Greg Mitchell | The Nation

For the past month, in a change of direction, I’ve written mainly weekly, media-related “columns” here, as opposed to the daily, shorter, “blog” posts that I produced for the three years previous. Going forward, starting this week, I’ll be mixing it up, with both full-length pieces and shorter takes. The following falls in the latter category.

It’s a flawed film, but I’m surprised that not a single writer here has explored The Company You Keep, directed by (and starring) Robert Redford. It portrays several Weather Underground members who became fugitives after a bank guard was killed in one of their robbery attempts. I saw it a couple of days ago and was glad I did.

Of course, I am a veteran of political activism in the late-’60s and early-’70s, but beyond that, the story has a local angle for me. I happen to presently live about a mile from where the incident that inspired the movie (via a novel) took place: the infamous “Brinks Holdup” near Nyack, New York. that resulted in the death of a Brinks guard and two local police officers. I drive by the memorial to them almost every day. The local post office is named after the two slain cops.

In the past five days, millions of words have been written and spoken relating to media mistakes and failures in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings. So far relatively little has emerged concerning the even more deadly explosion in West, Texas, last Wednesday. But now, in an interview this week, one of the leading government “whistleblowers” of the past four decades, who still (somehow) holds his job, has sharply criticized the lack of deep media probing of the Texas disaster—and the alleged “lies” in key Reuters and New York Times articles.

Managers of the West Fertilizer plant that ignited, killing at least fourteen (with others still missing), mainly first responders, should face a federal grand jury “but you can’t get to that if the media won’t even give people the facts—and in the case of the Times and Reuters, have given people false facts,” says Hugh B. Kaufman, a senior analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency since the 1970s. He also criticizes a new Huffington Post report but does praise some other reporting.

“Don’t forget, unlike Hurricane Sandy, this is a man-made disaster,” Kaufman declares. “The bottom line is: It’s a law enforcement, criminal violations issue, that resulted in needless loss of life. These guys in Texas broke the criminal statutes of the United States, but the media and Texas politicians are pretending it’s a regulatory policy issue. It’s like Alice in Wonderland—or maybe Dallas in Wonderland.”

As you may have heard, right-wing pundits, and some in the mainstream, are accusing the “liberal media” of covering up the sensational case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, whose horror show of crimes at his abortion clinic should have (they claim) drawn repeated news coverage and commentary. Ross Douthat of The New York Times on Sunday went so far as use it as a prime example of the dangers of (allegedly) liberal reporters and editors increasingly pushing a certain social agenda—in this case, pro-choice.

It all started last week when Fox News’ Kirsten Powers for USA Today described the gruesome case, which has just gone to trial—Gosnell, 72, is charged with murdering seven infants and a pregnant woman—and charged that news outlets were deliberately ignoring it. She wondered why they acted outraged when Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke but not over a murderous abortion doc.

Her conclusion? "The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace." Both Breitbart.com and the National Review dubbed it a "blackout."

[Note: This is my first weekly column after three years of daily blogging.]

Alex Gibney’s much-anticipated film, We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks, will not hit theaters until the end of May and already it’s a media sensation. Of course, WikiLeaks really was always about the media (for example, I live-blogged revelations and responses for nearly 200 consecutive days here). Gibney summed up the reaction for me earlier this week: “My view, while biased, is: The response from people who’ve seen the film has been mainly positive and from those who haven’t, mainly negative.”

In the latter camp are Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, and several key allies, such as writer/filmmaker John Pilger. They claim they’ve seen a (what else?) “leaked” script but Gibney has some doubts about that. Even if they do have it, Gibney points out, they should know that words on a transcript are not a film, which you have to “see” and experience. And he adds: “I don’t consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker. So even if you saw a  transcript—the point of a  film is that people can see it. It’s how the story is presented. Pilger should know that since he’s a filmmaker."