Today in Totally Not Terrorism

[Trigger warning for anti-choice terrorism.]

There are a lot of things that don't get called terrorism in this country, but chief among them is the anti-choice movement, which is the most brazen, unapologetic terrorist campaign in the US, its co-ordination and orchestration done right out in the open, where no one in the media or politics will call it what it is. It is an inherently violent ideology, backed by a decades-long campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence directed at abortion providers and abortion seekers, that is ignored by one party and mainstreamed as a central plank of its party platform by the other.

Tuesday night, in McKinney, Texas, another Planned Parenthood clinic was the target of another incident of Totally Not Terrorism, during which, fortunately, no one was physically injured:

A heavy glass door is all that stood between damaging flames threatening a family planning clinic in McKinney and an arsonist's sights.

McKinney police and fire crews responded to a small fire that broke out around 10:05 p.m. Tuesday at the front door of the Planned Parenthood clinic, located in a block of stories in the 1700 block of Eldorado Parkway, clinic, police and fire officials confirmed on Wednesday.

...Holly Morgan, director of communications for Planned Parenthood of North Texas in Dallas, said the person or persons involved in the attack threw a Molotov cocktail, consisting of diesel fuel in a glass bottle with a lit rag, at the clinic's front door.

...The incident is also unique because the McKinney location does not provide surgical procedures or abortions for their approximately 4,000 clients, Morgan said.

"It's an all-preventive care location: well-woman visits, breast and cervical cancer screenings, birth control," she said. "They don't provide legal safe abortions, only preventive care."

This shit doesn't happen in a void. Now even clinics that are providing exclusively preventative care to women are being targeted by terrorists because of the incendiary rhetoric of Republicans across the nation who demonize abortion, demonize abortion providers and abortion seekers, and mendaciously frame Planned Parenthood as an abortion mill.

As an interesting side note, the original URL at which this story appears to have been located now takes you to a story about a local town winning an award for online financial transparency. That story also appears in their Most Popular, Most Emailed, and Most Commented sections, which seems wildly unlikely given the content.

The mysterious switcheroo happened after Ben Armbruster linked to it from Think Progress. (I mentioned it to him this morning, and now his piece has been updated with the correct link, which he also helpfully provided to me.) Naturally, I can certainly imagine how and why such a mysterious switcheroo might have happened, although I'm quite certain such expressions of cynicism would be resoundingly dismissed as the fantastic hysteria typical of people who write about Lady Business.

Today in Rape Culture

[Trigger warning for sexual violence, rape culture, police malfeasance.]

Despite NYC police and prosecutors' insistence that Jerry Ramrattan, a man who framed his ex-girlfriend for armed robbery as revenge for reporting that he had raped her, is some kind of criminal mastermind, and despite the New York Times' valiant attempt to sell that framing, it is manifestly apparent that Ramrattan is just your run-of-the-mill vindictive wankstain who paid off a couple of dudes and a woman willing to play roles in his misogynist scheme in exchange for the (false) promise of getting something they wanted.

I guess making Ramrattan out to be some sort of Danny Ocean is easier than admitting they held a rape victim behind bars for seven months because her rapist exploited their inclination to believe it was more likely that a successful businesswoman was randomly robbing strangers than that her boyfriend raped her.

I don't guess I need to point out the irony that Ms. Sumasar was evidently presumed of making false charges while her ex-boyfriend's stooges were making false charges against her. Two men who had not even been robbed easily convinced the police they had been, while Ramrattan is only now being charged with rape, after he was discovered to have framed his victim of armed robbery.

[H/T to Shaker Beth_in_Mpls. Previously on the New York Times' appalling coverage of sexual violence: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.]

News Corp-Owned Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton Steps Down

The News Corp phone-hacking scandal continues to unfold with Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, who has worked for Rupert Murdoch for nearly 50 years (!) and was chairman of News International when the allegations of phone-hacking were first made, resigning today.

Dow Jones & Co. is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which covers the story here with a bit more integrity than Murdoch's garbage news network.

This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Trigger warning for rape culture.]

On Monday, I mentioned that Jamie Leigh Jones, the Halliburton/KBR employee who reported being gang-raped by her co-workers, only to then be held hostage by her employer, and who had to fight through an absurd stipulation in her employment contract that required sexual assault allegations be addressed by private arbitration in order to take the case to court, lost her civil rape case against Charles Boartz and KBR.

