he said i was just in washington and people in washington tell me that they're concerned about your tone welcome to the mainstream media establishment or apparently outsiders just aren't excepted anymore but what does mr mo. and the land of the free but home of the not so free press because you're not a journalist to serve the longest time in prison for protecting his sources. the reason you are facing budget cuts is because of the crash that was created manufactured distributed by wall street plus the cause and effect is newark new

jersey a symbol of lots ahead for other american cities if so it may help wall street thanks. it's thursday july twenty first four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine frizz out there watching our team. well i want to start this afternoon by talking about the role of journalism in our society journalists that live in america are supposed to be the ultimate form of checks and balances the buck stops with us right now i can tell you when i was in j school getting my masters at a very prestigious university knowing for being one of the best journalism schools in the country we heard words and phrases like fourth estate public service government. well it turns out when it comes to the mainstream media journalists seeking truth telling are defecting as the caliber of some of these networks continues to crumble r.t.

correspondent lauren lister looks at the formula that is driving networks racing to the bottom now to talk about some of today's biggest quarterly stories it's the story behind the story no editorial mission driving the mainstream news cycle and i just kind of sat back i was like wow this is it this is the speech play by the rules instructions coming straight from the top he said i was just in washington and people in washington tell me they're concerned about your tone recently departed m.-s. n.b.c. anchor jane describes the talking to he alleges came from the head of the cable news network the talking to that drove him to leave the station and he said i love to be an outsider outsiders are cool but we're not we're insiders. we are the former insiders and analysts we interviewed say it's this way of thinking in the mainstream t.v. media that leads to a twenty four hour news cycle filled largely with ac anthony the woman accused of

killing her two year old little girl you would know if the this is your underpants we now learn maria demanded he move l. have been following her coverage that m.s.m. defector says it's cost stations their literate audience and credibility of mainstream television news in particular is in the gutter you're just wasting your time with casey anthony story with anthony weiner's wiener it's become a national joke a national joke that protects ad revenue and political currency unlike or hard hitting story it would be stories that offend big corporations and big political power and that's why they're not covered it could explain why politicians become fair game only on the way down when everyone's covering it maybe this is a theory is right now it could explain why more reporters haven't covered for example a secret prison in somalia run by the cia journalist jeremy scahill exposed secrets

and says several other american reporters know about it too instead this was the response to his story in the case of c.n.n. didn't even mention my report and just basically reprinted a press release from the cia saying that you know they were just assisting the somali government it could explain why networks aren't redoubling their efforts to cover hard hitting stories instead fresh off the successful ratings of the casey anthony trial you have a network like a.d.c. hiring former kidnapping victim elizabeth smart to cover missing children stories i mean they basically cleaned out and said we need to get more innocent children or innocent people stories and so that's what they're going to do and that is going to be a cost to other stories taking away from stories that affect people on a greater scale from jobs to inequality. poverty and wars and police brutality. meanwhile you have national celebrities filling the slots of journalists and we are so glad now to be joined by elizabeth smart and journalists filling the spots of

celebrities when cnn's anderson cooper tweeted this photo it quickly turned to fodder for hollywood gossip blogs shorts and anger admitting he had a child with a staff member the direction seems to be heading ever further in the direction of sensational and tabloid which of rupert murdoch's news corps scandal is any indication could back. you're going to lose a great things are going to lose viewers and you know ultimately you may be you may find yourself under investigation networks that pledge to lean forward or claim to be fair and balanced or that call themselves the most trusted name in news the defectors leaving to find an independent outlet if they want to try to live up to those models lauren lyster party washington d.c. . just a long list of examples lauren gave there and there are certainly more and when you see these examples it becomes clear that the time is really right to talk about this they thought donna is an emmy award winning news producer and is working now

