We Need a News Media of the People, by the People, and for the People

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Mon Aug-25-08 11:21 PM
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We Need a News Media of the People, by the People, and for the People

Our Founding Fathers, being well versed in world history, recognized the potential for a single or small group of powerful, ambitious and ruthless men to destroy democracy in their attempt to carry out their imperial ambitions. To prevent that from happening they created a Constitution (albeit flawed in many ways) that contained numerous mechanisms meant to serve as a check on such ambitions.

Paramount among those mechanisms was our First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press. By protecting our right to speech, to assemble, and to petition our government, our First Amendment is meant to protect us against punishment for expressing our opinions, regardless of how unpopular those opinions are.

A free flow of information is essential to prevent the imposition of tyranny. In contrast, a monopoly of information by the rich and powerful prevents the free flow of information and facilitates tyranny.

But our First Amendment � and hence our democracy � is now under vigorous assault by our government, greatly facilitated by the fact that most of the news that Americans receive today is under the control of a very small number of powerful and wealthy individuals and corporations. Because that assault has been so successful, those individuals and corporations have obscenely disproportionate influence on our nation�s priorities and policies today.

Bill Moyers has pointed out that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. When that separation disappears, fascism, whose primary characteristic is the fusion of government with corporatocracy, replaces democracy. Moyers explains:

What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.

Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and � in defiance of the Constitution � from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.

HOW DID FASCISM DESTROY OUR 1ST AMENDMENT RIGHTS

The Telecommunications Act of 1996

Our national news media has always been far from perfect, yet it has served us through more than two centuries, with the protection afforded it by our First Amendment, to prevent us from relapsing into tyranny. But with passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a very small number of very wealthy corporations began to monopolize our national news media. The result has been a national news media that has sunk to new depths in their failure to inform the American people about the most important issues of the day. To the extent that they are interested in important issues and events, their objectives are primarily to misinform the American people into quietly accepting their efforts to dismember our democracy. Robert McChesney and John Nichols, in �Our Media, Not Theirs�, sum it up like this:

Congressional approval of the Telecommunications Act, after only a stilted and disengaged debate, was a historic turning point in media policy making in the United States, as it permitted a consolidation of media and communication ownership that had previously been unthinkable.

The role of the Bush/Cheney administration

George W. Bush has contributed greatly to the loss of our First Amendment rights. By neutering our free press, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has allowed him to get away with that by giving him cover and generally remaining silent. In other words, our corporate news media and the Bush administration have acted synergistically to destroy our First Amendment. Here are some of the things that the Bush administration has done to destroy our First Amendment, under cover of a complicit news media:

First Amendment zones
With the onset of the Bush Presidency in 2001 we saw the creation of the concept of �First Amendment zones�, in which American citizens would have their Constitutional rights to free speech protected. The corollary to that is that their Constitutional rights are NOT protected outside of those zones. The American Constitution does not say anything about �zones� in which the Constitution applies. It is supposed to apply throughout the country. And in fact, the very purpose of George Bush�s �First Amendment zones� is to impede the ability of American citizens to have their protests of government heard by other citizens. As such, the first amendment zones should be seen as a clear violation of our Constitutional rights to free speech.

Access to the President
The Bush White House has also established a well publicized policy of denying access to the President for journalists who fall out of favor with the Bush administration. Since the jobs or careers of many journalists depend on having that access, this practice gives those journalists a strong incentive to write stories that cast the President in a favorable light, and a strong disincentive to write stories that are unfavorable to the President.

That practice also violates our First Amendment rights. The President works for us, the people. We have a right to know what he is doing, and that right is definitely abridged if only those journalists who have proven their loyalty to the President are allowed access to him � especially in the context of presidential press conferences.

Paid Presidential Pre$$titutes
Another unprecedented practice of the Bush administration is to insert its own reporters (paid for with tax payer dollars) into its press conferences or other venues and have those reporters pretend to be real journalists, printing stories as if they constituted real news or independent editorials, when in fact they are nothing but government propaganda.

This again is a violation of our First Amendment rights, including free speech and freedom of the press. The purpose of the press is to provide us with the information we need in order to exercise our rights and responsibilities as citizens. If the United States government arranges to put out government propaganda disguised as news, then citizens will not be able to distinguish between the two, and therefore �news� loses much of its value. And also, it ties up airtime or newspaper space that would otherwise be devoted to real news.

The criminalization of independent news reporting
Among the most egregious violations of our First Amendment rights by the Bush Administration has been its attempt to criminalize journalists who report stories that the administration considers unfavorable. As with all tyrannical power grabs, the criminalization of journalists is done under the guise of �national security�. But since the Bush administration allots to itself the power to determine when a journalistic action is criminal, it thereby has the power to send to prison any journalist who writes a story that displeases it. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales rationalized the right to imprison journalists for providing information to the public that the Bush administration deems to be criminal conduct.

