The Most Distrusted New Sources

FEMA Solicits Firms to Monitor Media Coverage of Their Activities

Friday, February 17, 2012
Activist Post

FEMA still seems to be smarting from the media accurately reporting their disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, and the increased exposure of their intended use for so-called "FEMA Camps."

This week they announced that they are seeking public relations and media monitoring help from private contractors.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) opened bidding for "commercial media broadcast monitoring service" on a February 15th post on the government's Federal Business Opportunities website.

FEMA is seeking media monitoring firms who will be responsible for rapidly monitoring, archiving, and measuring all news and transcripts related to their activities 24/7. They are expected to be able to evaluate the "publicity value" of media coverage and possess "editing capabilities."

Other responsibilities include the distribution of live and pre-recorded materials to the broadcast news, independent media and on the Internet, and "to monitor the effectiveness of public affairs messaging."

Below is the full text of FEMA's Statement of Work: Division of Public Affairs Broadcast Media Monitoring Service:

Purpose: The purpose of this Statement of Work is to establish a service agreement subscription with a commercial broadcast media monitoring service. FEMA is looking to select the best option for the modernizing and standardizing the media efforts for Joint Field Office (JFO) TV news monitoring and FEMA headquarters broadcast operations.

Background: The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Office of External Affairs is responsible for the effective dissemination of accurate information to the public concerning FEMA’s programs, missions and goals for emergency management. FEMA External Affairs provides primary support to the FEMA Administration, Deputy Administrator and FMEA senior leadership, with primary responsibility for the communication of agency goals, objectives and accomplishments. In addition, the Office is responsible got the preparation and distribution of critical response and recovery information to state and local officials, agency stakeholders and general public. 

This on-going requirement has FEMA External Affairs staff deployed to Joint Field Offices (JFO), who continually monitor local broadcast media news reposts as they relate to agency operations in the field. In additional, requirements are needed at the FEMA Headquarters to update and standardize a method for capturing local broadcast news from a JFO, as well as, nationally broadcast news and cable outlets. 

Within the Office of External Affairs, the Public Affairs Division is responsible for the monitoring, archiving, and measurement of media representation, which includes broadcast TV, radios, and cable news media. The broadcast media are relied upon to deliver disaster information in a reliable, efficient and expeditions manner. Both live and pre-recorded materials are distributed to the broadcast news and independent production media via satellite transmission, the internet and other delivery services. To monitor the effectiveness of public affairs messaging, and respond to critical events, FEMA requires the ability to monitor and retrieve clips and transcripts from network and local television affiliates in a rapid manner upon demand 24/7 through an on-line distribution service. 

Scope of Work: The contractor shall provide at least 11 accessible accounts or individual passwords to access the service (with a potential surge capacity of 40 if needed during extremely high disaster activity). The service shall provide unlimited online access to clips from all U.S. television networks and major Nielson markets 24/7. The service shall provide a means to download an unlimited number of clips and transcripts for internal FEMA distribution to key individuals upon demand. The service shall provide media statistics including the audience exposure and publicity value. The service shall have a means of delivering clips or notification of clips via email to key individuals as assigned by FEMA. 

The service shall allow for unlimited digital clips, unlimited keyword searches, permanent archive, and editing capabilities. It would be preferable not to need to purchase additional equipment or software. 

Contract Period: The performance period for the subscription is one year from the date of the subscription initiation with three (3) annual options for renewal.

How about this?

How the US Govt Uses Its Corporate Media Servants to Attack Real Journalism

Friday, July 15, 2011 by Salon.com

by Glenn Greenwald

"The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced. 'CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,' Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff" - BBC, April 9, 2009

Earlier this week, the truly intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill published in The Nation one of the most significant political exposés of the year.  Entitled "the CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia," the article documented that the CIA uses and effectively controls a secret prison in Mogadishu, where foreign nationals who are rendered off the streets of their countries (at the direction of the U.S.) are taken (along with Somali nationals) to be imprisoned with no due process and interrogated (by U.S. agents).  Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: "US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners" and are "there full-time," Scahill reported.  On Democracy Now on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it has no knowledge of this secret prison.

This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: "they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it."  Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using "torture by proxy" -- as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions.  Just yesterday, a federal judge "reacted skeptically" to the Obama DOJ's demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where "U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia."

Scahill's discovery of this secret prison in Mogadishu -- this black site -- calls into serious doubt the Obama administration's claims to have ended such practices and establishes a serious human rights violation on its own.  As Harper's Scott Horton put it, the Nation article underscores how the CIA is "maintaining a series of 'special relationships' under which cooperating governments maintain proxy prisons for the CIA," and "raises important questions" about "whether the CIA is using a proxy regime there to skirt Obama's executive order" banning black sites and torture.

