The Corrupt Government-Media 

            QUOTES CONCERNING CONTROLLED NEWS 

            (Posted on Art Bell)

John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff of the the New York Times,called by his peers, "The Dean of His Profession," was asked in 1953 togive a toast before the NY Press Club; and this is what he said. After reading it, think about what he said.

"There is no such thing at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you that dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of journalists is to destroy truth; to pervert; to villify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." (emphasis added)

Richard M. Cohen, Senior Producer of CBS political news, stated:

 "We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with issues and subjects that we choose."

Richard Salant, former President of CBS News:

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."

"THE LATE GRAND DRAGON OF THE WASHINGTON POST"
by Sherman H. Skolnick 07/23/01

LIVING IN WONDERLAND: TIRED OF THE LIES, PROPAGANDA AND HYPOCRISY

Monopoly Media Manipulation
By Michael Parenti

W's Latest Unjust Reward

Protecting Americans from W's Illegitimacy
By Robert Parry

So Gore Really Won? April 6, 200

Liars and Whores of the Press Those With the 50 Dollar Hair does and Nickel Heads
by Sherman S. Skolnick

OBSTINATE MEMORY AND PURSUIT OF THE PRESENT
Delaying the News Until It No Longer Matters

THE PENTAGON PAPERS: MEDIA PRAISE RINGING HOLLOW  By Norman Solomon

ACTION ALERT: "Political Dynamite" Fails to Explode
Extreme proposals of Treasury's O'Neill mostly unreported  June 13, 2001

It has been now 18 days since the story on the lawsuit against Ariel Sharon broke (June 4, 2001),
 and yet the NY Times has yet to make mention of it anywhere in the news!

Apocalypse Culture II  Book Review

Salon and the decay of American liberal journalism Comment
by Patrick Martin 29 June 2001

What Good is Free Speech if No One Listens?
by Kurt Luedtke

"THE LATE GRAND DRAGON OF THE WASHINGTON POST"
by Sherman H. Skolnick 07/23/01

His fortune was ostensibly based on fraud. And his daughter ended up running the major espionage propaganda trumpet in the U.S. Capitol.

By 1912, it was evident that America was needed in Europe's upcoming and expected World War One. Basically, European-based ruling families foisted upon the American people a PRIVATE central bank, calling it by the misleading term of the FEDERAL RESERVE, as if it were a U.S. Government entity. The purpose was to suck huge money out of the growing, industrial U.S. to finance Europe's periodic killing fields, which were not part of any national purpose of the United States.

Re-elected President in 1916 as an alleged "peace" candidate, Woodrow Wilson, a professorial stooge for Wall Street, just a few weeks after being inaugurated in 1917, shoved American doughboys into Europe's own bloodbath. War music such as "Over There", was used to mold and pump up American opinion to favor WAR IN EUROPE. To help finance Europe's War, the U.S. sold through out America, as if it were "patriotic", war certificates called Liberty Bonds. A key figure in the sales was a Wall Street pirate, Eugene Meyer.

Meyer was later apparently rightly accused but never criminally prosecuted for having reportedly embezzled tens of millions of dollars from the Liberty Bond issues under his supervision. Cynics often note how big-time criminals are rewarded instead of jailed. Meyer became a Governor of the Federal Reserve, a ruling class device to instigate wars and depressions for high-level profits. Meyer went on in the early 1930s, to organize the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,a highly corrupt entity used to rescue certain failing banks [who secretly rewarded certain RFC insiders with bank stock] while ignoring other failing banks who did not pay off insiders. [A case in point being the Continental Bank of Chicago, now merged with Bank of America, owned principally by the Rothschilds, the Jesuits, and more recently, the Japanese mafia, the Yazuka. Continental almost went under in 1931.]

Meyer also went on to become the first President of the World Bank, accused by some as a trick for exploiting non-industrialized nations.

So, with his reputed massive funds embezzled from the Liberty Bond issues, Meyer found it easy, in the depths of the Great Depression, in 1933, to buy the Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale. Likewise in the Depression, Meyer's daughter Katharine, was trained at Rockefeller's University of Chicago. In the 1930s, key figures at the Teutonic-structured university and its adjoining hospitals were pro-Hitler [as to the hospitals, I have personal knowledge]. While other Chicagoans, including unpaid or unemployed teachers, ate out of garbage cans, the students at the pro-Nazi University came and went as if nothing important economic was happening.

Meyer, purportedly a Jew, married to a Lutheran, acted more like the German Jews that favored the Nazis. As to Katharine and her siblings, "The children were brought up in the traditions of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, the church of presidents, where the Meyers--Mr. Meyer was Jewish, his wife Lutheran--had their own pew." New York Times, July 18, 2001.

Meyer came out of the so-called "investment bankers", and bond houses of Wall St. Those high up in those firms retain their Jewish surnames, but have not been followers of Judaism for several generations, having been converted to other religions. The public is seldom reminded of this. See the book "The New Crowd The Changing of the Jewish Guard on Wall Street", by Judith Ramsey Ehrlich, Barry J. Rehfeld, Little Brown & Co., 1989.

Katharine married Philip J. Graham, a lawyer, who went on to run his father-in-law's business the Washington Post. In 1963, a few months before the political assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Philip Graham either committed suicide or was murdered. Various explanations of his demise leave much to be considered. [Was there ever an adequate explanation by the Washington Post how Washington, D.C., had their entire phone system shut down during the JFK murder?] By 1963, already a long-time adjunct and front of the American CIA, the Washington Post, like the rest of the monopoly press, trumpeted the "lone assassin" explanation quickly planted by the espionage agencies.

In 1972, Katharine Graham as boss-lady of the Post, did at least two noteworthy acts [1] Under her control, the Post covered up the poison murder of the sinister dictator of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. And [2] under her control and on behalf of the American CIA, the Post was the orginator of most if not virtually all the stories about the alleged break-in at the Watergate Hotel, owned at the time by the Pope. The Post ran no stories pointing out as some European authors have, that the whole event was set-up by double-agents, like James McCord, long-time CIA official in charge of their physical security, to finger Nixon. Most every sizeable press, TV, and radio outlet merely repeated what the Post printed about "Watergate".

Mrs. Graham was in a position to know full well that Bob Woodward, with virtually no journalism background, had been a courier to the White House for CIA and others in the espionage community, incuding the military. Some authors contend, naming names, that some thirty admirals and generals planted the Watergate details on Woodward, an intelligence operative from a young age. It was the military way of getting rid of Richard M. Nixon, accused by them of treason in Viet Nam, without blowing out his brains in an open car like JFK. See "Silent Coup The Removal of the President", by Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1991.

Hence, some contend that Bob Woodward and his Watergate book and articles, have been a mammoth fraud blindly repeated as valid by the liars and whores of the press.

Bob Woodward was the son of Du Page County Chief Judge Alfred Woodward. [Du Page is the county adjoining Cook County, site of Chicago.] It was strange to find out that Alfred Woodward had a long history of espionage, being an operative of BOTH Army and Naval Intelligence [supposedly that does not happen].

In 1973, Chief Judge Woodward had assigned to himself one of the most important but unpublicized cases in America. It involved a huge money laundry masquerading as a financial empire/insurance company. "The Equity Funding" scandal. The Chief Judge put himself in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars of monies and assets of this swindle machine. Among the creditors were teachers pension funds from around the nation. Also creditors into millions of dollars was Chief Watergate investigator Leon Jaworski and Nixon White House aide Bob Erlichman and his family. Ahead of most all of the other creditors, Chief Judge Woodward arbitrarily and corruptly paid out mostly in full to Jaworski and Erlichman. Teachers and other pension funds received almost nothing by Chief Judge Woodward's lawless orders.

Court records, by law, are in the custody and control of the Chief Clerk of the Court. Despite that, Chief Judge Woodward kept the Equity Funding files in his office, locked up in one of his file cabinets. He denied access to these "public records". One day in 1973, I showed up in his office demanding that I be permitted access to the court files he kept concealed there. I informed the Chief Judge I was going to sue him for unlawfully concealing public court records. He threatened to have me arrested for "contempt of court" inside his office. He realized, however, that would cause publicity of the very cases he was trying to keep secret. As a result of the stand-off, I obtained copies of the rare and revealing files. They support my contention that the Equity Funding mess was one of several secret methods of laundering funds by the Nixon White House for their dirty tricks against dissidents and peaceniks.

In later years, members of our group brought a federal court lawsuit against Judge Woodward and several other Du Page County judges. They were charged with, outside of court, engaging in satanic rituals in part linked reportedly to a hospital owned and operated by the Judges. As shown in federal court, the judges directed their rituals to misuse and brutalize small children, the parents of whom were among those accusing Judge Woodward and the judges as defendants in the federal suit. As a signal to insiders, on a key meeting date, one of the satantic ritual judges would put a purple flower on their judicial bench, according to the federal court pleadings. A Chicago federal judge, contending he had no time to consider such matters, refused to consider the facts and put the case arbitrarily out of court.

