Why do ‘Liberal Media’ Go So Easy on Bush?
We saw another example last week of the double standard that permeates so much of America’s media these days, the media that so many conservatives claim are “too liberal.”
A sneak peek at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that virtually every bigwig in the Bush administration passed along lies about who was involved in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame — including the president himself.
McClellan in 2003 stood at the White House press room podium and said that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby, the two most senior aides to George Bush and Dick Cheney, had anything to do with leaking to several members of the press that Plame was an undercover CIA agent. She was exposed in an apparent retaliation for a guest column her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written for the New York Times, claiming that Bush had lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address.
As it later turned out, not only was Bush’s speech a lie, but McClellan’s defense of Rove and Libby was also an outright lie. McClellan’s memoir, to be published next spring, claims that five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in his telling that lie to the press and the rest of the nation: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.
But the McClellan excerpts got little play last week in our so-called anti-George Bush liberal media.
Contrast that with what would have undoubtedly happened had the president been Bill Clinton.
Not only would Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have begun a 24/7 feeding frenzy, but every TV network and big city daily newspaper would have carried major stories about the president being fingered in another lie.
Wisconsin’s own intellectual giant of a congressman, James Sensenbrenner, would have insisted on the House Judiciary Committee calling for an investigation that would surely lead to impeachment proceedings.
They did all that, after all, when Bill Clinton was caught lying about messing around with a White House intern. Had Bill Clinton lied his way into starting a war and then instructed his press secretary to tell the American people lies about underhanded dealings by his staff, the Washington politicians and the national press would have run the man out of town on a rail.
Perhaps this administration has lied to the American people so many times that it doesn’t qualify as news anymore.
But, I say again, if a president can be impeached for lying about an extramarital affair, then why aren’t we impeaching a president who lied to his country to start a war that is soon to have lasted five long years?
Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times.
Copyright ©2007, Capital Newspapers.
I have often wondered what kind of ‘hand shakes’ have occurred between the Bush administration and some of the big press agencies. What could Bush and company offer a news organization in return for not revealing the truth? Can anyone with insight into this kind of ‘look the other way’ media coverage help us out here?
“Perhaps this administration has lied to the American people so many times that it doesn’t qualify as news anymore.”
After Michael Powell finished creating the NeoCon’s version of the Ministry of Truth I unpluged my TV and tuned my shortwave set to Canada and the BBC. Should I ever want American Propaganda (AP) there is always the old Movietone News at the public library…
So why does the liberal media go so easy on Bush? The article doesn’t answer the question!
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens’ groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.
“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.
“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”
“That’ll do it,” the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
· Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html
The answer is: the majority of the MSM is owned by the very, wealthy, elite and they are for the most part very conservative. The reporters and columinists that work for them know the economic, parameters if they want to stay employed even though they may not agree. THE MOST EGREGIOUS LIE: THE MSM IS LIBERAL!
I believe it has been reported that the Bushits denied access to any press conferences and froze any person or group out unless they toadied to the administration. Was it rotten? Yes, but it worked for them as they never fail to ostrasize or punish anyone who does not go along. That is the new way that comes from having a hard right fundamentalist in control. I guess he learned that kind of behaviour by reading scripture and praying regularly as he claims to do. Apparently someone tore out all of the teachings of his favorite philosopher, Jesus, from his book.
manifestos should be spread out over several boxes. otherwise bleariness sets in. just a suggestion!
Same thing that keeps Congress in check: allegiance to class, protection of and deference to wealth as the class according exclusive respect and authority.
It is the real world scenario behind the widely broadcast mythology of the American Dream which includes: wealth and success are the result of hard work, sacrifice, blahblahblah and if you are poor you are a failure, a lazy bum, not worthy, blahblahblah, which simplistically legitimizes blaming those without as deserving of their lot without taking into account the variety of variables that serve to impede or deny or exploit others lack of opportunity.
Re:What could Bush and company offer a news organization in return for not revealing the truth?
All mainstream media organizations depend on massive ad fees to stay in business. For example we have all seen million dollar commercials for Exxon or Shell on T.V. Yet any marketing agent will tell you that none of those ads will inspire a single consumer to run out and request Exxon or Shell gasoline. Gasoline purchases after all, are based on two primary factors; price and convenience. However the infusion of so much cash into the media via these pro-Bush corporations allow them to exercise tremendous influence over the media content.
