This Week:

Quote of the Week

Support Police Victim's Family

Where (and What) Are the Front-Page Stories?

A Stroll Through the News With Nygaard

Greetings,

Many readers tell me that they can't bring themselves to read the daily newspapers, and there are many reasons to refrain from the practice, I admit. It is often quite depressing, the papers fail to report on much important news, and much of the news that is there is either under-reported or mis-reported. Still, if one has the required skills, one can learn a great deal from the papers. At minimum, one can learn to spot the unspoken assumptions and ideologies that make the news look like it does. This, in turn, is useful in understanding U.S. ideology, and in understanding the notoriously wacky interpretation of political events for which United Statesians are famous. If one wishes to effectively promote a democratic movement for change, one had better understand where most people are coming from.

In that spirit, his week brings you another installment of the occasional "Stroll Through the News With Nygaard." The first installment of this feature, back in June of 1999, bore the catchy title "Short But Important News Items." My, we've come a long way in terms of entertainment value, haven't we? To the casual reader, these "strolls" can look like little more than a politicized "News of the Weird." They are a little more than that, as I explain in this week's front-page essay about front pages.

Readers of Nygaard Notes over the past several months may have come to the conclusion that I am obsessed with war and violence. That's not entirely false, although what I am really obsessed with is ending war and reducing violence. As urgent and serious as is the War Against Terror (the WAT?!) in all of its manifestations, there are plenty of other items in the news worth acting on. So, this week I avoid war talk and focus on everything-else talk. Eclectically yours,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"Emergency department overcrowding itself is a symptom. It's a symptom of a health care system that's broken."

-- Carmella Coyle, senior vice-president of the American Hospital Association, commenting on the fact that one in three hospitals in the United States—two out of three in urban areas—are now reporting that their emergency rooms are so crowded that they are forced to turn away ambulances.

Support Police Victim's Family

I wrote at length in Nygaard Notes #149 about the killing of Abu Kassim Jeilani by the Minneapolis police on March 10th. Twin Cities area residents now have a chance to directly support the family left behind by Mr. Jeilani.

On Thursday, April 25th, at 7:00 p.m., there will be "An Evening of Spoken Word and Music to Benefit the Family of Abu Kassim: "How Many Words do you Know for Justice?" Held at the Babylon Art and Culture Center, 1624 E. Lake Street in Minneapolis, the bill includes local artists like Juliana Pegues, Rush Merchant III, e.g. Bailey, Emmanuel Ortiz, Eric Long, as well as popular Somalian singer/songwriter Lul Jeylani. The master of ceremonies will be Omar Jamal from the Somali Justice Advocacy Center. Organizers invite you to "Please join us on this evening to honor the memory of Abu Kassim Jeilani and to help and raise funds for his family."

Tickets are $8-$10 dollars at the door, food and drinks will be available. For more information, email mnovak7@hotmail.com, or call 612-722-5438.

Where (and What) Are the Front-Page Stories?

In an essay called "The Banality of Danger," ‘way back in Nygaard Notes #170, I said

"Our for-profit media system tends to highlight the unusual, the extraordinary, and the unexpected, since that's what sells papers. That's the way the "news" works. Important but routine things, such as another case of cancer caused by exposure to X-rays or asbestos, or the details of yet another American suicide (we average about 80 per day in this country) are not as likely to get on the news as a man who loses his life when he gets run over by his riding lawnmower. That's understandable."

Understandable, yes, but unfortunate, as the front pages increasingly become platforms less for news and more for "infotainment." Advertisers like this sort of thing, as it tends to deliver more of the consumer eyeballs that their advertising dollars are intended to purchase. As war hysteria settles into the bones of our culture, coverage of the extraordinary exploits of our military have become so popular—yikes, so entertaining!—that a new media genre has appeared, which advertising insiders have christened "militainment."

Decisions about which items are placed on the front page of the paper are crucial ones because the front pages (or the electronic equivalent of the front page, television news) set the agenda for public discourse in this society. The decision to place an item on the front page is to say that it is important, and almost guarantees that "people will be talking" about it in the nation's taverns and over the workplace water cooler.

Headlines are great clues to the prevailing ideology in the culture in which those who write the headlines live. If what people are talking about is heavily influenced by the placement of a story, then how people think about that story depends on how those stories are framed, which is often revealed in the headline.

I have often quoted legendary journalist I.F. Stone, who reportedly said that he enjoyed reading the New York Times because he liked to look and see on which page they would publish the front-page news. This is not just an entertaining point, but an important one. Placement, emphasis, and tone tell us a lot about what the media find important in the flood of news through which they sort every day. This week I give a few examples of items that have been buried on the inside pages in recent weeks, but that I would have placed on the front page, often with a different headline.

A Stroll Through the News With Nygaard

Balancing on the Backs of the Poor

"Many On Medicaid Lack Drugs, Study Says." That was the headline on page 22 of the April 9th Times, atop a story explaining that many states are balancing their budgets by cutting off poor people's access to needed prescription drugs. A non-partisan research group called the "Center for Studying Health System Change" surveyed 39,000 people to arrive at this conclusion, but that wasn't good enough for some people. The director of the Medicaid program in the state of Arkansas, for example, "found it hard to believe that people were going without prescription drugs because of cost controls," saying "If anything, co-payments need to be higher."