as a communications director for free press they pay so much for coming and i know your organization has been really active and outspoken in the need for an actual free press and the need for a press not to be sort of owned by a corporation talk a little bit about that and how you see the media landscape right now. well like you i went in journalism school unlike you i'm sure i did it because i had a very strong feeling about the importance of good media good journalism and it democracy people need to know what's going on what you don't know can hurt you what you don't know can kill you we know this to be true and i went to school because i wanted to expose those stories and after a long in at the risk of sounding modest precess full career at it i would chose to walk away because i was no longer proud of what i was doing every day i was required to do one thing that would made me embarrassed or ashamed or give me an example of something that made you not proud of i won't name the station but i was

working at a local local station in los angeles where we had footage of a highway patrol officer who after appears pursuit had a suspect face down on the ground kicked him in the head turned around steadied himself and then kicked him in the head again i was but i was very upset by that and i said to the executive producer we really need to play up this story she said no we don't. and i said well that were white washing a clear case of police brutality she said ok if you want to call it that that's what we're doing but we're not going to do that story that seems a little bit outrageous i mean more than a little bit rao you know i want to go back to this report that we just showed that r.t. correspondent laura lister did it brought up the case of james huger just in the last you know day or so we found out that he there's sort of a mutual decision i guess but he chose to walk away from his role at m.f. understand i want to play a little bit more of what he had to say about that decision or the point of the show was truth telling that's what we're supposed to do and we're supposed to

challenge the government that's the role the media so i stuck to that and and i hope i made the right decision. the point of the show jenks that is truth telling and i know it you know we had jake on i think asked for months and months and months before he got the gig at amazon d.c. and that's what we liked about him he did not mince his words he was just out there and that got him into trouble what's your reaction to us. not terribly well were acquainted and i respect the way that he's presented himself i don't always agree with with what he said politically but he always speaks with conviction and with honesty and there is precious little room for that sadly enough in the mainstream media about a whole long i mean because that i watched jenks entire kind of rant that he went off of air and he said you know the numbers prove it when he started acting more

like himself when he stopped acting sort of like a congressman or a senator as he was originally asked to do his ratings kept going up so cancer be argued that networks should do what the viewers want and clearly the viewers want somebody to tell the truth. absolutely you know what i've also been a journalism professor and i you know i told my students that. the public has a very keen b.s. detector they know when you're not giving them the full story and a big problem with what's happening in traditional commercial media now is that they're so afraid of offending anybody that they're not actually telling you anything if the republicans say it's black in the republican say it's what the democrats say it's white and the reporter comes out and says g.o.p. says black democrats say white i'm done well that's not that's one of them is obviously not telling the truth or is farther away from the truth than the other and if you're not making that decision for them as a general making that analysis as

a journalist you're adding nothing to the story you're just sort of repeating what somebody else said as opposed to actually doing your own digging and sort of making connecting from dots you have to be able to see it some point either it's closer to black or it's closer to white or you're simply a stenographer. i've heard the excuse time and time again but here we live in a time when this wasn't always the case but we live in a time with twenty four hour cable networks that these networks have a lot of time to fill so they have to do the shark attacks or these kidnappings but it seems to me i mean i think back to the case of anthony weiner and gate this wasn't a story that was one of many stories this was a story that filled out filled out the majority of programming certain days so why can't they do it all why can't these networks say you know what yeah the kidnapping story sells the commercials or whatever but let's also think in some good stuff. money the bottom line is it always comes down to money you know the paradigm example i used with my students as a journalism professor was if you've got

a story of a county health care budget and it's been cut and that that decision is going to affect tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in that caring. and you've got a liquor store robbery where the owner was shot. which story are you going to cover well if you say if you want to do the health care story you've got to spin dozens if not more man hours analyzing that finding out where the money went and if you come out with a story that explains why that's so important to your audience you've got to come up with pictures. as my first news director said t.v. without pictures is radio and nobody listens to the radio. but if you do the liquor store robbery story you talk to the cop you talk to the neighbors who are so sad to see one thought shopping as he is a college right so up you do it and you're done but your story is done inside and on for the four o'clock news inside of two hours you're done you've got the pretty pictures of the flowers and the candles in front of the store and it's done such

