For coverage of our delivery of FAIR's ongoing petition demanding that the TV networks cover proposals for a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system to ABC News' NYC studio, you can tune into Democracy Now!--a
media outlet that could teach the networks a thing or two about how to
contribute to, rather than interfere with, the public debate on
healthcare reform.
The controversy over the arrest
of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama’s remark
that the police “acted stupidly” has taken up a lot of newspaper
and broadcast space in the past week, and brought some attention to
the problem of racial profiling and indeed the problems of even having
a public discussion of race issues in the United States.
Before I know it I’m sucked into the New York Times story and I haven’t had my Prozac or anything.
Through the
miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol
through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story’s point has
been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait on
the hook of evil, are blown to Kingdom Come by an IED that had been
planted in the car in which they sat helplessly.
The debate about health reform is clearly in critical condition,
with the prospects for President Barack Obama's proposed "public
option" looking increasingly uncertain. The U.S. is the only
industrialized nation where insurance for primary healthcare is largely
in the hands of private corporations, but despite overwhelming public
support for a greater government role in health insurance, pundits are
now advising us that even Obama’s modest proposal of making private
insurance corporations compete with a public insurance fund may have to
be scrapped.
Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.
Who exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon?
We've just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading
from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers,
here's how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President
Dick Cheney's orders, didn't inform Congress that, to assassinate
al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death
squads.
President Obama said on Wednesday night:
Walter Cronkite believed his "proudest"
moment as a journalist occurred when he told the nation that the
Vietnam War was unwinnable, despite rosy rhetoric from the Johnson
White House and Defense Department. Following his death last week,
various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite's
influential '68 on-air editorial.
With his measured calm and seriousness of purpose, Walter Cronkite set
a high standard for television journalism that has rarely been met
since his retirement in 1981. But the legendary CBS anchorman who died
Friday also may have unintentionally contributed to the American Left's
dangerous complacency about media.
The feeling of many Americans (especially liberals) about the Cronkite
era was that journalists could be trusted to give the news reasonably
straight.