As you may recall, one of the good things to come out of this nightmare was the passage of Senator Al Franken's anti-rape amendment to last year's Defense Appropriation bill, which stipulates that the US Defense Department must withhold defense contracts from private contractors "if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court."

When Franken first introduced the amendment, Jones said: "It means the world to me. It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it."

Cue Mother Jones with an extraordinarily absurd article headlined: "How the KBR Rape Verdict Undermines Al Franken's Contracting Law."

According to author Stephanie Mencimer, Jones having lost her case threatens the law because Franken's amendment must be renewed annually as an amendment to the defense budget. And now that Jones' case was lost, there's less incentive to support the law.

Huh? So because one woman lost her case, legislators should/will decide that no woman should have the right to have her day in court? Does not compute.

Of course, I don't think that logic is the point here. The concern trolling about the safety of Franken's law seems like a contrived justification for Mencimer's real objective, which is to deliver some thinly veiled contempt for Jones ostensibly on behalf of survivors: "[I]t's hard to see how bringing—and then losing—a dubious rape case in civil court is a win for victims of sexual assault. If anything, Jones' case, in which she asked the jury to award her $145 million, will make it even more difficult for sexual assault victims to have their claims taken seriously."

So Jones is just a gold-digging opportunist with a "dubious" rape case whose unmitigated temerity to lose her civil rape case has now made it "even more difficult" for survivors to be believed.

And this is about concern for Franken's law. Sure.

You know, I don't believe that a complainant losing a case in a culture so steeped in rape culture narratives that winning is nigh impossible makes things more difficult for survivors.

I do, however, believe that reporters sneering at survivors who lost and making thinly veiled accusations that they're lying, money-hungry whores is precisely the sort of thing that renders justice elusive for most survivors of sexual violence.

Q: How hard is it to boycott Rupert Murdoch?

A: Pretty hard, if you're someone "who consumes media of any kind in today's world."

Note that that's a "heavily abridged" list. Yikes.

Actual Headline

"Fatties R Us: Washington obesity rate nearly doubles."
While "fatties" is certainly a word that many fat activists use in a reclaimative or ironic way, that is quite evidently not the way the word is being used here.

The story also contains the charming line: "Washington also out-fatted nearby states."

Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

[H/T to Erica.]

The UK's Phone-Hacking Scandal, and Why You Should Care About It (Plus Teaspooning)

So, as you may—or may not, for reasons that will become evident—have heard, there is an exploding phone hacking scandal in Britain, comprehensive coverage of which by the Guardian can be found here. The broadest gist is that a British tabloid hired a private investigator to hack into the voicemail boxes of famous or otherwise newsworthy people—and, in at least one particularly awful case, the voicemails of a murdered girl were deleted. More on that in a moment.

Although this happened in Britain (and only in Britain so far as we know), it's also an important story for the US and elsewhere, too, because the tabloid at the center of the story is the News of the World, which is owned by the UK subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the same company that owns Fox in the US.

Shaker Richard Gadsden, who's a UK-based Shaker, put together a great summary of the phone-hacking scandal and its history, which I am publishing with his permission. First, some background:

Mobile phones (cellphones) have voicemail. You can access the voicemail from any other phone by dialing the call centre and putting in the phone number of the mailbox you want and the PIN. Unless the user has positively selected a PIN when they set up the phone, the PIN defaults to 0000 or 1111, depending on the network. Most people only ever call their voicemail from their own phone, and they don't need the PIN to get in from their own phone, so they never find out that the PIN even exists.

A Private Investigator, called Glenn Mulcaire, discovered that he could listen to the voicemails left for well-known people by calling into the call centre and putting in the right PIN. (It is believed that a number of other PIs were doing the same for other newspapers, but this has never been proven.)

He started selling the recordings he took of the voicemails to the News of the World, a tabloid newspaper here in the UK, owned by News International (the UK subsidiary of News Corp, which is the Murdoch media empire, including Fox in the US, and Sky here in the UK).

This originally came out in 2006, when it was found that he'd gained access to the voicemails of members of the Royal family; there was a police investigation at the time, Mulcaire and Clive Goodman (royal editor of the NoW at the time) were arrested and served time in prison. The editor at the time, Andy Coulson was sacked.