Another example that comes to mind was a Newsweek edition that covered the “10 biggest medical breakthroughs”. Not surprisingly nine out of ten ‘breakthroughs’ were drugs whose manufacturers advertise heavily in Newsweek. So rather than stating some obvious health advice such as ‘don’t eat fast food, buy organic and avoid Coke’ the message was ‘eat anything you like because there is a convenient drug to solve the unhealthy side effects of your choices’.
Finally, networks posing as ‘news organizations’, side track Americans from real issues such as poverty, the War in Iraq, wages, environmental degradation, etc. with non-political, hyped up, media created diversions such as the O.J. Simpson trial or some missing child, stories that are corporate friendly. In effect the media spoon feeds us with stories that don’t threaten the status quo.
The only way to avoid this, is to have a news organization that is not dependent on expensive corporate ads, something that hasn’t occurred in the U.S. to date.
I had an epiphany the other day that changed my entire thinking about who I should be focusing my energy on hating these days, and it ties in directly with this article. The MSM are the ones who are really controlling this country. Think about it. The last step in there lust for power happened with the 1997 Telecommunications Act that allowed for massive centralization of media power.
Think about it, 99% of what is being watched on TV, or listened to on the Radio, is owned by an oligopoly of 3 or 4 companies, all owned by the mega-wealthy conservative elite.
After all, it was the media that really played up the lewinsky affair, not letting the public forget about it, and pounding Clinton on a daily basis. They made him a lame duck for the last 2 years of his Presidency and paved the way for Bush to run on the “moral majority” ticket.
And to take it even further, when it was apparent that Gore had actually won in 2000, the media manipulated the facts to make it seem like Bush was the rightful winner, and Gore was being the sore loser.
They own the information, so they can bend the will of the people all they want.
Bush is their puppet, Hillary will be their puppet. She is obviously the candidate the the MSM is trying to prepare us to accept as the next president.
For example, why are News stations allowed to show polling numbers that supposedly show which candidate is “in the lead”
Those polls are only meant to scew voter opinion towards the candidate the media want to portray as “being in the lead” If someone was thinking of voting for Kucinich, they won’t now because they think it will be a throw away vote. Congress should pass a law forbidding these “polls” from being shown prior to election. The only purpose they serve is to screw voters towards specific candidates whom the MSM has already chosen to be front runners.
In my opinion, the progressive movement in this county is directly tied to the internet. I would love to see a study that shows how voting patterns are effected by the concentration of internet access in a certain area. I would be willing to bet that areas that vote conservative are places where most people are still getting all their information from the Television. AND THEY ARE TRYING TO TAKE THE INTERNET AWAY FROM US. WE CAN’T LET THEM DO IT.
In my opinion, the interent progressive movement in the US is filled with way too much in fighting about which candidate is the most “pure”. The powers that be know that they don’t have to worry about the progressive movement because we are not all mobilized behind one candidate. I know that Dennis Kucinich will be a good president, but being realistic, I don’t think that enough of the progressive movement will vote for him for it to make a difference, and most of those votes will be taken away from whoever is Hillary’s closest opponent at the time.
We all need to stand together and work to beat Hillary, because she is obviosly the new media darling. And I truely believe that Obama is that best chance. He may not be perfect, but we cannot let the Media choose the winner again.
The 4th Estate is chronically spooked by the GOP’s Dirtier Birds. It was evident at the tables in the Opulated Belly of the Beast when Stephen Colbert, instead of the picnic-issued ‘plastic knife’”understanding” proceeded instead to weild what John Stewart called a “ballsilicious” satiric rapier –such that Bush was said to be livid & Laura refused to even shake Colbert’s hand afterwards. Some over-pampered Washington Postpoodle then took Colbert to task for being a “bully”. A “bully”. Imagine! Poor BRING-em-on. They all chortled when the “mock-search” went ‘neath the tables for WMD two years before. This time, tho, you could see as audience flowed through the pan-frame the hasty no-brainer-bud-nip of any “serious laughter” because the M$M High Command was seated among their hi-6 producers & 7-figure newslebrity meatpuppets. The Honchos of course were NOT amused; all those Mergers & NeoConglommerations potentially on the line, nothing that drew Nero’s blood could be “funny”. Whereas the Nation, on the other hand, had something of a different take indeed.
Sheila Samples turned to Gore’s treatment by corporate press to expose similarly abject failures of professional nerve & duty.