Only in Arkansas, you say? Joan Hanberry over at the National Governors' Association weighed in with this compassionate comment: "There's no question that cost-containment measures affect access to prescription drugs, but that may be a positive outcome." (On the following page of that day's Times, the headline read: "Bush Pushes Volunteerism." Hmm, maybe he expects people to volunteer to make their own prescription drugs?)

Forget the Kids; Get a Job

Headlines can be very revealing. Take, for example, two headlines for the same Associated Press story: "New Welfare Rules Get Mixed Review" in the Star Trib, and "Study Says Welfare Switch Slighted Young" in the Times, which both appeared on April 16th. The article reports that "Numerous state-run studies of people leaving welfare have found that most earned more than they got from welfare, but not enough to leave poverty." In addition, "Most of the mothers...continued to have trouble paying the rent and buying food. Mothers...spent less time with their children, who spent more time watching television." It must be the opening sentence that gives us the "mixed review" headline: ("Most mothers facing new welfare rules have found jobs..."). Of course, this sentence can only make sense if one is sufficiently immersed in "Free Market" thinking to agree that the raising of children is not a "job."

Drugs in Peru...

The Times reported on Valentine's Day that coca—the plant from which cocaine is derived—is "making a comeback" in the Peruvian highlands, according to Peruvian and United Nations antidrug officials. Why? Because "a vast American-backed campaign of aerial fumigation" in neighboring Colombia has been "successful" in reducing the supply of coca, which has "pushed the price of coca to new highs in recent months." [I'm sure the pun was unintentional. Ed.] This price increase has lured more poverty-stricken farmers and distributors into the coca business, as it always does. In fact, the phenomenon in which "eradication in one place simply pushes coca growing to another, given the continuing demand for cocaine, principally in the United States" is so well-known that experts call it "the balloon effect." Another side-effect of the increase in profits from illegal trafficking is the comeback of the deadly guerrilla group the Shining Path.

The Times reports that the trend toward more drugs, more violence, and more terror brought about by the U.S.-led (not "U.S.-backed") eradication effort "does not mean that antinarcotics efforts in the Andes are failing, said analysts who track American antidrug programs." Besides apparently being unaware that cocaine is not a narcotic (in fact, it's the opposite of a narcotic), these "analysts" must have a similar definition of "success" and "failure" as the Minneapolis police.

Nygaard Notes Alternative Headline: "War On Drugs Is a Failure."

...And Drugs in in Minnesota

The March 11th Star Trib reported that a Hennepin County "drug task force" has "recently seized larger amounts of crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana in individual busts than it had in the group's previous 13 years of work." The story calls the recent period "an unusually successful three months," despite the fact that the police "can't say for sure whether the record busts are driven by tenacious police work, talkative informants, more drugs flowing into the Twin Cities area, or plain good luck." I read the article twice to see if there was any mention of a possible reduction in drug use that might be expected as a result of this "success." There wasn't, and that's likely because there won't be any reduction in drug use, nor in the harm that comes to neighborhoods and communities as a result of the drug trade. Soon-to-depart Minneapolis police chief Robert Olson was quoted as saying, "All I know is there are hundreds of thousands of hits that aren't going to be dealt." He doesn't actually know this.

In fact, just as in the Andes, it is likely that the temporary reduction in the supply of drugs will result in even higher prices on the street, luring increased numbers of suppliers and dealers into the trade. In the third-to-last paragraph, we do see the county sheriff admitting that "to eliminate the drug problem, there has to be education, treatment, and prevention." Dare I say that the more money our nation decides to spend there, and the less we spend on futile drug busts, the more "successful" we might be in reducing the harm that illegal drugs continue to wreak on our communities? But, to those for whom some abstraction called "law and order" is inherently good, arrests by definition mean "success," even if the result is more drugs and more violence on the streets.

Nygaard Notes Alternative Headline: "War On Drugs Is a Failure."

What Is Wrong with Those People?

United States military spending dwarfs that of any other country. In fact, our nation spends more than twice as much money on making war as the do all the nations of Europe combined. The Times reports in a front-page feature story in its March 16th edition that this is becoming a problem. Why is it becoming a problem? Because, as "everyone agrees," Europe is not spending enough! Europe's "inability" to "improve" their war-making capacity comes about because those backward folks from the Old Countries have the wrong idea about what is needed to "combat the threats and poverty of the developing world." They "prefer to spend their money on social welfare at home and aid to poor countries abroad." The article goes on to report that NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson "complains with some bitterness that Germany is the only European country that has increased its military spending at all" since September 11th. Speaking of global military power, Lord R says, "We don't have too much America. We have too little Europe."

11 Million Kids

"U.N. Says Millions of Children Die Needlessly" was the arresting headline above an important story in the Times of March 14. Unfortunately, the story was buried on the bottom of page 13, right next to a photo and brief story about National Elephant Day in Thailand. Preventable diseases claim the lives of 11 million children—8 million of whom are babies—each year, a situation that a United Nations special session on children will be addressing in May. The Director General of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland, points out that "These deaths were preventable and treatable, not inevitable."

In the third-to-last paragraph (Ed. Note: Often the key information resides here!) we learn that, despite the ease and low cost with which many of these deaths could be prevented, "except for Nordic nations, contributions by rich countries have gone down, leaving the poorest countries struggling to meet their populations' basic needs." Even though the Times gave similar placement to 11 million kids as they gave to National Elephant Day, give them credit for noticing. The Star Trib never even mentioned the report.