Where's the Beef?

(original graphic here)

(Update below)

Over the past week or so there were some very important stories that somehow just didn't make it into the main NPR news shows:

• Georgia inmates organized a historic, peaceful multi-institutional strike and the best NPR could muster was a segment on Talk of the Nation that discussed the general topic of jobs in prisons.
• Senate Republicans essentially told seriously ill 9/11 first responders to go die, but it just wasn't terribly important to NPR. There was someone who did cover it, though.
• There was protest at the White House with over 130 people getting arrested. Those arrested included nobodies such as Daniel Ellsberg, some alleged Pulitzer Prize winner, a former CIA analyst, and war veterans. NPR's on-air response - yawn... Wait, it did get a mention from Mara Liasson who got out her trusty FOX converter and turned these 135 arrested citizens and noteworthies into anonymous "dozens."

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on NPR, after all there is only so much time in a broadcast and it's important to touch on the finer things in life like cappuccino ala Milton Friedman, $60 a bottle wine tasting with Scott Simon, and exciting mail-order gourmet meats (click the graphic at the top of the post) that will help a Tea Party crooner give money to groups like Focus on the Family. Oh baby, life is good!

To their credit, the NPR "Two Way" bloggers did have posts on the anti-war protest and on Pat Boone's creepy creds, but those posts were brief, and don't begin to compare with the exposure of featured, on-air news stories. Furthermore, as readers of this blog have pointed out, the online snippets and AP-wire feeds allow NPR to claim that they are covering news that they are essentially ignoring.

Update (12-23-10)

On Thursday morning, NPR covers the passage of the reduced First Responders bill and essentially ignores the media criticism of John Stewart's scathing episode against the non-coverage of the Republican attempts to kill the original Zadroga bill. It's really a brazen piece of hypocrisy and I'd recommend people to visit the story and post comments...

On NPR Supermax is Super Funny

Considering whether Guantanamo detainees might end up in the Florence, Colorado Supermax prison, NPR put Melissa Block on the phone with Bob Wood. According to Block "He's publisher of the Florence Citizen; his newspaper was active in helping bring Supermax to Florence and he says the prison is good for the local economy." Essentially, Wood tells block that bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the Supermax in Florence is not a controversial issue at all.

Block glibly closes the interview with this anecdote:

"By the way we also called the mayor of Florence, Colorado - Bart Hall - who told us this: 'Florence is used to having very bad boys at the Supermax. We weren't expecting it to house a bunch of kindergartners."

Oh man, that is so funny. Unlike those bitter, humorless Quakers, I just laughed and laughed to think of "more than twenty thousand prisoners in the United States...in special super-maximum security facilities....locked in small, sometimes windowless, cells....A few times a week...let out for showers and solitary exercise....[with] almost no access to educational or recreational activities...." What a riot! Ho! and kindergartners....yes, the idea of children in inhumane detention is just so clever and witty....

I just hope that NPR will hurry up and call up some of America's finest torturers enhanced interrogators so they can regale us with torture humor. Oh Melissa, you certainly are a very bad girl!

Robbins' Fetid Baloney Sandwich

On NPR News what do you call a an outdoor prison camp where the 2000 inmates "live outside, sleeping on cots in hundreds of old canvas tents in the broiling summer heat and the chilly desert winter"? It's "the place called Tent City, Joe Arpaio's most famous invention" where "the idea is to make life tough and humiliating."

And when male inmates are forced to wear "a black and white striped uniform usually worn over pink underwear" that's just "the Sheriff's fashion creation" that inmates "model" for the NPR reporter.

Even when Robbins tells us that "for food the Sheriff serves the inmates green, as in fetid baloney sandwiches" the tone is humorously matter of fact.

I considered writing a parody of Ted Robbins' pro-police state report on Maricopa Sherrif Joe Arpaio, but it was just too depressing to try. His story is disgusting, and echoes the humorous euphemisms that torturers often use to describe their crimes.

It is telling that on a morning when anti-immigrant/nativist racism is making the news, NPR chooses to do a folksy send up of this anti-immigrant, racist, prisoner-abusing Sheriff, Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona. CNN covered this creep back in 1999 - and the story has grotesque foreshadowing of Abu Ghraib - inmates exposed to hot and cold weather in run down tents and forced to where humiliating underwear. In fact the Maricopa Sheriff's office drew the attention of Amnesty International back in 1997 for abuses and reported torture with stun guns - and the intervention of the ACLU in 2007 for abuse to a quarantined TB patient. But on NPR Arpaio is introduced by Steve Inskeep as "a man enforcing laws at all costs..." and his perverted practices are described by Robbins as "either innovative or a throw-back to harsher times."

There are times when I think maybe I'm a bit too critical of NPR, and then they run a piece like this and I just think, why would anyone with a conscience want to support this mockery of journalism.

Prison Nation

ATC had a piece about Colorado agriculture using prison labor to make up for a shortage of seasonal workers. As I listened to the report I kept thinking that its not really fair to report on prison labor without contextualizing it in the current growth of the prison industrial complex and the horrific history of convict leasing.

A brief bit of searching will turn up some fascinating history such as this resource from Florida, the state I was born and raised in, or this general history of the practice. In fact, even NPR has covered convict leasing a few times in the past.

As far as the current prison system, it would have been interesting to hear from someone at Critical Resistance or the Prison Activist Resource Center which has a link to information on prison labor.