a good point i know this was brought up a lot after the two thousand election there wasn't time or money to really investigate what happened unfortunately you know i could talk about this for the next hour about we have time thanks so much communications director for the free press. and it's not just that journalists in this country are asked to tone it down like tank was in many cases they're fired and in still other case put in jail you're right you may remember hearing about josh what he was twenty four years old and was arrested for refusing to turn over a video he had shot at a g eight protest in san francisco back in two thousand and five josh spent two hundred twenty six days behind bars more time than any journalist in u.s. history for protecting his source as since his release he has remained a constant symbol for the many many of the injustices and lack of freedom of the press and he's now here on our t.v. to tell his story investigative journalist or. hey there josh i know it's it's been

a few years but give us the nuts and bolts of your story and how it has since played out so basically i started with a video blog that only these protests in the seventy's area started with anti-war demonstrations but covering at least brutality and the other issues and i found one protest that resulted in a police officer being injured you know i didn't see any embed incident at all but. what i was subpoenaed by the f.b.i. for were to appear in front of a grand jury and not only turned over the video that i had released yet but also turned but also testify about who was there that i knew and obviously there was concerns about doing that i try to have to subpoena aquash that was unsuccessful and book was called the reporter's privilege which is in essence saying that

reporters should have to testify about the material that they gathered because it basically turns them into an arm of the government at that point in time and this is an exception all. twenty one court in forty nine states prostitutes. in some way or another but instead a record you are very very limited in how you can invoke the reporter's privilege and it was eventually sent tsui federal detention center in northern california where he stayed for about seven months. you know it's really interesting because i when i was a young cub reporter back in savannah georgia we had the g. eight in sea island i can to thousand and four i covered a protest the story aired and within moments there was a knock on our door from a you know members of the homeland security department who wanted to know more about somebody that i interviewed a protester who actually was like making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they wanted to know where he was and they wanted to see the rest of the video as well luckily though and i know this happened has happened in the case of many other news

organizations my higher ups backed me up and said no we don't give away our raw video it's different though for freelance journalists i know that you i think at the time were working independently i know a lot of journalists who go to try to cover the war independently without being embedded run into some can some problems because they're working on their own talk a little bit about that and how you know sometimes it does help to have you know a large company fighting for you but it doesn't always get the right story out but i haven't heard any international war coverage at all but i certainly am aware the fact that if you're not going to embed the cost of doing reporting in a war zone like iraq afghanistan that cetera is tremendous because you have to provide your own security you have to write a translator and you have to i mean it's like a multimillion dollar operation and that's why only seeing stuff from behind the so on where they don't have to have that sort of expense or embedded reporting and

then when you are embodying you have this situation where you're expected to. you know these are guys that are protecting your life and that's going to shape the relationship and that's going to shape your reporting totally i want to get back to your situation a little bit here just because we do have you here we are in a country that promotes free press free speech and yet you spent time in jail a lot of time i wondering if this was just a sign of the time five years ago or if you think this is something that could still happen today i mean immediately after i was released from jail i started teaching for a federal shield law that was robust that included. video bloggers independent journalists freelancers and cetera. there was some progress that was made unfortunately it doesn't look like the climate is right for right now there is a lot of blow up following the wiki leaks situation obviously. so it definitely

could happen i know that there's a journalist by the last name of rice and who's potentially facing the same situation i was about source material certainly wasn't a protest that he was covering that point in time. so it definitely can still happen the culture forced the keening journalists seems like it may have changed a little bit but there's definitely those vulnerabilities and even in covering protests you see. u.c. berkeley where i just graduated from the journalism school i was faced with student conduct charges that hung over my head for eighteen months wow wow just covering it it's very very interesting and yet those parts i think we need people covering them to really understand where the rage is in this country i thank so much for speaking with us investigative journalist josh wolf. and just in case you're hungry for one more story about the media covering the media let's talk about rupert murdoch and his media empire and the firestorm spreading as