Check this link:
http://sheilasamples.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/the-last-founder-standing/#comment-452
Corporate funding and control of the MSM masks a more fundamental issue of morals. The focus of morality for most in this country (try an informal poll) is personal, as opposed to an inclusive morality that balances the obligations, rights, and responsibilities, of both the individual and social collective.
The MSM reflects the above moral bias (stagnation?). This is why it vilifies acts such as Bill Clinton lying about an affair, and portrays Bush & Co. lying for political gain as “part of the game.”
Unless the concept of morality progresses among the populace, we will continue to let people take us to war as an instrument of policy, or let them get away with abusing power to silence dissent, or think that it is okay for a CEO to draw a salary that is 500 times that of the average worker, etc.
scaredhippie:
“And I truely believe that Obama is that best chance. He may not be perfect, but we cannot let the Media choose the winner again.”
What?! You don’t think the media have chosen him too?!
“The best chance”? Of what? Same old, same old only with a new and cuter variety of corporate shill?
I don’t give a damn who said what or who the focus is on, for me it’s “give me Kucinich or give me death”. If he “dies” after the primaries, then color me out of the box. I will no longer play in the rigged game
with unconscious players.
aside from the nausea I personally feel about any further elections at this point resolving anything.
the media is partially responsible, but there are a small force of individuals beyond the media I remain convinced because you can read their agenda like lines on a page.
Let’s call them the folks for whom money and wealth truly is nothing because they invented it, or it’s a family business.
Everyone interested in rising up to their level, media, political persons, would naturally be sucking up to them to try to get an invite.
scaredhippie, I agree with what you are saying but I believe that alexnosal in the post before yours is closer to the truth. In fact, for me anyway, it’s so obvious that it’s one of those things a person like me just can’t see. It’s there, right in front of my nose, but I couldn’t see it.
How do probably 99% of media survive? On money made from advertising. Who’s running the government? The corporations, and to a lesser extent, religious groups are. Why won’t the “liberal media” do their job? Because if they did their job, pretty soon the business they work for would be out of business once big name advertisers pull their adds from a media organization’s programming.
It’s so obvious to me now that I can’t believe the thought had never occurred to me before. That’s why we get the news we get. If it keeps the big corporations happy, then papers are allowed to print it.
Of course we have different media organizations with differing political views and agendas, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Common Dreams couldn’t survive if the various drives for donations weren’t successful, so I am fortunate enough to have a source that prints news written by people that I share opinions with and so I read and can even make comments.
I also read, but to a far less extent, the news as seen through the eyes of those I don’t share views with because I need to hear or read both sides of the same issue. This is what makes the posts so great. By reading the posts I can also hear from those I don’t agree with but their opinion is still important to me and many times it changes my original view of a certain issue.
To finish, this is just one reason why journalism is dying. I think there are many other factors, one being that the owners of the large media sources tend to be all cut from the same cloth. Also, there’s a conscious effort to keep us as dumb and misinformed as possible as a people. I say “who cares about Britney Spears?” yet a lot of people apparently do. Why is this? I can’t answer that one. Maybe it’s because no thought is involved, and who wants to think when they can barely keep a roof over their head. The entertainment, or what passes for entertainment, is a lot easier to deal with.
Celebrity:
I think that unfortunatley you are right, Obama is also a media darling, that’s why he is always second to Hillary, it makes a good story. I think it would be great if Kucinich had a chance, which is why I’m so pissed that the media are allowed to scew voter opinion by constantly showing unverified polls that position Kucinich as an imposible bet. Imagine a world where no one had any idea of who was leading, or way behind, when they placed there vote. It would be totally impartial. No more of this, “I can’t vote for that person because nobody else is” crap.
I agree that it sucks that we are forced to play this “game”, but dropping out of the game is not going to solve anything. We need to make small steps to change the rules, and everytime I hear Obama speak, he seems to be a genuine person who shares a lot of opinions with me and other liberals that I know. His voting record is pretty clean. I’m not sure why so many people on the left hate him so much. If anyone does have a gripe against him, let me know and it may change my opinion. I’m always up for new information.
Even Obama is forced to speak the way the behind the scenes people want for him to. You can’t deny that you hear the propaganda?
Where there’s propaganda, there’s smoke, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. If the candidates weren’t working on their ability to fabricate reality, they wouldn’t be taken seriously by the other folks who put them up there as our fabricated choices.
Those who speak plainly, are held in derision and ostracized out of the realm of remote possibility. As are we in the truth seeking percentage of the american population, I mean, just take for example one’s self.