Following the notoriety of the "Watergate Affair", Katharine Graham repeatedly sent Bob Woodward to the Chicago-area for press conferences. And I came to each one as a reporter. When Woodward showed up, he pointed to me and shouted, "The press conference will not proceed until that man in the wheelchair is removed." There was no basis to force my removal. I had not even said hello to anyone. I was permitted to remain, however, when I told the security police I would sue for false arrest if they removed me, without any basis in law or fact, upon the orders of Bob Woodward as sent by Katharine Graham.

Bob Woodward evidently was fearful I would raise a question about the Watergate/Equity Funding mess, and about his father the Chief Judge. Bob Woodward suspected that I knew about the details that later showed up in the book "Silent Coup". At the press conferences, I was specifically forbidden to ask any questions.

A month after Nixon was re-elected President in 1972, there was a plane crash near Chicago's Midway Airport. Twelve Watergate figures died in the sabotaged crash, including Mrs. E. Howard Hunt, wife of the purported Watergate burglar. She was carrying two million dollars in her luggage which she placed on a separate first class seat next to her. This was Nixon White House "hush money" given to her by her husband reportedly blackmailing Nixon with documents showing Tricky Dick had been implicated in the murder of President Kennedy. The FBI had 150 of their agents already waiting near the airport for the plane to arrive. They apparently were going to arrest her for blackmailing Nixon. The plane pancaked short of the airport. In violation of law, the FBI cordoned off the crash site forbidding local fire, police, and hospital ambulances from approaching the smouldering United Air Lines plane.

In the months after the crash, based on our private investigations, I did radio talk shows all over the U.S. {I decided to withhold until months later, that we had "liberated" the entire National Transportation Safety Board file showing sabotage, some 1300 documents and photographs.] Reportedly on behalf of the American CIA, her bosses, Katharine Graham sent to Chicago to interview me her supposed crackajack reporter Ronald Kessler. After an interview of only a few minutes, he said he wanted to be driven back to O'Hare Airport to return to Washington. Kessler wrote a two-part front page series in the Post condemning and heckling me. {How could he know my position if he only spent a few minutes interviewing me?] Well-wishers, however, from all over North America called me, stating "Sherman, you must really have something for the Post to have you on the front page twice, heckling you for your investigations of the Watergate plane crash."

Ronald Kessler, in various books he has written, claims to be a CIA expert. Here are some of his books "Escape from the CIA", Pocket Books, N.Y., 1991. "Inside the CIA", Pocket Books, N.Y., 1992. "Inside The White House", Pocket Books, N.Y., 1995. "Moscow Station", Scribners, N.Y., 1989. "Spy vs. Spy", Scribners, N.Y., 1988. "The Spy in the Russian Club", Scribners, N.Y., 1990.

The original edition of a book pointing out Katharine Graham and the Washingon Post's connections to the American CIA was suppressed. "Katharine The Great Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire", by Deborah Davis, hardcover, 1991, Institute of Media Analysis, Inc.

The Washington Post, like others in the monopoly press, have several reporters who specialize in whitewashing espionage agency matters. Their specialty often is showing up late at night to interview an eyewitness in political assassination events. One such Washington Post reporter showed up after midnight to interview such a witness. An hour after the reporter left, the eyewitness was found murdered. Are some such reporters "pilot fish" for assassins? Why does this happen again and again over the years? A few examples Nuclear whistle blower Karen Silkwood was on the way to meeting a mass media reporter. She was planning to show documents of misuse of dangerous plutonium at the plant she was working. She was murdered on the way to the reporter. In the Clinton era, an eyewitness uncovered secret incriminating documents he remembered accidentally leaving in a car that ended up in the junk yard. Shortly after a monopoly press reporter interviewed him, he was murdered.

In the many decades Katharine Graham headed the Washington Post, no one seemed ever able to ask her about any of the foregoing. It is quite proper to call her THE LATE GRAND DRAGON OF THE WASHINGTON POST, adding, AND THE AMERICAN CIA.

Cynics find it interesting, that accidentally or otherwise, Katharine Graham fell on a sidewalk and broke her head. To some, an appropriate way to croak for someone as sinister as she was.

Stay tuned.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since 1958, Mr.Skolnick has been a court reformer. Since 1963, founder/chairman, Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, disclosing certain instances of judicial and other bribery and political murders. Since 1991 a regular panelist, and since 1995, moderator/producer, of one-hour,weekly public access Cable TV Show, "Broadsides", Cablecast on Channel 21, 9 p.m. each Monday in Chicago. For a heavy packet of printed stories, send $5.00 [U.S. funds] and a stamped, self-addressed business sized envelope [4-1/4 x 9-1/2 #10 size] WITH THREE STAMPS ON IT, to Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, Sherman H. Skolnick, Chairman, 9800 South Oglesby Ave., Chicago IL 60617-4870. Office, 7 days, 8 a.m. to midnight, (773) 375-5741 [PLEASE, no "just routine calls]. Before sending FAX, call.

W's Latest Unjust Reward
By Robert Parry
April 5, 2001

So let's get this straight. If all of Florida's "undervotes" are
counted and a standard of "clear intent of the voter" is applied -
including perforated ballots and those with indentations in more than
one race, indicating a malfunctioning voting machine - Al Gore won
the state by 299 votes.

If a more liberal standard - counting all ballots with an indentation
only on the presidential race - Gore's victory margin increases to
393 votes.

In a different age, the Miami Herald's lead might have been:

"Gore won Florida if all under-votes are counted."

Or the newspaper might have written a two-part lead also noting that
George W. Bush would have prevailed if stricter standards were
applied to the under-votes, requiring that the so-called chads were
partially or completely removed.

Another reasonable lead to the story would be that the Florida
election - when various irregularities such as the "butterfly ballot"
are ignored - was a virtual dead heat.

Instead, the Herald and its partner in this unofficial recount, USA
Today, focused on the election outcome that would have occurred if
one first subtracted the extra votes that Gore got in Palm, Broward
and Volusia counties and in 139 precincts in Miami-Dade County.

After subtracting those counties and precincts, the newspapers hailed
a Bush victory by a supposed 1,665 votes, a tally reached by applying
the most liberal standard for under-votes, the appearance of a single
indentation.

Why the newspapers picked this contorted approach as their story lead
is a bit murky. But the newspapers made clear that any contrary
analysis -- that Gore would had won if similar counting standards
were applied statewide  -- was left to the domain of those
deemed "Gore's supporters." 

The full statewide results of this recount - what the voters actually
wanted - are not addressed until the 44th paragraph of the Miami
Herald story. That's where a reader finds out that if the liberal
ballot standards were applied statewide - or even if somewhat more
conservative standards were used - Gore would have won.

Odd Reasoning

The stated reasoning for this odd decision to bury what would seem to
be the natural lead - Gore's apparent victory - was that the Florida
Supreme Court supposedly exempted those three counties and 139
precincts from additional recounts when the court ruled on Dec. 8
that hand tallies already done would be included in the statewide
totals.

In other words, the two newspapers focused not on the will of the
Florida voters but on how the state court's last-minute efforts to
allow a balanced state recount might have ended if Bush's lawyers had
not rushed to the U.S. Supreme Court and stopped the recount.

One of several problems with this reasoning is that the key issue in
any election should be the will of the voters, not the quirks of a
legal battle.

Already other findings have shown that the confusing "butterfly
ballots" in Palm Beach and improper ballot purges by Gov. Jeb Bush's
administration cost Gore thousands of votes that would have made him
the clear winner in the state.

There are also the so-called "over-votes" - ballots where a voter both
punched a hole in a ballot and wrote in the name of the candidate.
They are being reviewed by another group of newspapers. ("Under-votes"
are ballots kicked out by machine counters as showing no vote for
president.)

Troubling News Judgment

But possibly even more troubling in the Miami Herald's news judgment
is that the newspaper effectively rewards George W. Bush, again, for
his determined effort to frustrate a full and accurate count of
Florida's ballots.

If Bush had agreed early on to accept Gore's offer of a statewide
recount, state officials would have had time to fashion a reasonable
remedy that would have avoided many of the discrepancies in county-by-
county standards.

Such a remedy was the clear goal of the Florida Supreme Court when it
ruled on Dec. 8 that all 67 counties - not just the ones in South
Florida - should examine their under-votes. Obvious votes that had
been missed by the counting machines were to be added into the
totals. Disputed ballots were to be left to the state courts for a
final decision.

