Come direbbe un tossicodipendente che cerca di uscire dal circolo, come prima cosa bisogna ammettere l’esistenza del problema. Governo e media americani, magari con la popolazione al seguito, ancora si rifiutano risolutamente di farlo.

Articolo dopo articolo, leggiamo di “interrogatori estremi” e “tattiche inquisitorie brutali”. Le parole ingannano. Non ammettono il problema. Cercano di girarci attorno.

Il soggetto non è “tecniche inquisitorie estreme”. Non stiamo parlando di “tattiche inquisitorie brutali”. Il soggetto in questione è: tortura.

Le leggi americane definiscono chiaramente il concetto di tortura (18 US Code §2340): “Azione commessa da una persona sotto pretesto legale e intesa ad infliggere forte sofferenza fisica o mentale (altro dal dolore o dalle sofferenze risultanti unicamente da sanzioni legittime, inerenti a tali sanzioni o da esse cagionate) ad altra persona affidata alla sua custodia o controllo.”

Le leggi internazionali (la convenzione Onu contro la tortura) definiscono la tortura altrettanto chiaramente: “[Q]ualsiasi atto mediante il quale sono intenzionalmente inflitti ad una persona dolore o sofferenze forti, fisiche o mentali, al fine segnatamente di ottenere da essa o da una terza persona informazioni o confessioni, di punirla per un atto che essa o una terza persona ha commesso o è sospettata aver commesso, di intimorirla o di far pressione su di lei o di intimorire o di far pressione su una terza persona, o per qualsiasi altro motivo fondato su qualsiasi forma di discriminazione, qualora tale dolore o sofferenze siano inflitte da un agente della funzione pubblica o da ogni altra persona che agisca a titolo ufficiale, o su sua istigazione, o con il suo consenso espresso o tacito.”

Queste descrizioni sono istruttive, ma non ne abbiamo bisogno per arrivare alla conclusione che gli atti descritti nel rapporto (waterboarding, privazione del sonno e l’introduzione a forza di sostanze nel retto delle vittime, tanto per citarne tre) rappresentano tortura, solo tortura e nient’altro che tortura. Non esiste una definizione razionale del termine tortura che non si adatti alle azioni descritte.

Da qui giungiamo inevitabilmente ad una seconda conclusione: Le persone coinvolte nei casi di tortura, dagli esecutori materiali, su su lungo la catena di comando, fino al presidente degli Stati Uniti, sono criminali violenti e pericolosi. Sarebbero riconosciuti come tali in una società sana, che esistano o meno leggi che dicono che le loro azioni sono crimini.

La domanda, ovviamente, è: cosa fare? La risposta degli opinionisti tradizionali varia da “nulla” a “audizioni in senato nella speranza che tutto si dissolva” fino a “nominate un giudice speciale e lasciate che sia lui a far fuori i criminali meno protetti così noi possiamo continuare come sempre”.

Anche le proposte più radicali non vanno oltre il deferimento degli Stati Uniti e la consegna di tutta la banda, dal primo all’ultimo, alla Corte Internazionale dell’Aia.

Nei programmi di disintossicazione in dodici punti, il secondo punto consiste nel riconoscere un “potere superiore”. Il secondo punto di un programma di disintossicazione dalla tortura, il riconoscimento dello stato come “potere superiore” in terra, è in realtà il vero problema.

Lo stato accorda ai suoi rappresentanti un potere estremo, soprattutto sui carcerati e i prigionieri di guerra. Questo potere corrompe, permette ai rappresentanti dello stato di commettere abusi e torturare, come notato dagli psicosociologi nell’esperimento condotto nella prigione di Stanford.

Lo stato, inoltre, protegge i suoi uomini dalle accuse di responsabilità, nasconde la violenza di stato con eufemismi, devia il discorso dalla tortura come crimine alla tortura come politica. E poiché lo stato ha il monopolio della legge, tutto il processo penale è nelle sue mani. I torturatori sanno che difficilmente saranno processati.

Se tolleriamo lo stato, tolleriamo la tortura. È più che mai ora di smetterla di tollerare entrambi.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

As any recovering addict will helpfully inform you, the first step is admitting the problem. The US government and American media (and presumably following them, the America public) still resolutely refuse to do that.

In story after story, we see references to “enhanced interrogation” and “brutal interrogation tactics.” Those are weasel words. They’re not admissions of the problem, they’re attempts to talk around the problem.