Fast forward three years, and Andy Coulson, after having become Director of Communications for the Conservative party, is now Director of Communications for the Prime Minister. The story might have died altogether, were it not for the fact that a 2009 Guardian investigation uncovered evidence of police malfeasance.

Back to Richard:

In 2009, the Guardian discovered that the police had ignored evidence collected from Mulcaire that lots of other people had been "phone-hacked", had not informed hundreds of other victims (including senior politicians and journalists at other newspapers). This became a political scandal, especially because [of Andy Coulson's prominent position in the Prime Minister's office]. There was a Select Committee enquiry, and a number of out-of-court settlements between NoW and alleged phone-hacking victims.

One of the reasons that the story continued in 2010 was that [the actress] Sienna Miller refused any out-of-court settlement with a confidentiality clause and insisted on extensive discovery in the courts; the other main reason was that the New York Times investigated it and found more connections between Andy Coulson as (then) editor and the scandal, which resulted in him resigning as Director of Communications on 21 January 2011.

The police have now restarted their investigation - it seems that they deliberately down-played the investigation originally because they have a close relationship with the NI papers that they didn't want to damage - but they started arresting people in bunches (at which point Sienna Miller accepted an out-of-court settlement as it looked like the facts were coming out anyway).

Again, the story may have effectively died here, as a shady tabloid unethically digging into celebrities' private lives is terrible, but sadly not particularly shocking. And, the wheels of justice seemed to be turning.

But the phone-hacking was even worse than it originally appeared.

On Monday, the Guardian published a heartbreaking update on the scandal in which it was revealed that the News of the World's private investigator, the aforementioned Glenn Mulcaire, had, in 2002, hacked into the voicemail of a missing 13-year-old girl named Milly Dowler, who had been, it was later discovered, murdered by a man named Levi Bellfield, who was convicted and sentenced to life last month for murdering Milly.

Mulcaire did not stop at merely listening to the messages on Milly's phone, though. From the Guardian's Monday piece:

As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word.

But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly's voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.

The Dowler family then granted an exclusive interview to the News of the World in which they talked about their hope, quite unaware that it had been falsely kindled by the newspaper's own intervention.

Truly contemptible, just an absolute abdication of even the merest traces of decency.

Naturally, the deletion of the voicemails not only gave Milly's family false hope; it also interfered with the police investigation.

Back to Richard:

This has now broken the story from the media pages onto the front pages of the newspapers, and much higher up the public consciousness.

In rapid succession, a number of other high-profile victims of crime have been found in the Mulcaire files - the victims of the Soham murders (another pair of young abducted girls) and some of the 7/7 victims too.

It's just beyond the beyond. I spent last night reading a ton of coverage of the phone-hacking, and it just left me feeling light-headed with revulsion and what I can only describe as dismay, though the word seems insufficient, at the entitlement, the callousness, the chilling lack of empathy which led to these actions.

And I fear that we have yet seen only the tip of this decidedly grim iceberg.



What we can do in response, however, is lift our teaspoons. Richard notes that advertisers have started pulling their ads from News of the World, and suggests: "One useful teaspoon would be to write to those advertisers and ask them to pull advertising from all News Corp owned media world-wide. Ford, as the first advertiser to pull out of NotW, would be a good one to start with, as they are big sponsors of Sky TV in the UK and of a number of Fox TV properties over there. Hitting the entire Murdoch empire, rather than just one newspaper (which they could just close down and then relaunch under a new name) would achieve far more in driving to some kind of responsible journalism."

For US Shakers, here's a list of Fox News sponsors here, for a start.

And here is a sample letter, which you are free to borrow in whole or in part:

Dear Fox News Advertiser,

I am writing to inform you that I will not purchase your products as long as you continue to advertise on Fox News.

As you are certainly aware, Fox News is a property of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the UK subsidiary of which is deeply embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal in which his employees engaged in profoundly unethical ways, and, in least one case, possibly criminal ways, by interfering with a police investigation of a missing teenage girl. Nonetheless, Murdoch continues to stand behind those employees.

Your advertising dollars are supporting irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous journalism, abroad and very likely at home, too.

I urge you to stop advertising on Fox News immediately.