Contrary to the Miami Herald story, the Florida Supreme Court's
ruling did not exempt Palm, Broward and Volusia counties from this
effort to achieve a reasonably consistent statewide standard. The
court's ruling stated:

"Only by examining the contested ballots, which are evidence in the
election contest, can a meaningful and final determination in this
election contest be made.  In addition to the relief requested by
appellants (Gore's side) to count the Miami-Dade under-vote, claims
have been made by the various appellees and intervenors (other
parties interested in the case) that because this is a statewide
election, statewide remedies would be called for.

"As we discussed in this opinion, we agree. While we recognize that
time is desperately short, we cannot in good faith ignore the
appellants' right to relief as to their claims concerning the
uncounted votes in Miami-Dade county, nor can we ignore the
correctness of the assertions that any analysis and ultimate remedy
should be made on a statewide basis." [Emphasis added.]

The Florida Supreme Court left wide discretion on how to manage the
recount and how to achieve some uniformity in standards to a circuit
court judge.

"The circuit court is directed to enter such orders as are necessary
to add any legal votes to the total statewide certifications and to
enter any orders necessary - in tabulating the ballots and in making
a determination of what is a `legal' vote, the standard to be
employed is that established by the Legislature in our election code
which is that the vote shall be counted as a 'legal' vote if there
is 'clear indication of the intent of the voter'," the ruling
stated.  [For the full ruling, see www.flcourts.org]

Obstruction

But the next day, Dec. 9, as the statewide recount was underway,
Bush's lawyers raced to Washington and got five Republican justices
on the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the vote counting to protect Bush
from the "irreparable harm" that he might have suffered if the count
went against him.

On Dec. 12, the same five justices overturned the state court's
effort to achieve a balanced recount, effectively handing the White
House to George W. Bush, who had already lost the national popular
vote by more than a half million votes, but eked ahead in the
Electoral College with Florida's 25 electoral votes.

Now, with the handling of this unofficial recount, the Miami Herald
and USA Today have rewarded Bush again for his obstruction of a full
and fair tally of Florida's ballots.

Possibly, the newspapers' editors felt that little good would come
from highlighting the full statewide results that indicated a Gore
victory.

After all, Bush is president and there's no way to alter the official
results in Florida, no matter how much those results failed to
reflect the will of the state's voters. Plus, the stock markets are
falling and the United States is in a confrontation with China, the
editors might have felt.

But in crafting the latest recount story as they did, excluding three
counties and 139 precincts of a fourth, to make Bush as clear a
winner as possible, is just another reward handed to the Bush family.

It is a reward for doing everything possible to thwart the will of
the voters in Florida and across the United States.

*****

http://www.consortiumnews.com/040601a.html

So Gore Really Won?
April 6, 2001


One day after the Miami Herald published a story that prompted
national headlines about George W. Bush being the real winner in
Florida, the newspaper effectively recanted.

In a new story in Thursday's editions, the Herald acknowledged what
we also pointed out: that a careful examination of the Herald's own
data would have led to a conclusion that Al Gore was the choice of
Florida voters under a reasonable standard judging the "clear intent
of the voters."

The Herald's data revealed that by looking at the so-
called "undervotes" in all 67 counties and counting various markings
for president, Gore would have won Florida and thus the presidency.

The Herald's second-day story said Gore would have achieved net gains
of 1,475 votes in Palm Beach County and 1,081 votes in Broward County
if the various marks for president recorded on the ballots were
counted.

"Broward and Palm Beach canvassing boards... could have credited
hundreds more ballots to the Democrat if they had counted every
dimple, pinprick and hanging chad as a vote," the Herald reported.

Even with a more conservative standard, Gore could have erased Bush's
certified statewide victory of 537 votes, meaning that Gore could be
president today if a full, statewide recount had been permitted.

Yet, Wednesday's misleading "Bush Won" story -- pushed by the Herald
and its recount partner USA Today -- was widely embraced by the
national press corps and applauded by Bush partisans in the White
House. The new Herald story, entitled "Recounts Could Have Given Gore
the Edge," received only a fraction of the national attention.

Strange Logic

The earlier story reached its "Bush Won" conclusion by subtracting
Gore's gains in Palm Beach, Broward, Volusia and part of Miami-Dade
County. That subtraction was based on the questionable logic that
those votes would not have been included in the recount ordered by
the Florida Supreme Court on Dec. 8, even if the recount had not been
stopped by five Republican justices of the U.S. Supreme Court a day
later.

[For more details about the Herald's odd rationale, see "W's Latest
Unjust Reward."] 

After helping to establish the bogus conventional wisdom of Bush as
the legitimate winner, the Herald reversed itself with the second-day
story that reached what seems to be a contradictory conclusion.

"Had the Broward and Palm Beach canvassing boards used the loosest
standard in judging ballots... Gore almost certainly would have won,"
the Herald reported. "He might have gained 2,022 votes in the two
counties...

"And that tally may be conservative because it excludes the cleanly
punched ballots in Broward, 252 Bush votes and 786 Gore votes.
Broward election officials say they cannot be certain that cleanly
punched ballots weren't also read during the machine count."

The newspaper then quoted Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Fla., who followed
the Broward recount as saying that these marks on the ballots
represented the clear intent of voters.

"The reality is that the canvassing board did not use a liberal
standard and did not use the correct standard," Deutsch said. "Had
they used the correct standard, Al Gore would be president."

Deep inside the Wednesday "Bush Won" story, the Herald reported that
Gore would have carried Florida by 299 votes even with a more
conservative standard - counting undervotes that had been partially
punched through and ballots that had indentations in more than one
race, indicating a voter trying to cast a vote on a malfunctioning
voting machine.

As we pointed out, that information about Gore's apparent victory was
buried in the 44th paragraph of the Herald's initial story.

Missing Votes

In a related Florida-election development on Thursday, The New York
Times reported that hundreds of undervote ballots in Florida
apparently disappeared before the unofficial newspaper recounts could
be conducted, adding more confusion to the outcome.

"In Orange County, for example, officials reported in November that
they had found 966 ballots with no discernible vote for president,"
the Times said. "But when the newspapers went back to recount those
undervotes, the county could only produce 639 such ballots. In Miami-
Dade County, the discrepancy was 106 ballots; in Pasco 64." [NYT,
April 5, 2001]

The Times is part of a different group of newspapers conducting their
own recount in Florida, a tally that is expected to be finished in
about a month.

Unlike the Miami Herald/USA Today tally, the other newspapers are
counting both undervotes - those lacking a machine-read vote for
president - and overvotes - where voters may have punched a ballot
and then written in the name of the candidate of their choice.

Still, the Miami Herald's first misleading story reaffirming Bush's
victory is the one that has gotten virtually all the media play and
become the news media's conventional wisdom. The newspaper's reversal
a day later has been almost totally ignored.

Nevertheless, in contradiction of that conventional wisdom, the
evidence continues to build that Gore was not only the favorite of
Florida's voters - if there had not been irregularities with
the "butterfly ballot" and the purging of voters incorrectly
identified as felons - but it appears that Gore also would have been
elected president if a fair statewide recount had been permitted.

Thanks to the determined efforts of George W. Bush and his lawyers,
that opportunity was never permitted.

*****

http://www.consortiumnews.com/040801a.html

Protecting Americans from W's Illegitimacy
By Robert Parry
April 8, 2001


With little fanfare and outside the "conventional wisdom" of the
national press corps, the Miami Herald continues to tally more
missing votes for Al Gore, adding to the former vice president's lead
in unofficial recounts of the Florida election.

The Herald found "a net gain of at least 210 votes for Gore" from
smudged ballots in two Florida counties - Orange and St. Lucia - that
used optical scanners, according to the third part of its series on
its unofficial recount.

Yet, fitting the Herald's strange determination to depict George W.
Bush as the legitimate winner despite the findings of its own tally,
the Herald buried this new disclosure in the 22nd paragraph of the
story.

The newspaper also does not add these new votes to the totals that
show Gore ahead if other reasonable voting standards are used in
evaluating punch-hole ballots that were examined in the first two
stories.

In the third story, the Herald simply goes back to Bush's official
lead of 537 votes and states that the additional 210 Gore votes
were "not enough for victory, perhaps." [Miami Herald, April 6, 2001]

In its widely quoted - and highly misleading - first-day story on
April 4, the Herald portrayed Bush as the recount winner. That
conclusion, however, was reached only after the newspaper subtracted
Gore's gains in three counties - Palm Beach, Broward and Volusia -
and in 139 precincts of Miami-Dade County.

The Herald deducted those gains under the questionable theory that
those disputed votes would not have been counted under the ruling by
the Florida Supreme Court, which mandated a review of "undervotes" in
the 63-plus other counties and application of a common statewide
standard.

The Herald's interpretation of the ruling is dubious because it was
never clear if the state courts also would inspect the disputed
ballots in those three-plus counties - or why those disputed votes
would be treated differently than the ones in the other 63-plus
counties.