Violent intimidation
The story of the two week April 2004 U.S. assault on the Iraq city of Fallujah, with a population of 350,000, demonstrates the extent to which the Bush administration will go to censor unfavorable reporting of its military actions.

Despite the uniformly positive coverage of the battle by �embedded� American journalists, and the U.S. claim that there were no civilian casualties, coverage by non-embedded journalists depicted a vastly different picture. Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour and his team reported the following from that battle:

We found children, women, elderly, all lifting white flags and walking, or in their cars leaving the city� When we reached the heart of the city at the hospital, I almost lost my mind from the terror that I saw� planes bombing, ambulances taking the dead people� We were the only team that was able to enter the city� I could not see anything but a sea of corpses of children and women � mostly children� I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph. At the same time I was crying�

In response to the Al Jazeera reporting George Bush first proposed bombing Al Jazeera�s international headquarters, but was dissuaded from doing so. The Guardian reported on how the Bush administration chose to deal with the only non-embedded news organization that made an intense effort to report on the battle:

An Al Jazeera camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested In Iraq, held incommunicado in a chicken-coop sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by U.S. soldiers� Twenty other Al Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by U.S. forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a U.S. tank fired a shell at the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad�s Palestine Hotel. It was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices�

Amy Goodman and David Goodman further describe the difficulties that journalists face in reporting on the Iraq war, in their book, �Static � Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back�:

The Al Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Basra were bombed by American planes, and two of its correspondents have been imprisoned on unspecified terrorism charges� Al Jazeera�s journalists are not the only ones under siege. The Iraq War has been among the deadliest conflicts ever for journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that by mid-2006, over 100 journalists and media assistants had been killed in Iraq while doing their jobs. By comparison, 66 journalists lost their lives over the course of the 20-year-long Vietnam conflict. More than half of those killed in Iraq were Iraqi and other Arab journalists. Fifteen journalists have been killed by U.S. fire�

Journalists also risk arrest while reporting on the war in Iraq: In 2005 alone, U.S. forces arrested seven Iraqi journalists �for prolonged periods without charge or the disclosure of any supporting evidence,� according to CPJ.

CONSEQUENCES

Facilitation of the class war by the rich and powerful against everyone else

One of the main goals of the rich and powerful who control our press and much of our government is to increase their wealth and power. Since the great majority of people in our country have no great desire to see the wealthy get wealthier, disinformation is essential to the achievement of their goals. Al Gore, in �The Assault on Reason�, explains how the Bush administration has taken advantage of our lack of access to information (after playing a critical role in exacerbating the problem) to deregulate government, thereby increasing corporate profits at the expense of the American people:

Bush would not be able credibly to label a bill that increases air pollution �the clear skies initiative� � or call a bill that increases clear-cutting of national forests �the healthy forests initiative� � unless he was confident that the public was never going to know what these bills actually did.

Nor could he appoint Ken Lay from Enron to play such a prominent role in handpicking members to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) � unless the president felt totally comfortable that no one would pay attention � After members of the FERC were appointed with Mr. Lay�s personal review and approval, Enron went on to bilk the electric ratepayers of California and other states without the inconvenience of federal regulators trying to protect citizens from the company�s criminal behavior.

Likewise, this explains why many of the most important Environmental Protection Agency positions have been carefully filled with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries, ensuring that those polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws against excessive pollution�

The private foxes have been placed in charge of the public henhouses. And shockingly, the same pattern has been followed in many other agencies and departments. But there is precious little outrage because there are so little two-way conversations left in our democracy� This behavior could never take place if there were the slightest chance that such institutionalized corruption would be exposed in a public forum that had relevance to the outcome of elections.

Similarly, McChesney and Nichols explain how the corporate news media use disinformation to set the stage for their so-called �free market� schemes:

This is a generation that is under pressure from the media it consumes to be brazenly materialistic, selfish, and depoliticized; devoid of social conscience� The commercial media system is the ideological linchpin of the globalizing market economy�

The corporate media system is in many respects the advancing army of a global economic system that is hell bent on producing profits regardless of the social and environmental implications. This global �free market� economic system has produced considerable benefits for some (usually the wealthy) people, and notable benefits for many more, but it has come at a very high cost. Social inequality is increasing in nearly every nation, as is the divide between rich nations and poor nations. For working class and poor people, especially women, the results of the global �free market� can be disastrous.

Facilitation of war

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, our corporate news media failed to explain to the American people that the Bush administration�s case for invading Iraq was based on little or no evidence. They mocked the Downing Street Memo, which confirmed that fact, and they mocked Cindy Sheehan, who tried to call the scam to our attention.

