Author: George Salamon

By GEORGE SALAMON// “What a senseless waste of human life.” Customer, played by John Cleese, in Monty Python’s Cheese Shop Sketch as he shoots the shop’s proprietor.

You wish President Obama were mocking the “senseless” part of the “senseless violence” phrase he applies relentlessly to past and current destruction of life. But he’s caught the virus and doesn’t seem to be aware that he has now dropped into his huge “senseless violence” grab bag of human horrors:

Now that the USA and the coalition of the hesitant are stumbling toward the objective, NBC reporter Elizabeth Chuck had good reason to wonder “Why the Obama administration keeps saying ‘degrade and destroy’.” White House press secretary Josh Earnest finds the phrase “brimming with meaning.” Chuck did not. The strategy of air strikes on the black-flagged beheaders of ISIL (or ISIS or just the Islamic State) seems to be “in tatters” according to the UK’s The Guardian. Has Chuck’s question received a good answer?

By GEORGE SALAMON// “Journalists have no choice but to fight back because if they don’t, they will become irrelevant.” James Risen, NYT investigative reporter
What are they supposed to fight against? Fellow journalist Lindsey Bever of the UK’s Guardian spelled it out: “Committing an act of journalism could soon become an imprisonable offense.” That’s so because Risen refused to name sources for his report on a botched CIA operation in Iran (in his 2006 book “State of War”) in court and may soon go to prison rather than “break his vow of confidentiality.”

By GEORGE SALAMON// Reporting on Israel-Palestine, especially during the August exchange of rocket attacks from Gaza and Israel’s bombing of the densely populated strip, drew criticism from supporters of one side and those on the other. Since declaration of the ongoing cease-fire, things are not improving. Both sides insist that reporting generally ignores the whole truth, especially the part they deem central to understanding the “real” issues at the root of the conflict. This is a case where critics are right much of the time.

By GEORGE SALAMON// “American society is a sort of flat, freshwater pond, which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.” Henry Adams

The great grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams would still be right today about America except for the “silently, without reaction” part. America reacted to the Ferguson shooting of African-American Michael Brown by a white Ferguson cop on August 9th in reams of newspaper comments and posts on internet blogs. The media responded as well, reporting and then analyzing accurately and thoroughly on a few occasions, hastily and mindlessly on many more. (Media coverage has been and continues to be assessed in the pages of GJR.)