Times</I> and <i>Boston Globe</I> (Charles Price) also represents the interests of Texaco, on whose board of directors he cocurrently serves or from the <i>Wall Street Journal</I>, whose board member Rand Araskog also sits on Shell Oil’s board? Or how about Hollinger International, which owns London’s <i>Daily Telegraph</I>, the <i>Chicago Sun-Times</I> and the <i>Jerusalem Post</> and whose investment division was headed by Richard Perle, who also sat on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board at the time of the 9-11 attacks and won millions from the Homeland Security bonanza for his Trireme Partners company. Henry Kissinger, who was picked to head the 9-11 investigation until he opted not to disclose his clients list, is an advisor for Trireme and a board member at Hollinger.
It gets much deeper than we can detail further here but more than enough is sketched above to lend weigh to the claims of a media in crisis. The corporate drive to take over the internet, spearheaded by Verizon and AT&T (another San Antonio-based company), paints an even darker picture for the future. How are American interests identified as feasibly separate from corporate interests when it is corporate interests and corporately influenced interests in charge of the discernment? In the context of how news is distributed in the airwaves of Olive and the rest of Ulster County and the Hudson Valley, these questions were key issues on the evening’s platform.
By their buttons and conversation, as well as by their response to statements by the speakers, a primary concern in the audience appeared as questions about the absence of media outlets for voices in opposition to the war. Jeff Cohen extended the question into the political sphere;
"In a country where most of the people want to set a timetable to bring our troops home from Iraq- and in New York State that majority is even higher and, among New York Democrats, that majority is almost a unanimity, how is it that we have two senators in the State of New York who just voted <i>for</i> the war?" Cohen asked before endorsing Jonathan Tasini in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, another comment which drew approval from the crowd. (A drive to support Tasini in the lobby passed out flyers that registered the cost of the Iraqi war to Kingston, alone, as $23.9 million thusfar, which could have paid for 1,019 four-year university scholarships or other listed preferences. The flyers included the names of local residents who did not return alive from Iraq as part of the human costs of the war.)
"Overall, the public has historically had an expectation that the media reports facts, does it job fact-checking and investigating the truth," said NCRM founder Andi Novick when reached days after the event. "That’s not been true for a while and I don’t know how much of the public has caught on to that. It’s much worse now because of consolidation and because of the control the owners assert over their editors and journalists. Whatever firewall existed between the owners and the news department doesn’t exist anymore."
Novick said that the goal of the new group, formed officially at the beginning of the year, was to spread attention to the work of independent media as widely as possible and "raise awareness of the shortcomings of the existing predominant system so that people become aware that we don’t have a free press- that the media system we do have is the result of corrupt government policy and monopoly control that’s been condoned by government. Hopefully, awareness of those issues will cause people to want to become more active and fight back against that system."
"Americans have lost the right to elect their government," Novick said, noting that was marked as a key theme of the evening. "We wanted to draw connections between what was intended as a free press and the Constitution and why it is necessary to have a free press- so that you have checks and balances on those in power and how that’s been lost. Once that’s lost, everything else gets lost- like the rest of the rights declared in the Constitution."
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A summation of the views expressed at the Citizens for Responsible Media’s groundbreaking event can be said to approximate the following:
If "information is the currency of democracy,"as Thomas Jefferson wrote, then corporate media is bankrupting America. A stifling of dissenting or even inconvenient voices tends to distort the complexion of national opinion. Against the rocketing rise of alternate media outlets, the primary entities downplaying the media crisis, as proclaimed by the stunning success of this event, are in interested parties in government and in mega-media itself.
Presently, the general drift of mainstream media is not about the truth of what happens but about managing perception of events. However, a democratic electorate, to be part of a viable, effective system, must be concerned with actuality rather than manipulated perception. The difference between an informed electorate and a misled population defines the very meaning of a democracy.
When information is designated to be a strategic resource in an ill-defined war at the same time that war is extended into the perpetual future, it is tantamount to saying that we are no longer entitled to truth. This is a condition no democracy can survive.