That final court determination was never made because Bush's lawyers
aborted the process by convincing five Republicans on the U.S.
Supreme Court to stop the recount and effectively hand Bush the White
House.

The Full Undervote

If those three-plus counties are included in the total and if
the "clear-intent-of-the-voter" standard counts partially punched
holes and indentations when they appear on multiple races, indicating
a defective machine - Gore would have won by 299 votes, according to
the Herald recount.

Using a more liberal standard of a single indentation for president,
Gore's lead grew to 393 votes, according to the Herald's tally. Only
with more restrictive standards, requiring a partially punched-
through chad and ignoring all indentations, Bush would have prevailed
by 352 votes, the newspaper said.

But those findings about the apparent will of the Florida voters were
buried in the 44th paragraph of the Herald's first-day story, which
focused instead on the hypothetical outcome if Palm Beach, Broward,
Volusia and part of Miami-Dade were excluded.

Virtually, all national press coverage concentrated on that
hypothetical finding - the one most favorable to Bush - and ignored
the actual statewide count that showed Gore prevailing if all marked
undervotes were included.

In a second-day story, the Herald reversed itself somewhat,
acknowledging that Gore could have achieved net gains of 1,475 votes
in Palm Beach County and 1,081 votes in Broward County if the various
marks for president recorded on the ballots were counted.

"Had the Broward and Palm Beach canvassing boards used the loosest
standard in judging ballots - Gore almost certainly would have won,"
the Herald reported. "He might have gained 2,022 votes in the two
counties...

"And that tally may be conservative because it excludes the cleanly
punched ballots in Broward, 252 Bush votes and 786 Gore votes
(another net gain of 534 votes for Gore). Broward election officials
say they cannot be certain that cleanly punched ballots weren't also
read during the machine count."

Now, in its third-day story, the Herald identified another net gain
for Gore of at least 210 votes from two counties with optical-
scanning voting machines that require circles to be filled in, not
chads punched through.

Anti-Black Bias

Also, on Friday, USA Today, the Herald's partner in the recount,
reported that voters in Florida's majority-black precincts were
almost four times as likely to have their votes for president thrown
out than voters in precincts that were heavily white.

"Black voters were more likely to have been affected by error-prone
antiquated voting equipment, poorly trained poll workers and general
confusion at polling places," USA Today reported.

In majority-black precincts, 8.9 percent of votes were uncounted,
compared to 2.4 percent in majority white precincts, the newspaper
said.

The discriminatory treatment of black voters underscores again why
the Florida Supreme Court's order for a statewide solution was so
important. Presumably, the court-ordered recount would have
eliminated some of these biases in the voting.

But Bush did everything in his power to prevent a full and fair
recount. He rejected Gore's proposal on Nov. 15 for a statewide
recount and then obstructed the limited recounts that were conducted.

At one point, on Nov. 22, Republican hooligans recruited from GOP
congressional staffs stormed the offices of the Miami-Dade
canvassers, who reversed their decision to conduct a recount as the
Republican rioters pounded on the doors and walls.

On Thanksgiving Day, the protesters were treated to a celebratory
party with Wayne Newton singing "Danke Schoen" and Bush making a
thankful phone call to them, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In court, Bush's lawyers continued to battle Gore's lawyers who were
seeking a timely recount of at least some of the votes.

Then, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount on
Dec. 8, Bush sent his lawyers to Washington and got five U.S. Supreme
Court justices to stop the counting of votes in a presidential
election for the first time in U.S. history.

On Dec. 12, the same five Republicans vacated the recount ruling -
leaving no time for any revisions and making Bush the president.

Rewarding Bush

Now, the Miami Herald and USA Today have rewarded Bush again, by
constructing their recount findings in curious ways to guarantee that
the outcome isn't changed.

The Herald first did this with a story on Feb. 26 that only looked at
the Miami-Dade recount, showing Bush clinging to a narrow victory.
Then, on April 4, the two newspapers fashioned their lead paragraphs
to focus not on the statewide recount findings, but on the outcome if
three-plus counties were subtracted from the total.

It was as if the conclusion had to be "Bush Wins" no matter what the
facts were.

The rest of the national press followed that lead, summarizing the
April 4 stories as meaning that Bush won the statewide recount. That
erroneous interpretation rapidly became the conventional wisdom,
routinely repeated by journalists now as if it were fact.

The information on the actual statewide recount - buried in the 44th
paragraph - virtually disappeared.

The recognition of Gore's likely victory if the recounts of Palm
Beach and Broward were included was highlighted in the second-day
story in the Miami Herald, but that article received almost no
attention in the rest of the news media.

Like that second-day story, the evidence of Gore's additional gains
in optical-scanner counties has been effectively ignored.

With Bush the national popular-vote loser by more than one-half
million votes and almost certainly not the first choice of Florida's
voters either, the national news media apparently feels that the
American people just can't handle the truth.

In its odd handling of the unofficial Florida recounts, the press
corps seems to want to make Bush's apparent defeat in Florida - and
thus his illegitimacy - a kind of state secret, something that the
American people just shouldn't know.


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LIVING IN WONDERLAND: TIRED OF THE LIES, PROPAGANDA AND HYPOCRISY

 By Gavin Phillips

 Free to re-post w/attribute

 During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

 "Please would you tell me," said Alice a little timidly "...why your cat grins like that?" "It's a Cheshire Cat," said the Duchess, "and that's why. Pig!" 

In Lewis Carrolls wonderful novel, "Alice in Wonderland," talking rabbits dash around wearing a waistcoat and a fob watch. Cats disappear and reappear with amazing alacrity. Alice explores a beautifully fantastic and eccentric world, but a world of fiction.

 Let us take a look at 3 major incidents in Clinton's 6 1/2 year presidency and determine if the official/mainstream media versions belong in our world, or in a wonderland of their own making.

  THE VINCE FOSTER "SUICIDE"

 The official story of the Vince Foster death is that Foster shot himself on July 20 1993 in Fort Marcy Park, Washington. But the enormous amount of evidence collected by investigative journalist Chris Ruddy leaves the official version in tatters. Ruddy has documented many dozens of major and minor inconsistencies, loopholes and massive incompetence in the government's investigation. I have listed below a small sampling of some of these. 

1 No suicide note 

2 Another torn note was found in a briefcase that previously had been searched 

3 Three handwriting experts, including one from Oxford University, concluded the note was a forgery. 

4 Body so neatly arranged, arms at sides, head straight up, as "if it was ready for the coffin," according to two paramedics. 

5 No fingerprints, though gun found in hand 

6 No visible blood splatter or blow-back on gun 

7 Gun remained in hand Vincent Scalice and Fred Santucci, two homicide experts formerly with the New York City Police Dept. say: "Red flag indicating possible foul play...In our 50 years combined experience investigating homicides, we have never seen a gun so neatly arranged in a suicide's hand. We believe the gun was staged."

 8 Gun not sent for testing until one week after official ruling of suicide 

9 Police underexposed key 35mm crime scene photos, other Polaroid's missing 

10 Relied on autopsy of Virginia medical examiner, who has been challenged in two suicide rulings - in one case the murderer later confessed 

11 Patrick knowlton , a witness who officials said was the first to spot Foster's Honda in the parking lot, claims the FBI "lied" in his witness statement; they claimed he could not identify a man he saw in the park; he says he can. 

12 Foster's glasses were found with gunpowder on them 19 feet from his head. Vincent Scalice and Fred Santucci say: "It is physically impossible for the eyeglasses to have moved 19 feet, or any significant distance from the body, as a result of the gun's explosion." I have only given a dozen examples of what Ruddy's investigation unearthed, there are nearly a hundred documented at his website www.newsmax.com, (or see his book, The Strange Death of Vince Foster)if you want further evidence. Another very important question is why was the Park Police, real life equivalents to the keystone Cops and little more than nightwatchman, initially put in charge of investigating the death of the highest public official to die in suspicious circumstances since JFK? 

Also unprecedented is the fact that the lead investigator had never handled a homicide case before. I suppose he needed the experience! When journalist and author Ambrose Evans-Pritchard located key witness Patrick knowlton he found out that the FBI had lied about Knowltons statements. Below is a small part of an interview between Wesly Phelan and Knowltons lawyer John Clark: 

CLARKE: ...Pritchard located and interviewed him. And Pat was telling the story, and Pritchard said "Are you telling the truth?" And Patrick said "Yes, why?" And Pritchard said "Because that's not what it says in your FBI 302 reports." And Patrick had never seen them, and so he said "Let me see them." So he went through them, and he said "This is a lie...This is a lie...This is a lie...A lot of lies in there."