We’re not talking about “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Nor are we discussing “brutal interrogation tactics.” The subject in question is torture.

Torture is clearly defined in US law (18 US Code §2340): “[A]n act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

Torture is clearly defined in international law (the UN Convention Against Torture): “[A]ny act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

These summations in the laws of states are informative, but we don’t really need them to conclude that the actions described in the report — waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the forced infusion of substances into victims’ rectums, to name three — are torture, all torture and nothing but torture. There exists no reasonable definition of torture that the described actions don’t conform to.

From that primary conclusion we must inevitably draw a secondary conclusion: The persons involved in the torture, from the operators actually implementing it all the way up the chain of command to the president of the United States, are violent, dangerous criminals and would be recognized as such in any sane society, regardless of whether or not codified law existed to describe their offenses.

The question, of course, is what to do about it. “Mainstream” suggestions range from “nothing” to “hold some Senate hearings and hope it goes away” to “appoint a special prosecutor and let him throw some of the less well-connected criminals under the bus so we can get on with life.”

Even at the radical end of the spectrum, suggestions tend to run to things like putting the US under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and conducting a wholesale rendition of the gang, from top to bottom, to the Hague for trial.

The second step in 12-step addiction recovery programs involves recognizing a “higher power.” The second step in any torture recovery program is recognition that the existing temporal “higher power” — the state — is in fact the real problem.

The state bestows extreme power upon its agents, especially over prisoners and detainees. That power corrupts, enabling those agents to abuse and torture, as social psychologists observed in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The state’s structure also protects its agents from accountability, shrouding discussions of state violence in euphemism, turn the debate from torture as a crime to torture as policy. Furthermore, the state’s monopoly on law leaves prosecution and adjudication up to the state itself. Torturers know they’re unlikely to face justice.

If we tolerate the state, we tolerate torture. It’s time and past time we stopped tolerating either.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Prima Cosa, Ammettere le Torture
• Spanish, El primer paso es admitir la tortura

On May 25, The Bottom Line published an op-ed from a former Executive Content Editor, Hannah Davey, who explained that the reason there was a paucity of stories on the shooting at her former paper was that the paper wanted to reduce harm to their reporters.

Whenever tragedy strikes, emergency responders and journalists are some of the first on scene and are, consequently, more likely to suffer from emotional trauma because of it. As stated in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, a code we at The Bottom Line strive to uphold every day in our reporting, we are to minimize harm, whether physical or emotional. Ethical “journalists should show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage.”

After extensive discussions among our Editorial Staff, advisor and alumni, we have decided to not immediately publish an article on the recent tragedy in our community of Isla Vista to minimize the emotional harm for our reporters, photographers and multimedia journalists. Before we are journalists, we are Gauchos and feel we need our time to mourn, process and recover from this senseless violence.

To put it lightly, this irked a few journalists. Erik Wemple, the media critic at The Washington Post, wrote of the original op-ed, “The op-ed from Davey notes that the decision to bag publishing on a gigantic story came after ‘extensive discussions among our Editorial Staff, advisor and alumni…’ In those extensive discussions, these folks presumably engaged in philosophical exchanges on mourning and recovery, when a better focus would have been: How fast can we generate updates on this rampage? (emphasis Wemple’s)”

As an observer to a few tragedies where the news coverage was originally botched, I can understand – from a certain perspective – wanting to hold off on writing about something like this. If only to get to the closest possible version of the truth, I am for quality and not quantity. However, The Bottom Line‘s competitor, the Nexus, has a startling amount of well-crafted and thoughtful pieces on the Isla Vista shooting.

To be perfectly blunt, the student reporters on The Bottom Line appear to have been done a disservice by their editors and their adviser. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to learn how to report on tragedy, someone apparently decided that what their reporters needed most was a day off. 

Oh, and let’s talk about what the Society of Professional Journalists says about harm reduction:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should: — Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

Rather than apply this code to their reporting, Davey’s op-ed made it seem like The Bottom Line applied this to themselves and themselves alone.

The Bottom Line Editorial Board tacked on a correction to Davey’s op-ed on Wednesday. They said:

The Op-Ed that TBL published on May 25, 2014, “Op-Ed: Why We Have Not Yet Published Anything on the Isla Vista Shooting,” was written by a previous Executive Content Editor, and was approved to be posted by a few members of our current editorial board, but without consultation with our advisor and the majority of the editorial board. In a mentally and emotionally compromised state, the editors directly involved in the publication of the Op-Ed misjudged the situation. Even though said piece is an Op-Ed, we effectively allowed someone who is not currently involved with TBL to speak for us and define our coverage of the Isla Vista tragedy.