Despite the significance of this revelation -- or, more accurately, because of it -- the U.S. establishment media has almost entirely ignored this story.  Scahill thus far has given a grand total of two television interviews: on Democracy Now and Al Jazeera.  No major television news network -- including MSNBC -- has even mentioned his story.  Generally speaking, Republicans don't care that the worst abuses of the Bush era are continuing, and Democrats (who widely celebrated Dana Priest's 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning story about Bush's CIA black cites) don't want to hear that it's true.

Meanwhile, the CIA has been insisting that discussion of this Mogadishu site could jeopardize its operations in Somalia, and while that typical, manipulative tactic didn't stop Scahill from informing the citizenry about this illicit behavior, it has (as usual) led government-subservient American media stars to refrain from discussing it.  Indeed, Scahill said that this site is such common knowledge in Mogadishu (where even ordinary residents call it "that CIA building") that he'd be "very surprised" if international reporters who cover Somalia were unaware of it; he has confirmed with certainty that at least one correspondent covering East Africa for one of the world's leading media outlets was aware of, but never reported, the CIA's role at this secret prison.

While the establishment media has been largely ignoring Scahill's revelations, a few particularly government-pleasing journalists have been dutifully following the CIA's script in order to undermine the credibility of Scahill's story.  CNN's long-time Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr -- one of the most reliable DoD stenographers in the nation (she actually announced that the real Abu Ghraib scandal was the unauthorized release of the photographs, not the abuse they depicted) -- has been predictably tapped by the CIA to take the lead in this effort.  Earlier this week, Starr filed a truly incredible report -- based exclusively on a "U.S. official" to whom she naturally granted anonymity -- that had no purpose other than to refute Scahill's report even though Starr never once mentioned that report:

CIA operatives have secretly traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia, to help interrogate terrorism suspects about operations in East Africa and Yemen, a senior U.S. official told CNN Tuesday.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, stressed any suspects were under the control of Somali forces and the CIA was present only in "support" of interrogations in recent months. He described the number of times the CIA was present as "very small," adding that he would only say it was "one or two times."

"Only on very rare occasion does the CIA support debriefings of suspected terrorists who are in TFG (Transitional Federal Government) custody," the official told CNN.

Starr pretended that this was a headline-making scoop for CNN -- that a CIA official had bravely revealed some sort of unauthorized secret to her: that the CIA "helps" interrogate a "very small" number of Terrorism suspects in Somalia in a "support" role -- when it was plainly nothing more than an effort to undermine Scahill's report by claiming that the CIA's role was extremely limited (nothing more than a little help given to the Somalis) and that it was Somalia that controlled, ran and maintained responsibility for the prison.  Not only did Starr never mention the key facts -- that this prison is kept secret from the ICRC and imprisons detainees without due process who are rendered from other nations at the behest of the U.S. and that the CIA pays the agents there -- but she also helpfully wrote down that "the CIA gets assurances from the [Somali government] that detainees will not be mistreated," and then added that the real significance of the story is that it "underscores the growing U.S. concern about the rise of terrorist networks in the region."

In sum, Starr was handed a CIA press release that falsely denied the key elements of Scahill's story, which she then disguised as an anonymous unauthorized leak that she uncovered.  She slothfully and obediently disseminated CIA claims designed to minimize its role in this prison without lifting a finger to resolve the differences between those denials and the numerous facts Scahill uncovered which proved how extensive the CIA's control of the prison (and the rendition program that fills it) actually is.

It's not just lazy but deceitful: uncritically printing anonymous government denials while dressing it up as her own discovery (once Nation representatives complained to CNN, she tacked on this sentence at the end: "Parts of the story initially appeared in the magazine The Nation on Tuesday").  Whether it was Starr who contacted the CIA to obtain this "story" (unlikely) or the CIA which tapped Starr on the head and directed her to print this and she then dutifully complied (far more likely), this was a joint effort by the U.S. Government and its CNN servant to undermine Scahill and his story while appearing not to do so.

Serving the same purpose was this ABC News report by Luis Martinez, which at least has the virtue of being more honest than Starr's report:  ABC doesn't pretend to do anything other than serve as obedient stenographer to the CIA by uncritically writing down and passing on the statements of an anonymous Government official in denying Scahill's report.  Leaving aside the slovenly practice of granting anonymity to government officials to do nothing other than issue official government claims -- so common a tactic of journalistic malpractice as to not merit comment at this point -- the article does nothing other than print the same CIA claims without expending a molecule of energy to determine if the claims are true.