 Another surprising coincidence is that the day before Foster committed suicide Bill Clinton dismissed FBI director William Sessions. He replaced him with errand boy Louis Freeh, a man who made his name by obtaining a very dubious conviction of a mail bomber. Later testimony showed that the FBI laboratory had manufactured evidence to make the prosecution's case stronger. Freeh is another Clinton lap-dog, a totally unprincipled bureaucrat who has helped orchestrate several large government cover-up's in the last 6 years. 

THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING

 The Oklahoma City bombing has a special interest for me as I have recently finished writing a book on the subject (The Oklahoma City Bombing: Searching For the Truth) The official/mainstream media version about the April 19 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma is that Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and a home-brew fertilizer truck bomb are responsible for the worst act of terrorism carried out on U.S. soil. 

They say that McVeigh was alone on the day of the bombing. But immediately after the bombing many people said that they either heard and/or felt two distinct explosions. Jim Ferguson was in the U.S. Federal Courthouse located just south of the Murrah Building, he stated, "Everyone in town, everybody who was there, knows there were two blasts." In Michelle Marie Moore's book, "Oklahoma City:Day One" pg 46 she states: "Two attorneys with offices in downtown Oklahoma City were both dictating correspondence at the time of the explosions. The taped records of the two explosive events and the rumbling of the collapse of the Murrah Building are clearly discernible on their audio cassettes."

 The most important question in the Oklahoma bombing is whether an ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) truck bomb placed about 15/20 feet from the building can destroy about 25% of the building? Prominent explosive, engineering and scientific expert's say it is totally impossible.

 Brigadier General Benton K. Partin, U.S. Air Force, retired, has 25 years experience in explosives and ballistic weapons design and testing. Partin studied hundreds of photographs of the bombed out building and has no doubt whatsoever that demolition charges were placed at major columns inside the building. He says in part: "The total incompatibility with a single truck bomb lies in the fact that either some columns collapsed that should not have collapsed or some of the columns are still standing that should have collapsed and did not." He concludes; "This is a classic cover-up of immense proportions." 

Sam Cohen, inventor of the Neutron bomb and one of the last men alive who worked on the Manhattan Project says: "I don't care how much fertilizer and fuel oil they used, it would never be enough. Demolition charges placed at key column did the dirty work."

 Robert Frias, President of Frias Engineering of Arlington, Texas, a practicing engineer for over 40 years, registered in Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana stated, "Explosives had to have been placed near, or on the structural columns inside the building to cause the collapse that occurred to the Murrah building." 

I spoke with Partin in April of this year and he again re-iterated the impossibility of the ANFO truck bomb scenario. He also stated how over-the-counter fertilizer is virtually useless for ANFO bombs because of it's high water content. Ammonium nitrate has to be kept bone dry otherwise it will not explode, that is why explosive grade ANFO is primarily used for bomb making. (for more information see www.thenewamerican.com/focus/okc/index.htm) 

There is also plenty of evidence that the government had prior warning about the bombing in Oklahoma. The BATF's own undercover agent Carol Howe spent most of her time at Elohim City (neo-nazi compound in East Oklahoma) and talking to Dennis Mahon, a virulent anti-government white supremacist, and Andreas Strassmeir, a German (probably another government informant/provocateur) who constantly spoke of terrorist actions. 

By November 1994 Carol reported Strassmeir and Mahon were discussing making direct government attacks such as "assassinations" and "bombings". Carol told the BATF that the "Federal building" in Oklahoma City was a possible target. She also mentioned that something called the "Morrow Building" was a possible target.. When it became public that Howe had given the government prior warning they arrested her on trumped charges of possessing bomb making material. She was aquitted on all charges. 

Shortly after the blast Bruce Shaw rushed up to the remains of the Murrah Building looking for his wife who worked there. Bruce asked an ATF agent about his wife's whereabouts. Bruce told KFOR's Brad Edward's that the agent "started getting a little bit nervous. He tried reaching someone on a two-way radio...He said they were in debriefing, that none of the agents had been in there. They'd been tipped by their pagers not to come to work that day. Plain as day out of his mouth. Those were the words he said.". Bruce's employer, Tony Brasier was with Bruce at the time and verified his statement to Brad Edward's. 

Dr. Frederick Whitehurst used to be in charge of the FBI crime laboratory. Whitehurst went public saying that his colleague's at the lab were constantly manipulating evidence in order to favor the prosecution, basically framing them. The Inspector General's office independently investigated Whitehurst's allegations and agreed with him. The Inspector Generals 450 page report is a scathing indictment of the Crime Labs investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing and confirms everything Whitehurst said. In summing up, the Inspector General's report said the FBI crime labs had "repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without a scientific basis" in the Oklahoma bombing case. After going public, Whitehurst was demoted and transferred. Whitehurst resigned from the FBI and recently settled his whistleblower lawsuit against the FBI for approximately 1.65 million.

 The official version of events in Oklahoma is one of the most blatant works of fiction ever perpetrated on the American public. A colossal amount of evidence exists proving that the government/mainstream media story of a couple of disaffected men and a homemade fertilizer truck bomb is utterly absurd. 

TWA 800 

TWA 800 exploded at about 8.31 pm on July 17 1996, some 12 minutes after taking off from Kennedy airport, 10 miles south of Long Island killing all 230 people aboard. The government theorizes the cause was an unknown spontaneous ignition in the fuel tank. They still do not know for sure. The FBI had closed it's 16 month investigation into the incident on November 13, 1997, and found "absolutely no evidence" of criminal involvement, or of a missile being responsible. 

Investigator James Sanders, author of the book, "The Downing of TWA Flight 800," came to a completely different conclusion, along with other investigators. Sanders' conclusion was that the U.S. Navy was involved in war-games on the night of July 17, and were testing a highly sophisticated, recently upgraded, anti-missile missile system called the AEGIS-CEC . 

The system was supposed to be able to differentiate between friendly, enemy and commercial aircraft, in the often very confusing airspace that you have in a war type situation. The system was meant to pick out the enemy's from all other aircraft despite radar jamming by the enemy. (see The Downing of TWA Flight 800 pg 15 through 25)Unbeknownst to the passengers and crew aboard TWA 800, the Navy was using them and other commercial aircraft coming and going from Kennedy airport as neutrals. 

According to Sanders the Navy launched a BQM-74E drone in the vicinity of Shinnecock Bay. Linda Kabot was taking photographs from Westhampton Beach and inadvertently caught an image of what looks like a drone missile on one of her pictures. The Navy then launched an antimissile missile at the drone, but according to Sanders, the AEGIS-CEC system malfunctioned and went "blind," and the missile locked onto the closest available target, TWA 800.

 A long Island FAA radar technician said he saw, "conflicting radar tracks that indicated a missile," just before TWA 800 disappeared. (IBID pg 26) James made contact with Terrel Stacey who was involved in the official investigation but was unhappy with the way it was being run. Stacey acquired two small pieces of seat covering which were covered in a reddish/orange colored residue. This substance was only on seats in rows 17 though 19 in the forward section of the plane, near where the nose section blew off. Sanders gave one piece to CBS so they could run tests on it, they promptly returned it to the FBI. 

The other piece he had tested by West Coast Analytical Services, who broke it down into a list of chemical components. Sanders says on page 136 of his book that, "All of these elements (listed) are consistent with residue from a solid fuel missile." 

The FBI said it was seat glue. Why it was only on those seats was never explained. The NTSB had it tested by NASA scientist Dr. Charles Bassett and said that he had proven that the residue was seat glue. But this was a lie, Basset later swore under oath that his tests did not link the residue to seat glue. 

The FBI were enraged at Sanders' revelations. They immediately seized his phone records so as to ascertain who his informant was. James and his wife Elizabeth were arrested in December 97, just prior to the NTSB hearings in which Sanders was going to speak. James Kallstrom, the FBI's lead investigator said: "These defendants are charged with not only committing a serious crime, they have also increased the pain already inflicted on the victims' families." Of course Kallstrom is doing everything he can to ease the families pain and suffering. What a squirming hypocrite Kallstrom is, for he also took a piece of the wreckage and gave it to a family member of one of the crash victims as a memento. Kallstrom is guilty of exactly the same "crime" the Sanders were found guilty of, but don't hold your breath waiting for him to stand trial. 

They also charged Terrel Stacy alongside James and Elizabeth Sanders. Stacy, who took the cloth, testified for the government and was given leniency, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, while James and Elizabeth were charged with a felony. James and Elizabeth Sanders were found guilty on April 13 1999 and were sentenced on July 16. Sanders was given three years probation and 50 hours of community service. His wife received one year probation and 25 hours of community service. 

This is the kind of malicious selective government prosecution you expect to find in Beijing or in one of Stalin's purges. The heavy handed iron fist of Big Brother making it abundantly clear that journalists exposing government lies will not be tolerated.

 Speaking of lies, the government has committed several during their "investigation." The Navy said that the closest government ship to TWA 800 when it crashed was the U.S.S. Normandy, 185 miles away. 