a rest and resignations continue this is questions are surfacing surrounding the death of journalist sean hoare and then credited with revealing the phone hacking scandal in the first place with another political scandal another whistleblower dies but is this all just coincidence r t correspondent laura emmett reports. another political scandal erupts another whistleblower diaries sure hall was the first former news of the world journalists to go on the record to allege that phone hacking was endemic at the paper and that its editor and he called for an actively encouraged it paul was found dead in his house on monday setting the blog a sphere into a frenzy of comparisons with the case of dr david kelly why isn't this sean hoare story bigger reminds me of how dr david kelly was bumped off a similar tragedies of shawn hornbeck kelli all this madness and have it can we shawn who are that's what i'm thinking something's not right dr kelly was pins

inspector who first cause doubts on the government's claim that iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within forty five minutes it led to scrutiny of tony blair's decision to invade iraq by extraordinary coincidence kelly's body was discovered exactly eight years before that of sean hall's on the eighteenth of july two thousand and three it was british journalist andrew gilligan who david kelly had spoken to to publicize his belief that the forty five minute claim had been exaggerated gilligan believes there are similarities between kelly and sean hoare being at the center of one of these storms a terrifying experience i really don't believe either david or sean hoare was murdered because. i simply don't think it would have been in anyone's interest to murder them once they got into the public spotlight any more with an iota of sense and government would have known that to kill them would just would just amplify the story i think it's simply i think both were under enormous pressure from their

roles as whistle blows and and found it difficult to cope with that pressure sean hoare was evidence could have been crucial to proving that the news of the world editors supported a culture of listening to private voice mails for stories former editor andy colson who later became a media director to the current. my minister has always denied the allegations and was destroyed professionally by using international the journalistic world in london is a very small planes and i was the story was well known. drinking too much taking drugs and. moralized police a thing called death doesn't appear suspicious and they're looking at suicide dr kelly's death was also recorded as suicide although many including leading doctors and m.p.'s have never accepted that their suspicions of hardly be quelled by the fact that most of reports and other evidence has been classified for seventy years

so ten arrests six resignations two convictions and one death that the toll of the phone hacking scandal so far that the key whistleblower scandal has raised questions but so far only a month twitter ossie it's being reported as a horrible and unfortunate coincidence but it's doubtful that if this had happened elsewhere say in russia or in india the british media would be so quick to accept it as a coincidence particularly looked at in the light of the death of david kelly you'll read it r.t. . well as debt ceiling talks continue here in washington d.c. we want if it is a little further away from the political bubble are some places so far beyond that they need an enormous jolt to be saved and are they somehow a symbol of how much worse things could be ahead r.t. correspondent ana start here checking out the story.

homes abandoned and haunted by poverty crime and uncertainty about tomorrow business is long out of luck on desolate street in the big apple's backyard just a quick ride from manhattan and i feel like we're living in a. kind of a bad dream where everybody has amnesia i mean here is new york living in the shadow of wall street the reason newark is facing budget cuts is because of a crash that was created manufactured distributed by wall street new jersey's largest city seen unemployment at around ten percent nearly one in four families are living below the poverty line. him from suarez a school bus driver a twenty eight he has little hope for the future there's really nobody. to go out to get they say. maybe to try back to go back to the

same school we knew were because notoriously crime rate despite this hard truth thirteen percent of the police force have been laid off due to a budget crisis high ranking officials in the police department resisted paid cuts so jobs went out the window they voted for layoffs and so they kept their salaries but a lot of the new york had to shrink its police force and murders went up by more than fifty percent compared to the same period last year as a result of locals protecting themselves the best way they know how like harry and ron are. probably and i. now room shooting stabbings broadway's and carjackings are a big part of life in newark this is a right. chad where this happened while. the city drug gang driver is a major cause of violence locals tell us that this is one of many areas in newark where people come to buy and sell drugs crime has become. such a big part of daily life here that much of the unlawfulness goes unnoticed and