The Op-Ed states that “we have decided to not immediately publish an article on the recent tragedy in our community of Isla Vista to minimize the emotional harm for our reporters, photographers and multimedia journalists.” Although minimizing harm to our staff and community contributed to our decision, it was not the main factor. We decided it would be best to gather all the necessary facts to report on such a grave and tragic incident, rather than rush to publication and print misinformation. This does not mean that our reporters and photographers refused to or chose not to cover the events of May 23. Our staff has been reporting, interviewing, and photographing since Friday night in preparation for an online story published Monday and our regular print issue on Wednesday. Additionally, we have been covering the incident through our Twitter account, providing accurate live updates of the events.

We pride ourselves on factual and accurate reporting, not sensationalism and fear-mongering. We, as a news organization, do not want to contribute to the panic by exploiting the grief of our fellow community members. We serve our community first, and we took the steps that we thought were necessary to best serve that community. Our primary audience is UCSB and Isla Vista, who were rocked by a tragic event and have experienced a severe loss. We did not think it journalistically ethical to harass our community in its time of grief and shock, and decided to hold off premature publication of an article so that we did not hurt anyone through misinformation.

This is… better than the reasons given in the previous op-ed. Still not great, and still hinting at a disservice done to the student journalists, but better.

It should be noted that The Bottom Line is associated with UCSB’s Associated Student Body. The Daily Nexus is an independently-run paper with no adviser. Marissa Wenzke, the now-former Editor of the Nexus, posted this in the comment thread of another Washington Post article on The Bottom Line‘s coverage:

A student paper is comparable to a media outlet because, well, it is a media outlet. We have no faculty adviser and we get along just fine. Student journalists are journalists – if they want to be.

I’m thankful to be alive*, and when I was reporting, it was for my friends and classmates who were waiting on information all that night, waiting on updates to see if their loved ones were okay, and waiting to find out what exactly happened that night.

*According to an LA Times article on the Nexus’s reporting, Wenzke was in an apartment on the adjacent street to where the shooting happened.

The article doesn’t really answer the second question, as at the time, no one really knew why past rumor and speculation. But past that, the article is really just… uninformative. We’re apparently supposed to care (and/or not… care? What is happening) about the incident at the Met Gala because Solange is Beyonce’s sister, and Bey was recently listed as one of the most influential people by Time Magazine, and then there are memes and reposted photos from TMZ and…

Is this what new media is supposed to look like?

Vox debuted mere weeks ago, on March 30, to limited fanfare; it’s part of the same media group that hosts the fantastic tech site The Verge and video game site Polygon, and its launch was sponsored by General Electric. According to their “About” page, Vox is building their site in public, “listening to your feedback and learning as we grow.” Its mission? “Explain the news.”

So far, they’ve “voxsplained” Common Core (including an article listing all the ways in which Louis C.K. is wrong about it), net neutrality and Benghazi, among other subjects; they’ve also done hard hitting journalism on… otter necrophilia.

So far, color me unimpressed, and a little bit queasy.

When we talk about new media, and celebrity-journalist-centered media specifically, we tend to be optimistic that a given vehicle is going to highlight the good points of a particular writer’s work. With The Intercept, we focus on Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras’s writing on government surveillance. With FiveThirtyEight, we want good political statistics. With Vox, what are we getting? After the first month, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot. Mostly, it just reminds me of the overly-curious personality sphere you have to kill from Portal.