Worse, ABC allows the CIA to depict Scahill's report as false by uncritically printing the blatant strawmen against which the CIA rails ("CIA Doesn’t Run Secret Prison in Somalia" . . . CIA "refutes a report that the agency runs a secret prison in that unstable country" . . . "A story published in The Nation said that the CIA was running a secret prison to house and interrogate terror suspects").  The whole point of Scahill's article is that while the Somalis exercise nominal control over the prison, that's merely a "plausible deniability" ruse to allow the U.S. to use it at will, as evidenced by the fact that the CIA pays those agents and is continuously present.  The "denials" uncritically printed by ABC confirm and bolster Scahill's story, not "refute" it.

Worse still, the ABC report justifies the CIA program by quoting the anonymous CIA official as describing the program as "the logical and prudent thing to do."  ABC then helpfully adds that "senior U.S. officials have expressed concern that al Shabab may be trying to expand its terror operations beyond Somalia" and that " U.S. government officials worry that those lawless regions might become a safe haven for al Shabab and other terror groups."  There is no discussion -- zero -- of the illegal aspects of maintaining a secret prison, the dangers of allowing unchecked renditions of prisoners to Somalia hidden from international human rights monitoring, or the likely violations of Obama's highly-touted Executive Orders.  Like Starr's CNN report, this article is nothing more than a CIA Press Release masquerading as an ABC News "news article," the by-product of a joint effort by the CIA and another establishment news outlet to make Scahill's report look erroneous, sloppy and irrelevant.

Just consider what happened here.  Scahill uncovered this secret prison because he went to Mogadishu -- dangerously unembedded, as very few journalists are willing to do -- and spent 9 days there aggressively digging around.  By contrast, Starr published her report by being handed a CIA script which she blindly read from without any other work, and ABC's Martinez then did the same.  But it's CNN and ABC that are considered -- by themselves and establishment D.C. mavens -- to be the Serious Journalists, while Scahill's report is heard only on Democracy Now and Al Jazeera.  That's because "Serious Journalism" in Washington means writing down what government officials tell you to say, and granting them anonymity to ensure they have no accountability.

Through this method, the U.S. Government need not directly attack real journalists.  They simply activate their journalistic servants to do it for them, and those servants then dutifully comply, this ensuring that they will continue to be chosen as vessels for future official messages.

BP & Govt. Censoring Media, Destroying Evidence

Also see this article posted previously in this blog.

***

BP Censoring Media, Destroying Evidence

Orange Beach, Alabama -- While President Obama insists that the federal government is firmly in control of the response to BP's spill in the Gulf, people in coastal communities where I visited last week in Louisiana and Alabama know an inconvenient truth: BP -- not our president -- controls the response. In fact, people on the ground say things are out of control in the gulf.

Even worse, as my latest week of adventures illustrate, BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability.

For example, while flying on a small plane from New Orleans to Orange Beach, the pilot suddenly exclaimed, "Look at that!" The thin red line marking the federal flight restrictions of 3,000 feet over the oiled Gulf region had just jumped to include the coastal barrier islands off Alabama.

"There's only one reason for that," the pilot said. "BP doesn't want the media taking pictures of oil on the beaches. You should see the oil that's about six miles off the coast," he said grimly. We looked down at the wavy orange boom surrounding the islands below us. The pilot shook his head. "There's no way those booms are going to stop what's offshore from hitting those beaches."

BP knows this as well -- boom can only deflect oil under the calmest of sea conditions, not barricade it -- so they have stepped up their already aggressive effort to control what the public sees.

At the same time I was en route to Orange Beach, Clint Guidry with the Louisiana Shrimp Association and Dean Blanchard, who owns the largest shrimp processor in Louisiana, were in Grand Isle taking Anderson Cooper out in a small boat to see the oiled beaches. The U.S. Coast Guard held up the boat for 20 minutes - an intimidation tactic intended to stop the cameras from recording BP's damage. Luckily for Cooper and the viewing public, Dean Blanchard is not easily intimidated.

A few days later, the jig was up with the booms. Oil was making landfall in four states and even BP can't be everywhere at once. CBS 60 Minutes Australia found entire sections of boom hung up in marsh grasses two feet above the water off Venice. On the same day on the other side of Barataria Bay, Louisiana Bayoukeeper documented pools of oil and oiled pelicans inside the boom - on the supposedly protected landward side - of Queen Bess Island off Grand Isle.

With oil undisputedly hitting the beaches and the number of dead wildlife mounting, BP is switching tactics. In Orange Beach, people told me BP wouldn't let them collect carcasses. Instead, the company was raking up carcasses of oiled seabirds. "The heads separate from the bodies," one upset resident told me. "There's no way those birds are going to be autopsied. BP is destroying evidence!"