What ‘liberal media’ ?
Ain’t no such thing in the United States of America!
It’s all right-wing by varying degrees . . . capitalism
gone amuck!
h buchman 3:07 pm writes: What ‘liberal media’ ?
What about you? I don’t meant to say you are a liberal, but aren’t you in the above block an example of “liberal media.”
Perhaps I’m confused. That is print up there isn’t it?
Keep it up!
Barack Obama is getting media attention for one reason - to make Hillary Clinton acceptable to voters who would have a hard time voting for a liberal woman.
There was a good piece on NPR a few months ago with a social scientist who described how people will choose A when the only choices are A and B. But they’ll switch their choice to B when they’re offered A, B & C. The principal is in effect whether we’re a restaurant or a candidate.
As for the media, the ones who graduated from journalism school just want to be “objective”.
When they are constantly bombarded with criticism for being “too liberal” (no matter what they’re reporting) they’ll naturally drift to the right.
They only way to combat this is to create an opposing storm of criticism that the press is “too conservative”.
www.fair.org is a good place to learn how pervasive and subtle the bias is. We have to write to our papers and TV stations when we detect it.
To me, Obama sounds like a phony creation of media consultants and polling experts. I can just hear the focus group’s behind every word he speaks. I never have gotten the sense there’s a real person anywhere in there.
From this whole conversation, to me it sounds like a lot of people just don’t get it. Today’s America is government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. It doesn’t matter which of the two parties you are talking about.
Meanwhile, the notion of an independently owned media has gone the way of the dodo bird. Everything is owned by a corporation these days and both serves the corporate message and contributes to the corporate bottom line.
So, of course you don’t see corporate media supporting candidates that aren’t corporate friendly. Where the Kucinich supporter aggravate me is that seem to think that if they just whine enough about this then it will somehow change. Face it, it won’t. Do you really expect a corporate entity to take actions that are harmful to the corporation?
What we need is a citizenry that’s educated enough and aware of this enough to know that when they see candidates backed by big corporate money and promoted by corporate media, that those are the candidates that they should stay away from at all costs. In places like Venezuela, they seem to get this. They know the local corporate media does not speak for what’s good for the people, so the fact that the corporate media hates Chavez has little impact on a population that knows the corporate media is not on their side.
Of course the corporate media will always try to create phony differences between the corporate-approved candidates. So Hillary is presented as an alternative to the Republicans and Obama is presented as an alternative as Hillary. But you have to ask yourself what real differences in economic policies do you see between the candidates? The answer is none, or such minor differences as to be meaningless.
The current brew-ha-ha over health care is a wonderful example. No corporate candidate will support the sort of national single payer system that works in the rest of the world and that Americans favor when fairly given the choice. Instead you get the sort of BS we see about who really has ‘universal coverage’ and who doesn’t for health care plans that are purely there to prop up and support the HMO’s, insurance companies and big pharma. Who in their right mind would think that mandating that everyone has to buy health insurance is anything but that.
The key is, anytime you see any candidate promoted and spoken well by the corporate media is to know that candidate should be avoided at all costs. The candidates that are ignored and ridiculed by the corporate media are the ones to look for. What we need is a citizenry that understands this and thinks this way.
I’m reminded of the South Park episode where Stan refuses to vote for the new school mascot because the two choices are “douchebag” or “shit sandwich”
I bring great empowering and excellent N E W S:
Our belief in the systematic bought-and-paid-for inattention of the mass media may in fact be an illusion and gov’t hype to completely dis-empower us to “work the system”., as evidence points to what they’ve actually been doing - and it’s “simple” repetitive phones calls and threats to hurt circulation, not total subjugation!
OK, it might be simple, but that is hardly the same as easy, right?
Please follow this link here, for ‘Confessions of “an editor who ran Bush propaganda”‘, where in summary that editor states that:
Wow, isn’t insidiously clever to make us think we :
(1.) Have a liberal minding media, but then
(2.) Convince us that it’s really not going to speak the TRUTH, but
(3.) it still may be POSSIBLE to find truth again, if we finesse it as well as the shrub’s SHOCK troops do, as they’re clearly massively funded and organized for the ‘duration’.
(4.) The re-Thuglicans likely have a quite distributed tag-team fon tree for each media outlet ALL across the globe, and duplication of pressuring (to own editor) would only improve their (or OUR ODDs) for impact.