Ezra Klein has gathered together a pretty hefty team of writers to work for him at Vox, including Matthew Yglesias and Zach Beauchamp. But so far, the results have brought a less-interesting Buzzfeed to bear, not a new media franchise blazing new ground. Also, otter necrophilia.

~~~

The first two weeks of May have been very good to us at C4SS Media. The podcast feed (also on iTunes and Stitcher Radio) has been downloaded from over 2000 times since the first recording was posted on May 1. We’ve got more in the works, including a podcast for this blog and some other discussion-oriented shows. In the meantime, you can like Missing Comma’s Facebook page and follow us on Twitter, and don’t forget to do the same for the Center here and here. Thanks for your support!

In Alabama, prisoners are filming each other on smuggled cell phones to tell their stories and express grievances about human rights abuses in Alabama prisons. These videos are then posted on a YouTube channel affiliated with the Free Alabama Movement. As Bay Area Intifada explains, “the prisoners speak of deplorable conditions, slave labor, prisons being a continuation of slavery and many candid stories from their lives inside and outside the cement walls of Alabama’s prisons.” The very nature of the prisoners’ non-violent disobedience tells us something about Alabama prisons. The communication mechanism they use to engage in political speech, the cell phone, is prohibited by prison officials. Only by disobeying the prison’s institutional rules can the truth about prisons be revealed. Prisons are designed to suppress communication, dissent, and the accountability that might result from openness. The Free Alabama Movement deserves the support of all who care about freedom and justice, and I’ll continue posting on their story in the coming weeks.

Outside of prison walls, I’ve been seeing prison abolitionist ideas in various media sources. Anarchist journalist Charles Davis published an excellent article at Vice that discusses prison abolition and interviews Isaac Ontiveros of Critical Resistance. The interview covers a lot of important questions about prison abolition, including what to do about violent criminals, what tactics to use right now, and the risks of reform. Critical Resistance is one of the most significant prison abolitionist groups in the world today, and it’s always excellent to see their work highlighted at a popular website like Vice.

My friend Cory Massimo also recently published a guest post at The Stag Blog offering a libertarian case for prison abolition. He argues for a system based purely on restitution rather than punishment, and contends that prisons are the wrong response even to those who have violated the rights of others. I’m glad to see prison abolitionist ideas gaining traction in libertarian circles, and I hope they will continue to gain traction.

Shining light on the prison state doesn’t just mean talking about prisons themselves. Prisons are closely related to a variety of other political issues. For example, the prison industrial complex includes immigration detention centers th tat lock up migrants for deportation. Issues like border militarization should thus be core issues for those of us concerned about the prison industrial complex. Lucy Steigerwald has a great new column at AntiWar.com called “The War at Home,” which examines how issues like immigration restrictions, policing, prisons, and surveillance interact with militarism and the warfare state. Her first column, released this week, deals with border militarization. Border militarization tramples civil liberties while lining the pockets of both war profiteers and prison profiteers. I’m glad to see the issue being addressed at AntiWar.com.

The way borders operate as part of militarism, empire, capitalism, and the prison-industrial complex is also explored in Harsha Walia’s book Undoing Border Imperialism, which I recently started reading. The book develops a theoretical framework for seeing immigration restrictions not just as a domestic policy decision, but as a structural feature of empire. Moreover, the book discusses the tactics used by a network of anti-colonial and anti-state migrant justice organizations called No One Is Illegal, which operates throughout Canada. I haven’t finished reading the book yet, but so far it’s excellent and I highly recommend it.

Today’s a good day to mention border imperialism and the framework of criminalization that sustains it, because a major act of civil disobedience against the state’s borders happened today. Over 100 families attempted border crossings today at the Otay Mesa point of entry, demanding asylum so they could reunite with their families. These sorts of actions highlight the way the state’s borders, imposed through conquest and enforced through militarized violence, break apart the families, communities, and other peaceful forms of voluntary association that build a truly robust society.

These are just a few examples of the ongoing action, thought, and media happening lately to challenge the prison-industrial complex, the empire, and other mutually reinforcing systems of state violence. Let’s keep up these fights for freedom, until the state’s violence ends.

Podcasting represents a radical decentralization of the airwaves that can’t actually take place on the airwaves, for a few reasons.

Most people conceive of FM radio as being one giant mass of differently-formatted radio stations and content providers. In actuality, there are three tiers:

1. FM Commercial Radio Broadcast Stations
2. FM Noncommercial Educational Radio Broadcast Stations
3. Low Power FM (LPFM) Noncommercial Educational Radio Broadcast Stations