Sincerely,
[Name]

Please feel welcome and encouraged to leave in comments other ideas for teaspooning and/or additional advertisers in global Murdoch properties for contact.

My thanks to Richard for his valuable contributions to this piece.

Whoooooooooops

Whoops, CNN! Your article is about how companies "must proactively work to create a workplace culture that matches their workplace policies" and create a workplace environment that is LGBTQI-friendly not just "by policies but by the attitudes and behaviors of mid-level managers and co-workers."

But your headline is: "Why gays should come out at work."

Nope!

In Which Scatx and I Talk About Some Stuff

[Trigger warning for misogyny and violence. Emails in which we discuss media reactions to the new book by Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, have been shared with Scatx's permission.]

Scatx: I'm sure you are all over this like peanut butter on toast, but just in case: Ross Douthat's newest column, "160 Million and Counting." Why, New York Times, do you pay this man? WHY? Best part: The bottom where it says, "Paul Krugman is off today." I think we can ALL see that.

Liss: Have you seen this one? Jonathan Last in the Wall Street Journal: "The War Against Girls." Very interesting (by which I mean NOT INTERESTING AT ALL) that there are dudes using this book (which is purportedly NOT anti-choice) to make anti-choice arguments. Anyway, I hope men keep talking about this, so they can tell us ladies what to do!

Scatx: Wow—I can't even bring myself to read all of that. Skimming made me want to barf on my shoes. I feel for the author of the book—the WSJ guy makes it clear that she knows that her writing about this will be used by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Also: The colonialism of this whole thing is so problematic. The blatant disregard for systemic misogyny (which is, you know, a product of systemic misogyny). Seeing abortion as the problem instead of a symptom of larger inequalities and prejudices. I just don't even know how to think through all the elements at play. Of course, there was that new Gallup poll showing that, here in the US, we still love having baby boys more than we love having baby girls, just like in 1941 (when abortion was illegal). I'm sure that won't get the same level of press from anti-choice advocates that they love to give to India and China. GAH!

Liss: There's an article by Ujala Sehgal at The Atlantic that makes the point about cultural double-standards pretty well. And then there's the issue of infanticide, which is being conveniently left out of some of the posts who want to attribute "unnatural selection" exclusively to the West "exporting abortion technology." P.S. Here's another dude talking about it! Wheeeeeeeeeee!

Scatx: I was wondering about infanticide (I have written on it as a historian of the colonial period and remember studying it back when I was going to be a classicist). I just went to a huge women's history conference and was on a panel about it. It was interesting because there is (and always has been) so much infanticide in societies where contraception is limited or unavailable and slut-shaming and/or "bastard"-shaming is rampant. It is obvious to me that even if we were suddenly to all agree that abortion is morally wrong, it will NEVER stop. Nothing in history ever has shown that making abortion illegal will stop it. Nothing. Ever. Not paying attention to that kind of history, that overwhelming and in-your-face reality that we can see across millennia, boggles my brain to no end. The only way to end the boys-over-girls problem is for people to stop thinking that there is something better about boys. That's it.

Liss: Absolutely. And, of course, for us—the collective us, the global us—to stop actually providing material benefits to being a boy or having a boy. Plus all the other stuff that's wrapped up in the gender binary, and in the heterocentrism that hears "it's a boy" and axiomatically thinks "he'll have a wife," and in the poverty and lack of education and void of female role models and religiosity that feed gender prejudices and and and… I see why it's easy to say "damn feminists and their abortion exporting!" becomes such an easy refrain in lieu of embracing a vast challenge with such a complicated array of interrelated solutions.

Scatx: Plus, this bullshit of "we are against abortion to protect GIRLS" is so infuriating. Grown women literally can't be less of this story. Is there ANY other way for them to write pregnant ADULTS out?

Liss: Probably.

[H/T to Shaker Bonny_Swan for the WSJ piece.]

That's Your Liberal Media

In Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas' 4000-plus-word essay "My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant" in this week's New York Times Magazine, he used the term "illegal immigrant" exactly once. He placed scare quotes around the term to refer to the racism that undocumented immigrants to the United States face.

Presumably, that racism includes CNN.com's coverage, which used the term "illegal immigrant" four times in its 570-word-long analysis of Vargas' essay. CNN filed its piece under the title "Pulitzer Prize winner: I'm an illegal immigrant".

Just FYI.