Most people are basically decent. Thus, a free press can serve a vitally important role in a democracy in persuading a nation�s citizens to reject war, in opposition to the ambitions of that nation�s war-mongering leaders. And that is why the Bush administration has tried so vigorously to censure meaningful coverage of its Iraq war.

Dan Carlin explains the importance of accurate war reporting in general and visual images in particular, to help enable a nation�s citizens to make enlightened decisions regarding war and peace:

Images can end wars�. Like the photo taken after the My Lai massacre, showing dead babies piled half-naked in a dirt road atop their slain mothers and brothers and sisters, or the photo of the Saigon police chief pulling the trigger on a wincing Viet Cong officer, or the image of a little Vietnamese girl running naked, screaming, her clothes burnt off by the horrible, hot blast of a napalm attack.

If Larry Stimeling�s theory is correct � that these images fueled the anti-war movement and helped bring about the end of the Vietnam War�. average citizens, armed with the visual revelation of wasteful atrocities being perpetrated in their names on foreign peoples, and killing American soldiers, mobilized to stop it � and succeeded.

In contrast, the lack of relevant information provided to the American people hinders the occurrence of a similar phenomenon with respect to the Iraq war. Carlin continues:

But if Vietnam entered the collective American imagination as those brutal snapshots of ravaging bombs, murdered civilians, and American soldiers in body bags � as real, gruesome images of war that demanded outrage and action � the war against Iraq was notable for its unreality, for its poverty of visual imagery. Where are the pictures? �

Of course, it is not only the lack of visual images, but the lack of a great deal of information that Americans should know about the Iraq War, including our reasons for being there, that hinders us from responding in a fully effective manner. The overall effect of U.S. government censorship of Iraq War news is to prevent us from being sufficiently informed to make the decisions required of a democracy. Carlin explains:

To stop reacting is to stop exercising the emotions, good or bad, that make us human, and without those emotions there can be no agency whether one of selfish nationalism or willful indifference, or one of universal respect for the dignity of the individual, one that spawns compassion, activism and change. By limiting what we see, news sources limit our ability to feel anger, or sorrow, or indignation � they limit our ability to act. And when the media decide that their audiences don�t need to see something, or don�t want to see it, they strip us of the ability to act ethically.

Choosing of our Presidents

Our right to vote means little without our First Amendment rights because those rights enable us to gather the information we need in order to make an enlightened choice in the voting booth. For more than a decade now, our corporate news media has done everything in its power to obfuscate issues and tilt national elections towards it fascist allies. Few people take me seriously when I say this, but I maintain that with adequate and neutral press coverage during t]he Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, both Al Gore and John Kerry would have won with record landslides � despite the election fraud that occurred in those years. Consider the following:

Protecting Bush
With decent press coverage, George Bush would have been asked in 2000 to explain how his tax cut proposals could benefit anyone other than the top one or two percent of wage earners in the United States. Attempts by Bush to parrot the talking points he was given by his handlers would have been met by tough questions, which would have made him look like the blabbering idiot that he is. Then, if the press had treated his utter failure to offer a comprehensive explanation for the economic plan at the center of his candidacy with half the seriousness with which they had treated Bill Clinton�s sex scandal, Bush�s candidacy would have sunk like a lead balloon.

In 2004, Bush would have been asked to explain why his administration manipulated intelligence to provide an excuse for war in Iraq, why he lied to the American people about the reasons for that war, and about the hundreds of unanswered questions regarding his lack of preparation for the attacks of 9-11, as well as the failure of his administration to respond to those attacks on the day that they occurred. No amount of preparation could have prepared him to provide intelligible and satisfying answers to those questions. And again, if the national news media had treated these issues as they deserved to be treated, rather than repeated over and over again how �Churchillian� or �Lincolnesque� Bush sounds whenever he opens his mouth on these subjects, it�s difficult to see how he could have obtained double digit numbers on Election Day.

A decent news media would have followed up on Bush�s failure to fulfill his Air National Guard duties. Instead, there were a total of only two articles in U.S. newspapers, magazines or television in 2000 that dealt with both Bush�s absenteeism and the allegations that strings had been pulled to get Bush into the ANG.

Blaming Clinton for 9/11
ABC�s so-called �docudrama� of the 9-11 attacks, which they aired in the run-up to the 2006 elections, was nothing but a cheap political trick to put the blame on Clinton for the terrorist attacks that occurred on George Bush�s watch, and thereby influence the elections in favor of Republicans. The film pretended to be informative and based on facts.

The film�s chief script writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is an ultra-conservative political hack and friend of Rush Limbaugh. The film was shown only to a conservative audience prior to its release. The executive producer of the film was a member of the Bush administration�s PR team. ABC provided right wing bloggers with an advanced copy of the film, while excluding progressive bloggers from participating in a conference call about the film. And when faced with mounting criticism of the film, they yanked the official film blog in an effort to cut off further discussion.