The first tier, commercial radio, is your average music, talk and sports programming; the FCC allows commercial radio to potentially take up every slot from 92.1 MHz to 107.9 MHz. The second tier is where “public radio” can be found, and the FCC generally allots 88.1 MHz to 91.9 MHz to public radio stations. This is the realm of NPR and its competitor-partners. The third tier, LPFM stations, are generally smaller community outfits that can cover neighborhoods with their broadcasting power, but little else. They have a smaller budget and don’t operate through NPR; they also tend to hire more amateur and independent producers on a volunteer basis. Due to the low transmission power, it’s rare that these producers can get their work heard by more than a few hundred people at any given moment.

Podcasting does for these producers what national syndication does for Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition and All Things Considered: it gets their work out there to potentially anyone. Of course, the latter shows aren’t exactly done by independent producers, which brings me to the second barrier to entry for radio decentralization: just about every production company operates in the realm of old media.

With one notable exception, the companies that operate and compete in public radio hire much in the same way that a newspaper or television station does; only producers that are credentialed (usually in the form of a college degree followed by so many years interning or working at low-power FM stations) can get even entry-level jobs at National Public Radio, Public Radio International, or American Public Media. This is not a good or bad thing – this is just something that they do. Unfortunately, there’s a side-effect: not everyone currently producing audio has a college degree, and not everyone who wants to be in radio can actually afford to go to college for it; therefore, the demographic of people who are actually working at one of the major content providers tends to be very… monochromatic.

That notable exception? The Public Radio Exchange, or PRX. Its slogan is “Making Public Radio More Public,” and its entire infrastructure is set up for exactly that task. Anyone can sign up as a producer for free, and the entry cost to actually make money with PRX is only $50 a year. Unfortunately, the free producer account has a data upload limit of two hours – not exactly conducive to doing a long-run podcast. Also, there are some technical barriers to using PRX as your main distribution tool – barriers that, if you’re not familiar with the inner workings of public radio, might be very difficult to overcome. Studioless podcasting comes with very few of those barriers; plus, it’s all-online.

This is really the crux of what makes podcasting special: its ability to open up new spaces for more voices in almost infinite capacity. You can podcast for fun or for a living; your success isn’t tied to which market you’re doing the best in and you don’t have to worry about broadcast clocks. You don’t have to worry about your show being canceled because the station lost money or didn’t raise enough in the periodic fundraiser to keep it going. Podcasting is made for everyone.

Pick Your Niche

Unlike public radio, or anything produced professionally, by the book, in a studio, podcasting is limitless in terms of both creativity and coverage. This is a double-edged sword, and it is the primary reason you need to take some time to think about what you want to say with your show. Interested in news and politics? As a quick glance at iTunes shows, so do 500 other producers. Narrow things down to a specific topic, and run with it – especially if you believe that topic isn’t covered well in the rest of the media.

KISS – Keep It Short and Simple

The very best advice I ever got was from a podcaster I interviewed, Abby Wendle. She told me that the best idea for a show was one you could implement in a few minutes, as that’s generally what radio stations look for. While I’m not so worried about radio stations, this concept applies to your listener as well. (Note: I said listener, singular, for a reason.) Your casual listener has an attention span that will feel stretched if you go longer on a topic, story or episode than five to ten minutes. Obviously, if you go over that time frame, no one is going to, like, sue you, but your listener might not stick around for the whole thing — at least, not when you just start out.

Learn to write like you speak

This is actually a professional technique. I didn’t learn that until recently, when I was flipping through Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide To Audio Journalism And Production while bored the other day. Here’s what Jonathan Kern, the author of that book, has to say:

First, and foremost, say your sentences before you write them down; or at the very least, say them out loud after you’ve written them. […] As you write, ask yourself: Would I ever say this sentence in my regular life, when I am not writing a news story? If the answer is no, change it. […] Remember, expressing your thoughts in short declarative sentences doesn’t require you to eliminate any of your ideas — just to ration them out. You aren’t sacrificing anything by writing less convoluted prose.

I’ve tried podcast writing a number of ways, including: reading from the Associated Press wire; writing whole essays on a topic, the way I would if I were still in school; going scriptless. None of them have worked nearly half as well as when I’m writing the entire episode of a show like I’d speak the show naturally, without any pauses in thought. If you do this alone, the quality of your podcast will improve regardless of what equipment you’re rocking.

Next week: the significance of studioless podcasting.

Bill Keller is the former Executive Editor of the New York Times, so his arrival at this position, from up at the peak of the ivory tower, is at least understandable (though no less abhorrent). His wife, Emma? A cancer survivor.

Emma Keller’s post at the Guardian, titled “Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?” has already been deleted “with the agreement of the subject because it is inconsistent with the Guardian editorial code.” Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we’re able to knock back the clock and see exactly what she said.