The Village Voice reported Dean Steward and his girlfriend Susan Smith saw a naval warship about 3 miles offshore at about 3.10 pm on the day of the crash. Steward is an 8 year Navy vet and says he thought the ship was an Aegis class cruiser. 

Barbara Pacholk also says she saw a surfaced submarine and two Navy ships prior to the crash. (see www.villagevoice.com/features/9928/davey.shtml) 

The Navy said their only only asset in the area was a P-3 Orion aircraft. The Navy later admitted that there were three submarines in the area at the time. The Navy said that the there were no military maneuvers in the area at the time of the crash. Later they admitted that there were classified maneuvers being carried out. 

James Kallstrom in a recorded interview with Reed Irvine on September 14 1998, said that three of the surface radar contacts "were Navy ships on classified maneuvers." James Kallstrom told Congress that the FBI's investigation had included "tracking of all air and waterborne vessels in the area at the time of the explosion followed by appropriate interviews." 

Kallstrom also said, "We turned over every stone, not once but 10 times." But the FBI failed to turn over one of the most important stones of all, an unknown radar blip which became known as "the 30 knot track." This object turned out to be a boat some 30 feet long which rapidly leaves from under the burning debris of TWA 800 as other boats turned to render assistance. This is obviously highly suspicious and could well be where terrorists launched shoulder mounted SAM missiles. 

This is the opinion of William S. Donaldson USN (Ret.). Donaldson has also thoroughly investigated the TWA 800 case and his conclusions are that TWA 800 was taken down by one or two SAM missiles launched by terrorists, probably affiliated with Osama Bin Laden. Donaldson has excellent credentials, former Officer in Charge of Carrier Battlegroup's Air Traffic Control Center, pilot and military accident investigator (see twa800.com/).

 Admiral Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "All evidence would point to a missile." (USA Today: Retired Officers Fire Missile Back Into Case. 1/9/98) 

The NTSB's Peter Goelz was not interested in the boat, he said, "It does not intrigue me." This is like a policeman saying that a car seen speeding away from a hit and run doesn't interest investigators. 

The FBI, in their desperation to explain why dozens of reliable witnesses saw a missile like object rise in the sky, proposed a theory that a stream of fuel had ignited and this is what they had seen. This explanation worked well as a stunt in the movie Die Hard II, but is totally ludicrous in the real world.

 Undaunted, the FBI turned to the masters of deceit, the CIA, to see what they could cook up. The CIA presented a video showing a nose-less 747 maintaining stable flight and actually climbing about 3000 feet before crashing. The witnesses were supposedly mistaking a burning rising 747 at over 13000 feet for a missile like object rising from the surface. Unfortunately for the CIA they forgot about the laws of aerodynamics and physics. 

Engineers and pilots had a good laugh at this preposterous work of fiction. The fact is that the second the 747 lost it's nose it would stall and drop like a brick, end of story. 

The FBI interviewed 154 "credible" witnesses who saw a missile like object rising through the sky and then suddenly exploding.

 During the NTSB's only public hearings on TWA 800 in Baltimore, December 1997, Kallstrom asked the NTSB not to include the well over a hundred eyewitnesses who reported seeing a missile like object rise from the ocean surface. 

The red residue was also not displayed or accounted for in the hearings. 

Major Frederick C. Meyer of the New York National Guard's 106th rescue wing was piloting an HH-60G helicopter over Gabreski airport in Westhampton Beach at the time TWA 800 crashed. Meyer is a Vietnam vet and flew helicopters in Vietnam and knows what missiles and flak look like. On March 12 1998 he told the Granada Forum: "My purpose in being here tonight is to tell you that what I saw explode in the sky on July 17, 1996 was military ordnance...We're here to say it's no accident - somebody shot this aircraft down." (plenty of information at www.accessone.com/~rivero/CRASH/TWA/twa.html) 

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

 Repeated large government cover-ups are impossible to contain when you have a nosy, questioning and confrontational free press tenaciously digging for the truth. The mainstream media today are an embarrassment to themselves and the profession of journalism they purport to represent. 

The last 30 some years they have become hand and foot maidens for the government and are now a de facto fourth branch of government. Bill Clinton's favorite pets, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time magazine have slipped through the looking glass into their fantasy-land and want you to join them there. This is a world where "home-brew" fertilizer truck bombs rip apart concrete and steel. Where commercial jets blow up in mid-air and it is blamed on unknown spontaneous ignitions, a virtually unprecedented occurrence, while dozens of highly credible eyewitness testimony pointing to a different cause is ignored.

 Anything can be conjured up in their world. A world of gobbledygook and flying ching-a-lings. A world where scrilinks flip you wonky donks and iridescent 7 headed say bays float lazily along on moonclouds. 

The mainstream media world is one in which the truth (never mention the word truth around them, it's been known to induce catatonia) in any event is molded, changed, re-invented, abstracted, distorted, glossed over and finally emerges in whatever configuration the mandarins of power want it shaped. They slavishly sit at the White Houses knee, jaws drooling, waiting for the command to obfuscate the truth in another incident; off they dash, tails wagging in anticipation of a new opportunity to spread deceit and falsehood.

 I often wonder what happened to the ideals and aspirations of the editors and journalists of the mainstream press, what happened to their dreams of blazing their own path? I suppose they dispensed with them the second they found out that The Washington Post, New York Times et al are not in the truth business; they are in the making people believe in 3 winged glofats business. They ditched any noble thoughts they once had of informing people about the truth on important issues once they realized it was a despised trait by the editors of the mainstream media. They replaced integrity with venality, replaced principles for prestige, replaced scruples with social standing, replaced self worth for self importance. Anyway, now they can go to fancy cocktail parties and brush shoulders with Senators and Congressman who have also sold out. But that is who they feel most comfortable with, for they also believe in purple and green spotted zigomuffins. Unfortunately for the mainstream media fewer and fewer people take them seriously anymore. The Internet is their nemesis, the mere mention of which gets them highly agitated; flailing of the arms and wild snorting has also been witnessed. Once they compose themselves they sniff imperiously, 'they are all conspiracy nuts.' Of course there are rumors and gossip on the Internet, but the vast majority of people know how to differentiate between the two. All theories are open to the harsh criticism of thousands who openly and honestly debate incidents such as the ones discussed in this article. They have been tested by the fire of honest public debate and the conclusions are that the government/mainstream media are lying through their teeth. 

The Internet is flourishing and news websites such as Worldnetdaily.com and freerepublic.com are getting millions of readers weekly.

 "Reporting" in the Post and Times has become the laughing stock for many, the only use they serve now is to see just how far from the truth they will go whilst trying to propagate the governments latest 60 legged vay jay story. But the propaganda and lies keep on coming and being exposed. There must be some very red faces at the Pentagon lately. Yes, it turns out that NATO's great victory in Kosovo is nowhere near as great as we were led to believe. Two thousand Serb civilians were "collaterally damaged." Just prior to war's end NATO claimed it had destroyed about 60% of it's artillery and about 40% of their main battle tanks. But the London Times reported on June 24, "hundreds of Serb dummies managed to fool the NATO brass dummies into believing they were bombing hundreds of Serbian tanks and artillery." The Times goes onto say, "NATO's 79-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia...succeeded in damaging only 13 of the Serbs' 300 battle tanks in Kosovo." 

After all the rhetoric and chest thumping by the Pentagon war mongers about how sophisticated and efficient our technology is, they were fooled by the simplest and oldest trick in the book, decoys made of plastic and wood. "When you're traveling at 500mph at 15,000ft, it is easy to be fooled," a KFOR (NATO's Kosovo Force) told The Times. 

Col. David Hackworth (Ret), (author of "About Face") the most decorated American soldier alive recently wrote an article for Worldnetdaily, entitled "How the Serbs Outfoxed NATO,"in part he says; "During the conflict, smart bombs and missiles costing from 50 grand to 2 million bucks repeatedly blew up decoy "tanks," "artillery pieces" and other "targets" made of sticks and plastic, some of which included primitive heat sources for faking out gold-plated thermal-image systems in NATO aircraft. "U.S. aircraft flying at 15,000 feet had a field day blowing up these "Serb air defense units" and other dummy targets, while their spinners back at NATO headquarters daily chanted to the world, "We are significantly degrading their air defense and combat ability." And after 6 1/2 years of lies, dishonor and betrayal, Bill Clinton still sits on his throne. A depraved and morally bankrupt master con-man whose only legacy is having run the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States and the only sitting President to be accused of rape. And by his feet sit his most loyal supplicants, the mainstream media, whose power to deceive is rapidly diminishing I can hardly wait for their next work of fiction though; glowing, cappuccino slurping Jazzmavens perhaps?