Castigating Al Gore for everything under the sun
In 2000, Al Gore was a vastly superior candidate to George Bush. Gore beat him solidly in all three debates. To change the subject, instead of focusing on the content of the debates, the news media endlessly castigated Gore for anything they could think of. In the first debate they repeatedly focused on the fact that Gore was caught sighing during the debate; to make Gore out to be a liar they made up numerous lies themselves, including 4,800 references to the phony story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet; and they hammered the theme that �Gore would do anything to be President�, without the slightest bit of evidence to back up that contention, highlighted by Chris Matthews� claim that Gore would �lick the bathroom floor to be President.

The swift boating of John Kerry
The vigorous national news media coverage of the phony challenges to John Kerry�s service record in Vietnam, right before the 2004 election, provides a striking contrast to the virtual absence of any interest in the legitimate story of Bush�s Air National Guard (ANG) service.

The main doubts raised about Bush�s ANG service came from official ANG records. In contrast, John Kerry�s heroic Vietnam War record, including three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, were all part of his official record, and they were corroborated by ALL of the crewmates who were witnesses to the actions that earned Kerry his medals. The challenges to Kerry�s war record, on the other hand, were all based on the accusations of men who refused to sign affidavits testifying to their accusations and whose accusations were internally inconsistent and contradicted all available evidence.

Yet despite all that, the national news media treated the accusations of the �Swifties� very seriously in the months before the 2004 election. CNN mentioned the stories in almost 300 news segments. The New York Times printed more than 100 articles on the subject. And the Washington Post ran 12 front page stories on the accusations of the Swifties during a 12 day period in August 2004.

An example of the hypocrisy with which the national news media lent legitimacy to the story is provided by an episode of Meet the Press, where Tim Russert innocently asked a guest, �If the substance of many of the charges from �Unfit for Command� (the book used to assassinate Kerry�s war record) aren�t holding up� why is it resonating so much?� Duh, Tim. It resonated because media whores like you keep talking about it as if it was a legitimate story, without discussing the numerous holes in it.

The effort to marginalize Barack Obama
Now, the same thing is being repeated with Barack Obama. A recent ABC sponsored Democratic debate is emblematic of what is happening. Instead of asking substantive questions, the moderators focused on trivia, the only purpose of which was to destroy Obama�s candidacy: They incorrectly claimed that Obama had supported a total ban on handguns; they misquoted an associate of Obama�s, William Ayers, to make it appear that Obama associates with terrorists; they rehashed every embarrassing moment in the Obama 2008 campaign; and they used idiotic right wing talking points to make it appear that Obama�s stands against tax giveaways for the wealthy are bad for our economy.

SUMMARY OF OUR CURRENT STATUS AND HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

McChesney and Nichols sum up the current status of the U.S. news media and media conglomerates around the world:

The old-line parties have abandoned the playing field. They have stopped fighting for social and economic justice, choosing instead to seek the favor of the corporations the people want them to be battling� I don�t know if there is any place where this is more evident than in the battles over media monopoly, corporate conglomeration�

As the old parties have made their peace with markets, corporate capital, globalization of the economy, and the media that these patterns produce, they have left a void. In country after country, that void is being filled by new political groupings that� are making noise about the dangers posed to democracy by corporatization of the discourse�.

In the final chapter of their book, they explain what needs to be done. We the people need to wrest the corporate controlled news media away from the corporations and replace it with an alternative of our own. That is what happened when Hugo Chavez and the people of Venezuela fought off an attempted U.S. sponsored coup in 2002:

Even though reports of Chavez�s removal were spun as great news, the streets filled with citizens demanding the restoration of their elected president to office. As the protests grew, the media simply stopped covering the news� Only when the protesters took over the state television station did Venezuelans begin to receive news of what was happening in their country.

McChesney and Nichols explain that before the needed changes can transpire, there must be widespread popular awareness of the problem. Speaking of some recent successes by alternative news media in Australia, they note:

Legislative victories are only one test of the Australian Democrats� success, however. The real measure of their impact may well come in the shifting of attitudes toward media issues within Australia. By making media a central focus of their national campaigns and by forcing debates on subjects such as media ownership � and related issues, the Australian Democrats have pushed media issues into the political debate and � in what may be their greatest triumph � onto the front pages.

And finally, there can be no democracy without radical reform of the news media:

Among global democratic activists, there is an emerging consensus that unless the road to democratic renewal includes structural media reform, that road will be a dead end street� The issues are similar everywhere� The forces of darkness � large, profit-driven media corporations and their spoon-fed politicians and regulators � work their commercial schemes everywhere. This is a global struggle.

In other words: News of the people, by the people, and for the people is virtually synonymous with government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We can�t have one without the other. And until there is widespread recognition of that fact we will have neither.