“Lisa Bonchek Adams is dying,” Emma Keller writes. “She has Stage IV breast cancer and now it’s metastasized to her bones, joints, hips, spine, liver and lungs. She’s in terrible pain. She knows there is no cure, and she wants you to know all about what she is going through. Adams is dying out loud. On her blog and, especially, on Twitter.”

Is this mockery? I can’t tell. If I wasn’t aware of the title or theme of the article, I would probably say that this was just a very succinct, radio-friendly lede. But it becomes clear very quickly that this is no mere profile of a dying woman. Keller’s distaste of Adams’s practices is apparent by the second paragraph. It is apparently notable that Adams tweets “dozens of times an hour,” and that some of the people who follow her do so like they would a reality television show.

Keller doesn’t mention until further down that she herself is one of those people:

“The clinical drug trial she was on wasn’t working. Her disease seemed to be rampaging through her body. She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn’t stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?”

If this article were directed at the doubtless innumerable tourists of the internet, then I would most likely have no need to devote blog space to it. But it isn’t. Keller criticizes Adams for using social media as a way to keep herself going.

“It’s clear that tweeting as compulsively as Lisa Adams does is an attempt to exercise some kind of control over her experience,” Keller writes.

“She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She’s living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life,” she said. “In some ways she has invited us all in.”

Emma Keller ends her piece by saying,

“Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a “no visitors sign” on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?”

Emma seems to oscillate between being frustrated with herself that she has allowed a compelling story to hold her attention, and angry at Lisa Adams for creating that compelling content.

Bill’s article is still standing strong over at the New York Times, and while the snarkiness of his concern-trolling is more subdued, it’s still emblematic of a larger issue the Kellers seem to take with the medium.

He begins his less-virulent hit-job with a more-or-less stone-faced appraisal of Adams’s activity as a blogger over the last seven years. He writes,

“Since a mammogram detected the first toxic seeds of cancer in her left breast when she was 37, she has blogged and tweeted copiously about her contest with the advancing disease.”

The way he describes Adams’s fight with cancer from this point on is reminiscent of a war zone, and that’s not an accident: later in the piece, he reminisces about the time his father-in-law died from cancer in a British hospital, where,

“more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.“

Yet Adams, despite the advanced nature of her cancer, does not seem to be miserable; as Keller notes, she is currently receiving care from the New York Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the oldest private cancer research center in the world. Her tweets have lost some of their optimism, but she’s continuing to fight.

That she’s doing it in the public eye apparently deserves the ire of old media. If Adams had taken the time between painful and debilitating chemotherapy treatments to pen a memoir, or, as other writers have quipped, hundreds of thousands of sentences for the New Yorker, Keller (Emma and Bill both) would be weeping over her beautiful eloquence and inspiring prolificness. But because Adams decided to blog, this is not worthy of attention and we should question her motives.

It’s clear that, at least in the minds of some of the old media guard, blogging isn’t just “not-journalism.” It’s not fit for existence. That others are proving them wrong is inspiring in itself.

Adams’s story is not that of attention-seeking. It is emblematic of the struggle for human flourishing, despite astronomical odds against them. That she’s blogging it makes it no less powerful.

We will learn of the latest scientific projections of temperature increase, sea level rise and extremes in weather. The report is seven years in the making and is currently the ultimate in climate science — not Al Gore, not Rush Limbaugh, but actual scientists who study climate.

So, expect three things to happen: Media sensationalism, arguments for government interventionism in the market and, finally, the continuing stigmergic revolution.

Media sensationalism has already started. This is nothing new. The media always presents, hypes and glorifies two sides of the environmental issue of our time (even though there is overwhelming consensus that anthropogenic activity is impacting climate). My advice when it comes to the media and climate change? Turn off the radio, turn off the television, put down the book Bill McKibben or Sean Hannity wrote and please instead devote time to the science. Mainstream media is not for news, it is for entertainment — sadly.

Then come the calls for government interventionism. Whenever climate change is in the limelight, liberals tend to champion the need for our great government institutions to once again save human civilization. Conservatives and other skeptics advocate that these same government institutions should save big business from the liberals. Both arguments are absurd.

Modern liberal visions of empowering the state to combat climate change are short-sighted to say the least. Empowering bureaucracy to combat something as urgent as climate change will only exacerbate our environmental problems. Bureaucracy is slow, un-democratic and ripe with special interests. Any hope of changing power structures so they act with benevolence will fall flat. In the face of complex wicked problems facing our entire biosphere we should act in ways that make our institutions unnecessary — to work around hierarchy and build a new society free of institutional supremacy.