Reproduced from:  www.mmsweb.com

OBSTINATE MEMORY AND PURSUIT OF THE PRESENT
Delaying the News Until It No Longer Matters

Norman Solomon is the author of The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. He writes Media Beat, a nationally syndicated column.


Henry Kissinger usually has an easy time defending the indefensible on national television. But he faced some pointed questions during a recent interview with the PBS "NewsHour" about the U.S. role in bringing a military dictatorship to Chile. When his comments aired on February 20, the famous American diplomat made a chilling spectacle of himself.

Nearly three years after the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected socialist president Salvador Allende in September 1973 and brought Augusto Pinochet to power, Kissinger huddled with the general in Chile. A declassified memo says that Kissinger told Pinochet: "We are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here."

While interviewing Kissinger, "NewsHour" correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth asked him point-blank about the discussion with Pinochet. "Why did you not say to him, 'You're violating human rights. You're killing people. Stop it.'?"

Kissinger replied: "First of all, human rights were not an international issue at the time, the way they have become since. That was not what diplomats and secretaries of states and presidents were saying generally to anybody in those days."

Right. Back then, we didn't know that it was wrong to kidnap people; to hold them as political prisoners; to torture them; to murder them.

In Chile, the victims of Kissinger's great skills numbered into the thousands; in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, into the hundreds of thousands.

Monopoly Media Manipulation

By Michael Parenti

Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com


http://www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html

Michael Parenti Political Archive

May 2001

Monopoly Media Manipulation

By Michael Parenti

In a capitalist "democracy" like the United States, the corporate
news media faithfully reflect the dominant class ideology both in
their reportage and commentary. At the same time, these media leave
the impression that they are free and independent, capable of
balanced coverage and objective commentary. How they achieve these
seemingly contradictory but legitimating goals is a matter worthy of
study. Notables in the media industry claim that occasional
inaccuracies do occur in news coverage because of innocent error and
everyday production problems such as deadline pressures, budgetary
restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a
concise report. Furthermore, no communication system can hope to
report everything, hence selectivity is needed.

To be sure, such pressures and problems do exist and honest mistakes
are made, but do they really explain the media's overall performance?
True the press must be selective, but what principle of selectivity
is involved? I would argue that media bias usually does not occur in
random fashion; rather it moves in more or less consistent
directions, favoring management over labor, corporations over
corporate critics, affluent whites over low income minorities,
officialdom over protestors, the two-party monopoly over leftist
third parties, privatization and free market "reforms" over public
sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over
revolutionary or populist social change, and conservative
commentators and columnists over progressive or radical ones.


Suppression by Omission

Some critics complain that the press is sensationalistic and
invasive. In fact, it is more often muted and evasive. More insidious
than the sensationalistic hype is the artful avoidance. Truly
sensational stories (as opposed to sensationalistic) are downplayed
or avoided outright. Sometimes the suppression includes not just
vital details but the entire story itself, even ones of major import.
Reports that might reflect poorly upon the national security state
are least likely to see the light of day. Thus we hear about
political repression perpetrated by officially designated "rogue"
governments, but information about the brutal murder and torture
practiced by U.S.-sponsored surrogate forces in the Third World, and
other crimes committed by the U.S. national security state are denied
public airing, being suppressed with a consistency that would be
called "totalitarian" were it to occur in some other countries.

The media downplay stories of momentous magnitude. In 1965 the
Indonesian military -- advised, equipped, trained, and financed by
the U.S. military and the CIA -- overthrew President Achmed Sukarno
and eradicated the Indonesian Communist Party and its allies, killing
half a million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in
what was the greatest act of political mass murder since the Nazi
Holocaust. The generals also destroyed hundreds of clinics,
libraries, schools, and community centers that had been established
by the Communists. Here was a sensational story if ever there was
one, but it took three months before it received passing mention in
Time magazine and yet another month before it was reported in the New
York Times (April 5, 1966), accompanied by an editorial that actually
praised the Indonesian military for "rightly playing its part with
utmost caution."

Over the course of forty years, the CIA involved itself with drug
traffickers in Italy, France, Corsica, Indochina, Afghanistan, and
Central and South America. Much of this activity was the object of
extended congressional investigation -- by Senator Church's committee
and Congressman Pike's committee in the 1970s, and Senator Kerry's
committee in the late 1980s. But the corporate capitalist media seem
not to have heard about it.


Attack and Destroy the Target

When omission proves to be an insufficient mode of censorship and a
story somehow begins to reach larger publics, the press moves from
artful avoidance to frontal assault in order to discredit the story.
In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News, drawing from a year-long
investigation, ran an in-depth series about the CIA-contra crack
shipments that were flooding East Los Angeles. Holding true to form,
the major media mostly ignored the issue. But the Mercury News series
was picked up by some local and regional newspapers, and was flashed
across the world on the Internet copiously supplemented pertinent
documents and depositions supporting the charges against the CIA.
African American urban communities, afflicted by the crack epidemic,
were up in arms and wanted to know more. The story became difficult
to ignore. So, the major media began an all-out assault. A barrage of
hit pieces in the Washington Post and New York Times and on network
television and PBS assured us that there was no evidence of CIA
involvement, that the Mercury News series was "bad journalism," and
that its investigative reporter Gary Webb was irresponsibly playing
on the public's gullibility and conspiracy mania. By a process of
relentless attack and shameless mendacity, the major media exonerated
the CIA from any involvement in drug trafficking.


Labeling

Like all propagandists, mainstream media people seek to prefigure our
perception of a subject with a positive or negative label. Some
positive ones are: "stability," "the president's firm leadership," "a
strong defense," and "a healthy economy." Indeed, not many Americans
would want instability, wobbly presidential leadership, a weak
defense, and a sick economy. The label defines the subject without
having to deal with actual particulars that might lead us to a
different conclusion.

Some common negative labels are: "leftist guerrillas," "Islamic
terrorists," "conspiracy theories," "inner-city gangs," and "civil
disturbances." These, too, are seldom treated within a larger context
of social relations and issues. The press itself is facilely and
falsely labeled "the liberal media" by the hundreds of conservative
columnists, commentators, and talk-shows hosts who crowd the
communication universe while claiming to be shut out from it. Some
labels we will never be exposed to are "class power," "class
struggle," and "U.S. imperialism."

A new favorite among deceptive labels is "reforms," whose meaning is
inverted, being applied to any policy dedicated to undoing the
reforms that have been achieved after decades of popular struggle. So
the destruction of family assistance programs is labeled "welfare
reform." "Reforms" in Eastern Europe, and most recently in
Yugoslavia, have meant the heartless impoverishment of former
Communist countries, the dismantling of what remained of the public
economy, its deindustrialization and expropriation at fire sale
prices by a corporate investor class, complete with massive layoffs,
drastic cutbacks in public assistance and human services, and a
dramatic increase in unemployment and human suffering. "IMF reforms"
is a euphemism for the same kind of bruising cutbacks throughout the
Third World. As Edward Herman once noted, "reforms" are not the
solution, they are the problem.

In April 2001, the newly elected prime minister of Japan, Junichiro
Koisumi, was widely identified in the U.S. media as a "reformer." His
free-market "reforms" include the privatization of Japan's postal
saving system. Millions of Japanese have their life savings in the
postal system and the "reformer" Koisumi wants private investors to
be able to get their hands on these funds.

"Free market" has long been a pet label, evoking images of economic
plenitude and democracy. In reality, free-market policies undermine
the markets of local producers, provide state subsidies to
multinational corporations, destroy public sector services, and
create greater gaps between the wealthy few and the underprivileged
many.

Another favorite media label is "hardline." Anyone who resists free-
market "reforms," be it in Belarus, Italy, Peru, or Yugoslavia, is
labeled a "hardliner." An article in the New York Times (10/21/97)
used "hardline" and "hardliner" eleven times to describe Bosnian Serb
leaders who opposed attempts by NATO forces to close down
the "hardline Bosnian Serb broadcast network." The radio station in
question was the only one in all of Bosnia that offered a perspective
critical of Western intervention in Yugoslavia. The forceful closing
of this one remaining dissenting media voice was described by the
Times as "a step toward bringing about responsible news coverage in
Bosnia." The story did note "the apparent irony" of using foreign
soldiers for "silencing broadcasts in order to encourage free
speech." The NATO troops who carried out this repressive task were
identified with the positive label of "peacekeepers."

It is no accident that labels like "hardline" are never subjected to
precise definition. The efficacy of a label is that it not have a
specific content which can be held up to a test of evidence. Better
that it be self-referential, propagating an undefined but evocative
image.


Preemptive Assumption

Frequently the media accept as given the very policy position that
needs to be critically examined. Whenever the White House proposes an
increase in military spending, press discussion is limited to how
much more spending is needed, how much updating of weaponry; are we
doing enough or need we do still more? No media exposure is given to
those who hotly contest the already gargantuan arms budget in its
totality. It is assumed that U.S. forces must be deployed around the
world, and that hundreds of billions must be spent each year on this
global military system.

