Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles.<\/p>\n
We just started an online webpage:\u00a0Reporter\u2019s Alert<\/em><\/a>. From time to time, we will use\u00a0Reporter\u2019s Alert<\/em>\u00a0to present suggestions for important reporting on topics that are either not covered or not covered thoroughly. Reporting that just nibbles on the periphery won\u2019t attract much public attention or be noticed by decision-makers. Here is the second installment of suggestions:<\/p>\n 1. In recent years we have read about massive hacking of major databases at major retail chains (Target etc.), the federal civil service, national security agencies, credit card companies, and the list goes on. Tens of millions of people have had their personal files invaded by these mostly unknown remote hackers. These reports are accompanied by grave warnings of forthcoming untold damage to privacy, business propriety information, workplace labor information, and secret government databases.<\/p>\n Yet, with the passage of time, we are not informed about what, if any, grave consequences materialized, even with the warnings about many forthcoming identity thefts. How about some follow-ups to these announcements of big hacking?<\/p>\n 2. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were knowledgeable estimates that, at the very least, some 5000 people on average died in U.S. hospitals\u00a0every week<\/em>\u00a0due to \u201cpreventable problems\u201d in these institutions. Not included in this Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine peer-reviewed study (2016) were the preventable casualties from clinics and doctors\u2019 offices. When the Johns Hopkins report came out, it was a one-day story, (not on the front page), in\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. There was neither follow up from the media nor from Congressional or state legislative bodies. Medical Associations, such as the AMA, scarcely blinked. There were some resolutions encouraging staff to wash their hands to reduce infections. Some hospitals emphasized this simple measure. Otherwise, 250,000 fatalities a year \u2013 a conservative figure by the authors \u2013 was relegated to \u201cold news,\u201d rather than opening all kinds of media-driven doors.<\/p>\n 3. If you asked a reporter or editor: \u201cWho owns the bulk of the wealth in America?\u201d Chances are the response would be the top \u201cten percent.\u201d A more specific response might be that a dozen of the richest Americans own more wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% of American people. The subject is\u00a0private.<\/em>\u00a0What if the question was \u201cWho owns the most wealth of all kinds \u2013\u00a0private<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0public?<\/em>\u201d The answer would be the people. They own trillions of dollars in pension, mutual funds, and personal savings. They own the enormous \u201ccommons,\u201d the public lands (one-third of America, not counting offshore), the public airwaves, and should own the intellectual property created by huge R&D grants from the federal government to build most of the newer industries, and so on.<\/p>\n Why should the reality that corporations\u00a0control<\/em>\u00a0most of what people\u00a0own,<\/em>\u00a0either directly or indirectly through indentured governments, take away from the deeper reality that\u00a0ownership<\/em>\u00a0of, by, and for the people gets so little attention and therefore little deliberation about what we can do to restore\u00a0control<\/em>\u00a0to the people of what they\u00a0own?\u00a0<\/em>What might result from this overdue merger of\u00a0ownership<\/em>\u00a0with\u00a0control<\/em>\u00a0in a democratic society?<\/p>\n 4. The largest single discretionary spending budget in the federal government is that of the Department of Defense. Yet, the Pentagon has gotten away with violating federal law. The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 requires all government departments and agencies to provide Congress\u2212the Government Accountability Office (GAO)\u2212with auditable data. Auditors said the DOD FY2018 auditors could not express an opinion on the financial statements because the financial information was not sufficiently reliable. Given all the GAO and DOD audits of waste, fraud, and abuse in DOD\u2019s contracting history, defying Congress and the law here should be a matter of continual media reporting. The DOD budget accounts for more than half the operating budget of the U.S. government. Secretaries of Defense always promise to produce audits, but outside of a costly audit of the Marine budget one year, promises have not been kept.<\/p>\n 5. Here\u2019s one gigantic story in plain sight afflicting many millions of elderly people seduced into the Medicare [Dis]advantage plan. This corporatization of Medicare by giant health insurance companies keeps getting bigger every year. Now about 40% of Medicare beneficiaries, aided and abetted by both Parties in Congress and exploited by AARP, and some labor unions (SEIU) automatically enroll their retirees without first giving them a choice to go with traditional Medicare. As one knowledgeable physician declared about the glossily promoted deception of Medicare Advantage, \u201cIt\u2019s not what you pay, it\u2019s what you get.\u201d Not to mention we are subsidizing Medicare [Dis]advantage plans at the expense of taxpayers and traditional Medicare beneficiaries. Trapdoors are pervasive in Medicare [Dis]advantage plans \u2013 starting with narrow networks and hassling when people get sick, prior authorization hurdles, and obstacles to returning to traditional Medicare. Deceptive promotions and advertisements go unrebutted by the FTC, progressive members of Congress, AARP, and the media that carry deceptive Medicare [Dis]advantage ads. This erosion of traditional Medicare provides Aetna and UnitedHealthcare with windfall profits. See Dr. John Geyman\u2019s books (http:\/\/www.johngeymanmd.org\/<\/a>) 6. Congress, busy increasingly over recent decades in abdicating its constitutional powers to the Presidency and Executive Branch, has created an impressive record of\u00a0government by waivers<\/em>. Congress tells the Executive what it shall do, then inserts \u201cwaiver\u201d rights without standards. This lets the White House get away with unbridled power to escape the legislative intent of statutes. (Trump really exploited these exits).<\/p>\n Waivers are declared in the thousands every year \u2013 waivers from tariffs, waivers from arms sales, waivers from reports, from varieties of law enforcement actions, and so forth. Waivers create new lobbying businesses and invite corruption, favoritism, and the privileges of the big boys over the little guys. For example, in 2020, Apple got a tariff waiver from the US Trade Representative on paying a 7.5 percent duty on Apple Smart Watches imported from China. A key to abuses here is the absence of adequate boundaries (standards) or oversight by Congress.<\/p>\n The post Reporters\u2019 Alert: Launching a New Website Part II<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles. We just started an online webpage:\u00a0Reporter\u2019s Alert. From time to time, we will use\u00a0Reporter\u2019s Alert\u00a0to present suggestions for important reporting on topics More<\/a><\/p>\n The post Reporters\u2019 Alert: Launching a New Website Part II<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90863,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90862\/revisions\/90863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}