(5.) OK, don’t even bother with FauxNews, but maybe ‘the denuded emperor pix’ will leak out?
What GRASS ROOTS ACTION does it take from any of US?
_a._ Any person willing to call, and call again (watching the news wires, and being aware each day)
_b._ Heavy hitter progressive thinkers that will ACT (like STARS, Media celebrities, actors, chamber Commerce, talkers) with real influence, and or patience.
_c._ Lots of ‘cold calls’ in attempts to find each media
_d._ Attempt to convert retrenched re-Thuglicans as “double-agents” for TRUTH, as they know who to call
Like I said initially, this is SIMPLE, but it’s hardly EASY.
We ALL can Go for IT, as we deserve the best media that OUR money (remember WE are the actual circulation- right?) can influence and buy.
P.S. Thanks to inspiration posts throughout CD, and my apologies for cross-posting this to get this powerful message out, as bandwidth is likened to our CD’s very blood coursing through the ethereal veins of OUR WEB.
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
Point made COMarc,
as far as it goes back to me, if indeed there is an election which is open for debate.
Another election might be too many for me, I can’t hardly tolerate them almost as far back as I can recall. The next one looks truly sad.
Nothing against our local heroes though!
Why, because an administration will not tear down any media outlet for a frenzy about a blow job… I mean how can you impeach for that (there was censure for lying, sure) basically you don’t swing at those pitches.
Now a media frenzy for war crimes, that may lead to impeachment or prison, well you better be damn sure retalliation is in the air!
Please ignore the corporate media brainwash, think for yourself, decide your vote on the issues, and if you agree with Kucinich, vote for him in the primary.
The corporate media was silent in November of 2004 when the exit polling showed that it was a one in a trillion chance that Bush won in Ohio.
You just can’t trust them.
There is no one monitoring those polls to see if they are accurate, fair, reasonable or relevant. They should be considered for what they are, an attempt by the corporate media and big money to turn our election into a farce.
After I read “Inside the Company [CIA]” by Phillip Agee in 1975 and I learned about the huge effort in money and time that was spent in controlling the press in places like Uruguay and Ecuador, I said to myself, “If they are doing all that in those countries, what must they be doing in Chicago?”
I get my TV from Dish Network. It costs $5 a month more to get the Networks [they call them the ‘Local Channels’]. I don’t pay the $5 and I am spared all that bullshit. You should try it. You would be surprised to find out how much better life is without all that brainwashing. There are a couple of good channels on Dish - 9415 “Free Speech TV” and 9410 “LINK TV.” Check them out. Democracy Now! is a great news source and is broadcast on both those channels 5 days a week.
“But, I say again, if a president can be impeached for lying about an extramarital affair, then why aren’t we impeaching a president who lied to his country to start a war that is soon to have lasted five long years?”
Mr. Zweifel, I too would like to know the answer to your question. And, I fear, we never will.
heavyrunner-also check c-span on the weekend and now and then UCTV has an excellent program.
A liberal media can’t make much money.
The liberal media is an invention of the far right, just like Saddam;s WMD, they do not exist. There is only MSM = govt. propaganda organ, and there is alternative media with a reality bias.
THEY TOLD YOU WHAT: Thank you for the excellent posting.
Let’s not forget the corporations that profit from TV ads also happen to send their money to companies that ALSO own military/weapons manufacturing plants. The corporations ARE increasingly profitting from war and weapons production. Call it what it is! This country sells war and not much else, even much of its media celebrates violence in increasingly sickening (to dumb down and normalize such responses) ways!
Impeachment? Go here NOW and watch and listen from New Hampshire:
http://www.kucinichtv.com/
But remember how Bush inherited his wealth and Cheney took his.
Theytoldyouwhat made a great point about fascism.
Here is a link that explains it in a slightly different way:
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
America today meets all 14 points.
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. CONTROLLED MASS MEDIA
7. Obsession with National Security
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
9. Corporate Power is Protected
10. Labor Power is Supressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent Elections
An empire requires courtiers, and those who report what happens at court, when they aren’t dancing attendance on the ministers of various departments, must get the rest from pillow talk with PR queens and princessas; and to spill the beans would mean no more wonkie-nookie, no more pr*ck & p*ss-fests, and no more little squeezy cozy get-togethers for the press-pustules where they ooze, not Truthiness, but Knowiness, onto the screen or the page.