Which brings me to my other point: On the other side of the very same bureaucracy we have modern conservatives advocating that “junk science” should not foster policy and any attempts to do so are just outright attacks on good ole American capitalism. In reality, what we often find is government supporting big industry. For just one example, liberal champion and US President Barack Obama is stomping around the country advocating natural gas as a clean burning “bridge fuel” — the answer to the climate problem. The administration has ignored methane emissions (by touting that they are less than projected as if that means there are no emissions), groundwater contamination and other environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. Government institutions go out of their way to protect and support the economic ruling class. Big business has no better friend than big government.

In the face of our environmental crisis, however, we are witness to emerging orders.

The greatest of biological phenomenons — Spontaneous Order — is already at work solving the problems we face today. We see this in emerging ideas of food production in the form of local permaculture farms and the urban food movement. We see it in the emerging philosophy of Adaptive Collaborative Management in regards to the utilization of natural resources. We see social movements dedicated to preserving cultural and natural heritage. There is work being done that is changing our institutions to give communities democratic energy in the form of micro-generation and solidarity economies. There are many more examples of grassroots movements working to protect our ecology.

Climate change presents a great challenge to civilization. Where there is labor to be done, we will do it. Expect us.

And guess what? US Senator Dianne Feinstein just bore him out. She “insisted on limiting the legal protection to ‘real reporters’ and not, she said, a 17-year-old with his own website. ‘I can’t support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I’m not going to go there,’ she said. Feinstein introduced an amendment that defines a ‘covered journalist’ as someone who gathers and reports news for ‘an entity or service that disseminates news and information.'”

Well, all righty then. So if you’re not a “professional journalist” — someone who punches a time clock and gets a paycheck from an “entity” of some sort — you can go to prison for publishing leaks.

If you are a “professional journalist,” on the other hand, you’ll censor yourself — driven by the imperative of maintaining “access” to those in power. Of course it’s not really clear what this “access” is supposed to accomplish. Because the one sure-fire guaranteed way to lose access to those in power is to report on them in a less than flattering way.

I recall some of those “serious,” “professional” interviews the late Tim Russert used to do with the likes of Dick Cheney. Cheney would sit there and lie non-stop, and the most Russert would ever do was ask a mild-mannered clarifying question in followup to give Cheney a chance either to retract or affirm the statement. Never did he confront Cheney with anything from the factual record proving him to be a deliberate liar — let alone a quote of Cheney actually saying something he’d just denied ever having said.

So apparently the real point of access is access for its own sake — the prestige of sitting in a swivel chair on the same dais as Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton or John Kerry and actually getting to talk to them in the flesh. Or sitting in the same room with the other reporters in the White House press pool, busily taking dictation from the Press Secretary. Or being seen laughing at their jokes at the National Press Club dinner on C-SPAN.

A perfect example of how government uses the denial of “access” as a stick is the Department of Justice’s response to Brad Heath’s questions about whether the DOJ’s Office of Personal Responsibility had investigated newly declassified documents revealing the NSA’s systematic lies to the FISA court. We have answers, the Department said, but we won’t give them to you, because we don’t like your attitude. So we’ll wait till after you publish your story, and then give the answers to someone we like instead.

If the threat to withdraw access isn’t enough to rein in a young reporter who’s still got some fool idealistic notions in her head, the “entity” that employs her can be useful in another way. See, the publishers and owners, too, have “access” of a different kind.  They belong to the same social class as the government and corporate barons their lowly employees in the newsroom report on. The owner of the newspaper that employs a muckraking reporter probably plays nine holes of golf every Sunday with the scumbag politician the reporter exposes the dirt on.

The late Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post — a serious journalistic “entity” if ever there was one — positively relished in such “access.” She once regaled a room full of CIA officials with the assurance that “there are some things the American people don’t need to know.”

The journalistic community’s attitude toward leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, tellingly, is strongly polarized between those who are responsible only to their readers and their peers — the new Internet journalists, especially — and those employed by the kinds of “entities” Dianne Feinstein is so understandably fond of.

Some years back Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky formulated a “Propaganda Model” of the corporate media that said, at least in regard to “national security” affairs, the “free” U.S. media performed in the same manner you’d expect from the official state media in a totalitarian country. They were probably understating their case.