The Nation

A Walmart worker on strike, October 4, 2012. (Flickr/Matt Hamilton)

On Wednesday, workers in at least 150 Walmart stores plan to confront local managers with demands for change in the retail giant’s scheduling system.

A sheriff's vehicle patrols the area around Steubenville High School. (Reuters/Jason Cohn)

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the Steubenville High School rape trial involving several members of the school’s storied football team wasn't the crime itself as much as everything that surrounded it. It was the fifty people who stood around and did nothing while an unconsious young woman was being carried around like a slab of beef. It was the adults in authority who seemed all too eager to push this under the rug until photos were displayed for the world to see and the justice system was shamed to act. It was those who threatened the life of the young woman for daring to press charges, requiring armed guards outside her family’s home.

Editors' Note: After a review, we've determined that this blog post overstates the role Blue Line Strategic Communications and its founders, Michael Meehan and David DiMartino, played in Clean Energy Works. A coalition comprised of dozens of NGOs, Clean Energy Works was founded in 2009 to campaign for the passage of climate change legislation. The organization was led by Democratic strategist Paul Tewes and a managing committee comprised of representatives from each of the participating groups, which collectively determined the coalition's priorities and strategies. Clean Energy Works subsequently hired several firms to work on the campaign, including Blue Line, which handled strategic communications. While Blue Line played a role in shaping the campaign's messaging, it neither managed Clean Energy Works nor was it in a position to unilaterally determine strategy, as the post suggests.

The post also leaves the impression that Michael Meehan worked for Clean Energy Works. While Meehan worked for groups that were part of the broader coalition, he did not work directly with Clean Energy Works. That account was handled by his partner David DiMartino. As Fang reported, Meehan was a vice president at Virilion, the digital media company that held a $19 million contract from American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Meehan maintains, however, that he never worked directly on the ACCCE account, which preceded his arrangement with Virilion, and had no financial stake in it. Both Meehan and DiMartino, who were not interviewed before publication, contacted The Nation to say that neither of them are registered lobbyists, as the post describes them, but rather communications professionals. They previously worked at BGR Public Relations, part of the BGR Group, which has lobbied on behalf of fossil fuel companies, although both Meehan and DiMartino maintain that they had no role in those efforts.

We stand by the post's contention that Meehan's work for Blue Line and Virilion—while Blue Line was coordinating communications strategy for Clean Energy Works in favor of climate legislation and Virilion was working to block the same bill—created an apparent conflict of interest. What is not supported by the evidence is that this conflict influenced Clean Energy Works' strategic decisions and ultimately contributed to the failure of the bill.  We apologize for the errors.

I’m still working on this week’s column, but didn’t want this to pass. Amid all of the millions of words of criticism of the media written or uttered in the past few days (including my own), the vast majority of them have focused on active missteps, errors, faux expertise, laughable pontificating and the rest, but little on serious omissions. So let’s note that Tom Brokaw, of all people, yesterday stepped in, if briefly, to provide some badly needed scene-setting, sounding more like Glenn Greenwald than a reasonable impression of himself.

Here’s the transcript, with video below:

I think that there’s something else that goes beyond the event that we’ve all been riveted by in the last week. We have to work a lot harder as a motivation here. What prompts a young man to come to this country and still feel alienated from it, to go back to Russia and do whatever he did—and I don’t think we’ve examined that enough? I mean, there was 24/7 coverage on television, a lot of newspaper print and so on, but we have got to look at the roots of all of this because it exists across the whole subcontinent, and the—and the Islamic world around the world. And I think we also have to examine the use of drones that the United States is involved—and there are a lot of civilians who are innocently killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. And I can tell you having spent a lot of time over there, young people will come up to me on the streets and say, we love America, but if you harm one hair on the head of my sister, I will fight you forever and there is this enormous rage against what they see in that part of the world as a presumptuousness of the United States.