These are all little-trotter-afterers, without soul or center, and when the next infalted canine-in-chief is trotted out before them having won Best In Show, they will obediently sniff the nether parts and salivate and bark synchronic approbation.
As for the “14 signs of fascism,” you need only one: universal servility before military figures, which one sees & hears even among those who oppose the regime, and the consequent attribution of one’s own freedom to those who wear or have worn uniforms & murdered foreign civilians. That is fascism; all else is detail.
Although advertising-supported corporate-friendly ‘news’ is a nice way to keep up with celebrity infotainment and recent unusual murders and disappearances,
for people who actually want to know the important things going on in the world that have short, medium and long term impact on their lives, take a look at, and consider supporting:
www.TheRealNews.com
Coming soon to a channel near Faux News
Also visible at:
http://youtube.com/user/TheRealNews
“Don’t curse the darkness - light a candle.” - Chinese proverb
DICHTERFREUND - You’ve brought us a moving beyond the scenes look, and it IS scary: “obediently sniff the nether parts and salivate and bark synchronic approbation”, my thanks to you.
I will forever be aware of the implicit self-imposed damage of obeisance toward authority, not that I have ever gone very far in that direction, which is likely why I’m again un-employed.
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) is conducting this straw poll to determine which of the currently declared Democratic Candidates our membership is supporting for President.
Polling is open until 3pm Eastern time on December 4.)
https://www.pdamerica.org/polls/poll-pres-2008-1.php
Lovely post, dichterfreund.
I do want to take issue with one line in the article, an error which points to the answer to your question:
“Had Bill Clinton lied his way into starting a war and then instructed his press secretary to tell the American people lies about underhanded dealings by his staff, the Washington politicians and the national press would have run the man out of town on a rail.”
If you believe that, then it’s no wonder you can’t understand why we all suddenly love Hillary. No, they harassed and impeached him over a blow job, but lying about a war that makes megabucks for corporations, including corporations tied to media empires, is not something to impach a Presdent for but indeed is the job the Pres is hired to do. Hillary has already started this, and that’s why she has already been elected by the few dozen people who actually get a say in choosing our next president. All that remains is to keep up the drumbeat of “Hillary’s-the-frontrunner, she’s surging ahead in the polls, she’s unbeatable,” and see to it that any coverage of an unbought candidate who has a record of voting against antiConstitutional new Patriot Acts and sundry wars of aggression, is either not covered at all or covered with the sort of “Oh isn’t the little vegan leprechaun cute” dismissal that frightens people away from voting for Kucinich just because he represents their views and has a solid record of doing so.
Thank you, “Heytoldyouwhat” for your insightful and comprehensive account of what is happening in America, today. We are very swiftly reaching the point where all our civil liberties are being granted to us only upon condition of our support of the conservative hegemony.
I personally regard Kucinich as the best candidate for the sake of policy choices, but I like Obama for reasons other then electability. Obama is a moderate voice who will instead of silencing opposition, as the Republican party is currently attempting to do, bring conflicting groups together. This type of leadership is desparately needed. A conservative President, like Romney riding in on the wave of support from an Iranian invasion, will move us farther down the road to becoming a fascist country and ultimately civil war, but an unsuccessful extreme liberal like Kucinich may result in a backlash in 2012 that will have similar effects. I hope Obama can reverse the dangerous trends and polarizations in our current politics and help this country to again be a place of tolerance and freedom.
Why do the media take it easy on Bush?
Answer: Watch the documentary called The Corporation. It’s all about the bottom line. If the CEOs believe Bush can pull off the biggest heist in the history of the world, Iran and Iraq are worth about 50 trillion in proven oil reserves, then hey why not back the guy?
Dichterfreund and Wildfire:
Correction–Bill Clinton DID take us into war on a series of lies. Kosovo and our almost-war with Serbia was based on propaganda and false accusations that Milosovic was another ‘hitler’ out of control. Our proxy ally, the KLA, was primarily noted for being the chief heroin smuggler in Europe and had ties to Al Qaeda (remember that Kosovo was mostly Muslim and Serbia was/is Eastern Orthodox). Our war also benefited Croatia, which has been a virtual client-state of the Germans.
Clinton was probably impeached more for his lack of enthusiasm for declaring war on Iraq after PNAC demanded action against Saddam in the mid 1990’s.
Oh, yeah, and there was a BJ. But then again, the MSM refused to look into pretty provable accusations that Bush I had/has a mistress and had been seeing her since the 1980’s.