under reported on the day archie was in the city several shootings took place one person died over a dozen were wounded something the situation is so out of control that the few police officers still on payroll just stop trying the same drugs every day it's very frightening but i don't do nothing for the. song just my habit ian says priorities have to change in your work he wants to leave the town and move away from all the drama to somebody like make a. left turn when the signal of the job or. they try to act big with. the people they need to really take off the streets to do that increase in pride isn't the only result of service cuts at her known days works in a pantry that has run out of funding it can't provide for those in need anymore we've been talking for years that in about two years we should be out of this

recession and then the third year we continue saying you know in about two more years we should be out of this recession it doesn't i least at this level it doesn't seem like it's changing it is getting worse as shelters experience hits to their budgets homelessness is visible in the city but those that cause the financial have moved on people are forgetting that the financial crisis actually caused these cutbacks that we're facing day to day and in a place like new york having to suffer more is really a crime that's the crime. decades ago new work was booming but this is no longer and not likely to change without a shift in political will. that's a politician on doing really what they're supposed to do governor christie for more example he doesn't really he's saying one thing but he does totally opposite this is madison avenue in new york. and this is madison avenue in new. across the river

from the big apple the city is barely staying afloat but it sure can archie newark new jersey. new york of course a prime example of what can happen to cities in this nation and there are countless more that illustrates an important part of the system that just aren't working well from our earlier article with karl denninger with the market ticker i asked him how there can be such a large disparity between the bustling streets of the big apple and the bet wasteland that is right across the river in new york been a very horse city for a long time i traveled through there twenty years ago and the decay was very obvious even at that point this eventually what's happened in these sorts of metropolitan areas is the cities of taking on more and more obligations without any reasonable way to fund them and eventually all which is what is now happening to work and so you are faced with not being able to make the payments to provide those essential services and they have to be cut back. i mean really and course carl here

we are based in washington and there's so much talk about on what will happen if we don't raise the debt ceiling at about defaulting and what this country will look like and guess what the narrative looks like that in certain areas in many areas in fact why do you think that this is kind of emblematic of on a larger scale. it's a question of making promises that you can't cheat and the elected officials are always prompted to make promises to various constituencies but they're not held to account for this fiscal sustainability of what they say they're going to do and we're running into it now at the national level with the debt ceiling debate with our list of how that gets resolved i doubt that you're going to see anything in terms of long term fiscal sustainability that's going to actually or who will we get through this in the washington d.c. case for today probably but in the longer term in the intermediate term we're going

to have more networks. and you know i heard what you said about elected life is officially not being held to account it's really hard to disagree with that but i think that there's so much more i mean let's look at wall street let's look at a lot of things and perhaps they do tied up tied back to elected officials but there are a lot of other factors here in terms of who is to blame when she say. yeah i think this fair you have to look at the. it's not just a you know i want to play the wealth disparity card but at the end of the day if you were to tracks all of the wealth of the top twenty five percent of americans you can close the debt problem the deficit seventeen hundred billion or one point but for about one year but then all of the money would be gone and the next year would come along you'd still have a seven hundred billion dollars deficit and fortunately all the rich aren't rich any more so we have to have a change in priorities and look at things from a different perspective what is it that we can actually provide what is it that the

we want the government to do for us in this country and what are we willing to pay taxes to support and some where those things have to be because they haven't so last thirty years and this is the result i mean i think there's a question karl that a lot of people and especially politicians from both sides of the aisle are asking the problem is they're not getting and unified answer you mentioned just a little while ago at the impact of all of this the impact of this continued behavior staying on this path will be many many many more new work what happened then. well there's no good solution we in two thousand some choices available to us that we're all to do you know where you feel short term economic pain to look at one twenty one example what happens if the government allows those contractions to take place and then in two thousand and seven we got much more pain to take and we decided to pay for it and knowledge twenty eleven and the.