The body count of affected wildlife is crucial to prove the harm caused by the spill, and also serves as an invaluable tool to evaluate damages to public property - the dolphins, sea turtles, whales, sea birds, fish, and more, that are owned by the American public. Disappeared body counts means disappeared damages - and disappeared liability for BP. BP should not be collecting carcasses. The job should be given to NOAA, a federal agency, and volunteers, as was done during the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

NOAA should also be conducting carcass drift studies. Only one percent of the dead sea birds made landfall in the Gulf of Alaska, for example. That means for every one bird that was found, another 99 were carried out to sea by currents. Further, NOAA should be conducting aerial surveys to look for carcasses in the offshore rips where the currents converge. That's where the carcasses will pile up--a fact we learned during the Exxon Valdez spill. Maybe that's another reason for BP's "no camera" policy and the flight restrictions.

On Saturday June 12, people across America will stand up and speak out with one voice to protest BP's treatment of the Gulf, neglect for the response workers, and their response to government authority. President Obama needs to hear and see the people waving cameras and respirators. Until the media is allowed unrestricted access to the Gulf and impacted beaches, BP - not the President of United States - will remain in charge of the Gulf response.

***

link to video

BP and government blocking coverage of oil damage
By Muriel Kane
Saturday, June 12th, 2010

It is becoming apparent that efforts to prevent the oil gushing out of BP's blown-out Deepwater Horizon rig from ravaging the Gulf Coast may be largely ineffective. An increasing number of stories are also starting to circulate concerning deliberate attempts by both BP and government officials to block coverage of the damage and the clean-up attempts.

In a video clip obtained by ThinkProgress, a local news team from WDSU in New Orleans was told by a private security guard that they were not allowed to talk to cleanup workers on a public beach or come within 100 yards of cleanup operations.

"Who’s saying that?" reporter Scott Walker asked the guard. "Because no one can tell me that, unless you’re the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, you’re the Coast Guard, or you’re the military, can you tell me where to go on this public beach."

"I can tell you where to go because I’m employed to keep this beach safe," the guard replied, adding, "You are not allowed to interview any workers."

CNN's Jim Acosta similarly reported on Thursday that his efforts to film attempts by the Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Service to rescue oil-covered birds had been blocked, even though his news team had received permission from the state Fish and Wildlife Service to enter the bird triage center.

"I'm going to have to ask you to stop taking pictures," a National Guardsman told them.

"It's more important for the animals to have a quiet, calm, controlled area at this point," a Fish and Wildlife Service representative insisted when asked for an explanation.

CNN's Anderson Cooper also recounted being "prevented by federal wildlife officials from photographing birds covered in oil being brought ashore. ... They actually now have this area where the birds come in roped off and guarded by National Guard troops."

This obstruction of the media is occurring even though BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles sent out a message to BP employees and contractors on Wednesday, stating, "Recent media reports have suggested that individuals involved in the cleanup operation have been prohibited from speaking to the media, and this is simply untrue. BP fully supports and defends all individuals rights to share their personal thoughts and experiences with journalists if they so choose."

BP guards have continued to block reporters from interviewing the cleanup workers, and the workers themselves have spoken off camera of threats that they will lose their jobs if they talk to reporters.

The WDSU reporter specifically mentioned the Suttles memo to the BP guards who were blocking his access to cleanup workers and asked, "Still hasn’t trickled down to you all?"

The guards' unhelpful response was, "We already heard that one too. ... The e-mail did not explicitly give you permission to do that."



video link

BP buys Google, Yahoo search words to keep people away from real news on Gulf oil spill disaster

Maryann Tobin | June 6
In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. 

BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words ‘oil spill’,  on the internet, the top link will re-direct  them to BP’s official company website.

This would not be the first time that BP has tried to control information to protect the company’s public image.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, BP executives quickly underestimated the size of the disastrous oil spill. Some suggest they did it to avoid costly EPA per-gallon spill fines. The less oil spilled, the lower the fines. 

A month into the spill, the public learned through independent science, that the spill was in fact a million gallon a day gusher.BP got caught in their own lie when the used a syphon pipe in one of the broken riser pipes and proudly proclaimed that they were capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. With the oil obviously still gushing, they had to up their spill rate to explain the reported discrepancy in their earlier estimates. 

As the dead bodies of birds, turtles and dolphins began showing up on land, BP used a private security company as their ‘oil spill police’  to try to keep photographers and reporters away from the true death toll from their spill. Tides of black goo lapping a shore lined in corpses did not portray the company image Tony Hayward and his oil rich executives wanted.

BP can spend millions on advertising campaigns, and they can try to misdirect people on the internet. But no matter how hard BP tries or how much money they spend on public relations, they will never be able to hide the apocalypse unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. You just can’t buy or smile your way out of a multi-billion gallon oil spill disaster. 

The world is watching the Gulf of Mexico from airplanes, boats and satellite images. Sending people to the BP company website when they click on the words ‘oil spill’ is not going to erase the horrors of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, nor will the trickery of British Petroleum.