Likewise with media discussion of Social Security "reform," a
euphemism for the privatization and eventual abolition of a program
that is working well. The media preemptively assume the very dubious
position that needs to be debated: that the program, is in danger of
insolvency (in thirty years) and therefore in need of drastic
overhauling today. Social Security operates as a three-pronged human
service: in addition to retirement pensions, it provides survivors'
insurance (up until the age of 18) to children in families that have
lost their breadwinner, and it offers disability assistance to
persons of pre-retirement age who have sustained serious injury or
illness. But from existing press coverage you would not know this --
and most Americans do not.


Face-Value Transmission

Many labels are fabricated not by news media but by officialdom. U.S.
governmental and corporate leaders talk about "our global
leadership," "national security," "free markets," and "globalization"
when what they mean is "All Power to the Transnationals." The media
uncritically and dutifully accept these official views, transmitting
them to wider publics without any noticeable critical comment
regarding the actual content of the policy. Face-value transmission
has characterized the press's performance in almost every area of
domestic and foreign policy.

When challenged on this, reporters respond that they cannot inject
their own personal views into their reports. Actually, no one is
asking them to. My criticism is that they already do, and seldom
realize it. Their conventional ideological perceptions usually
coincide with those of their bosses and with officialdom in general,
making them face-value purveyors of the prevailing orthodoxy. This
uniformity of bias is perceived as "objectivity."

The alternative to challenging face-value transmission is not to
editorialize about the news but to question the assertions made by
officialdom, to consider critical data that might give credence to an
alternative view. Such an effort is not an editorial or ideological
pursuit but an empirical and investigative one, albeit one that is
not usually tolerated in the capitalist press beyond certain safely
limited parameters.


Slighting of Content

One has to marvel at how the corporate news media can give so much
emphasis to surface happenings, to style and process, and so little
to the substantive issues at stake. A glaring example is the way
elections are covered. The political campaign is reduced to a horse
race: Who will run? Who will get the nomination? Who will win the
election? News commentators sound like theater critics as they hold
forth on how this or that candidate projected a positive image, came
across effectively, and had a good rapport with the audience. The
actual issues are accorded scant attention, and the democratic
dialogue that is supposed to accompany a contest for public office
rarely is heard through the surface din.

Accounts of major strikes -- on those rare occasions the press
attends to labor struggles -- offer a similar slighting of content
while focusing heavily on process. We are told how many days the
strike has lasted, the inconvenience and cost to the public and the
economy, and how negotiations threaten to break down. Missing is any
reference to the substance of the conflict, the grievances that drive
workers reluctantly to the extreme expediency of a strike, such as,
cutbacks in wages and benefits, loss of seniority, safety issues, or
the unwillingness of management to negotiate a contract.

Media pundits often talk about the "larger picture." In fact, their
ability or willingness to link immediate events and issues to larger
social relations is almost nonexistent, nor would a broader analysis
be tolerated by their bosses. Instead, they regularly give us the
smaller picture, this being a way of slighting content and remaining
within politically safe boundaries. Thus the many demonstrations
against international free-trade agreements beginning with NAFTA and
GATT are reported, if at all, as contests between protestors and
police with little reference to the issues of democratic sovereignty
and unaccountable corporate power that impel the protestors.

Consider the press treatment of the suppression of the vote in
Florida during the 2000 presidential campaign. After a count of
ballots by the Miami Herald and USA Today, that took a limited view
of what was open to challenge, major media across the country
announced that Bush in fact won in Florida. Other investigations
indicate that such was not the case at all, but these remain largely
unpublicized. Furthermore, press treatment has focused almost
exclusively on problems relating to questionable counts, with much
discussion of ballot "dimples" and "chads." But in the aftermath,
hardly a word was uttered about the ballots that were never
collected, and the thousands of people who were disfranchised by the
repressive ploys of Florida officials and state troopers. Again, what
we got was the smaller (safer) picture, one that does not challenge
the legitimacy of the electoral process and the authorities who
preside over it.


False Balancing

In accordance with the canons of good journalism, the press is
supposed to tap competing sources to get both sides of an issue. In
fact, both sides are seldom accorded equal prominence. One study
found that on NPR, supposedly the most liberal of the mainstream
media, right-wing spokespeople are often interviewed alone, while
liberals -- on the less frequent occasions they appear -- are almost
always offset by conservatives. Furthermore, both sides of a story
are not usually all sides. The whole left-progressive and radical
portion of the opinion spectrum is amputated from the visible body
politic.

False balancing was evident in a BBC World Service report (December
11, 1997) that spoke of "a history of violence between Indonesian
forces and Timorese guerrillas" -- with not a hint that the
guerrillas were struggling for their lives against an Indonesian
invasion force that had slaughtered some 200,000 Timorese. Instead,
the genocidal invasion of East Timor was made to sound like a grudge
fight, with "killings on both sides." By imposing a neutralizing
gloss, the BBC announcer was introducing a serious distortion.

The U.S.-supported wars in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s
were often treated with that same kind of false balancing. Both those
who burned villages and those who were having their villages burned
were depicted as equally involved in a contentious bloodletting.
While giving the appearance of being objective and neutral, one
actually neutralizes the subject matter and thereby drastically warps
it.


Follow-up Avoidance

When confronted with an unexpectedly dissident response, media hosts
quickly change the subject, or break for a commercial, or inject an
identifying announcement: "We are talking with [whomever]." The
purpose is to avoid going any further into a politically forbidden
topic no matter how much the unexpected response might seem to need a
follow-up query. An anchorperson for the BBC World Service (December
26, 1997) enthused: "Christmas in Cuba: For the first time in almost
forty years Cubans were able to celebrate Christmas and go to
church!" She then linked up with the BBC correspondent in Havana, who
observed, "A crowd of two thousand have gathered in the cathedral for
midnight mass. The whole thing is rather low key, very much like last
year." Very much like last year? Here was something that craved
clarification. Instead, the anchorperson quickly switched to another
question: "Can we expect a growth of freedom with the pope's visit?"

On a PBS talk show (January 22, 1998), host Charlie Rose asked a
guest, whose name I did not get, whether Castro was bitter about "the
historic failure of communism". No, the guest replied, Castro is
proud of what he believes communism has done for Cuba: advances in
health care and education, full employment, and the elimination of
the worst aspects of poverty. Rose fixed him with a ferocious glare,
then turned to another guest to ask: "What impact will the pope's
visit have in Cuba?" Rose ignored the errant guest for the rest of
the program.


Framing

The most effective propaganda relies on framing rather than on
falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it, using
emphasis and other auxiliary embellishments, communicators can create
a desired impression without resorting to explicit advocacy and
without departing too far
from the appearance of objectivity. Framing is achieved in the way
the news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front
page or buried within, lead story or last), the tone of presentation
(sympathetic or slighting), the headlines and photographs, and, in
the case of broadcast media, the accompanying visual and auditory
effects.

Newscasters use themselves as auxiliary embellishments. They
cultivate a smooth delivery and try to convey an impression of
detachment that places them above the rough and tumble of their
subject matter. Television commentators and newspaper editorialists
and columnists affect a knowing tone designed to foster credibility
and an aura of certitude, or what might be called "authoritative
ignorance," as expressed in remarks like "How will this situation
end? Only time will tell." Or, "No one can say for sure." Trite
truisms are palmed off as penetrating truths. Newscasters learn to
fashion sentences like "Unless the strike is settled soon, the two
sides will be in for a long and bitter struggle." And "The space
launching will take place as scheduled if no unexpected problems
arise." And "Unless Congress acts soon, this bill is not likely to go
anywhere."


Stuff Just Happens

Many things are reported in the news but few are explained. Little is
said about how the social order is organized and for what purposes.
Instead we are left to see the world as do mainstream pundits, as a
scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance,
circumstance, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual
ambition -- rarely by powerful class interests. Passive voice and
impersonal subject are essential rhetorical constructs for this mode
of evasion. So we read or hear that "fighting broke out in the
region," or "many people were killed in the disturbances," or "famine
is on the increase." Recessions apparently just happen like some
natural phenomenon ("our economy is in a slump"), having little to do
with the constant war of capital against labor and the contradictions
between productive power and earning power.

If we are to believe the media, stuff just happens.
Consider "globalization," a pet label that the press presents as a
natural and inevitable development. In fact, globalization is a
deliberate contrivance of multinational interests to undermine
democratic sovereignty throughout the world. International "free
trade" agreements set up international trade councils that are
elected by no one, are accountable to no one, operate in secrecy
without conflict of interest restrictions, and with the power to
overrule just about all labor, consumer, and environmental laws, and
all public services and regulations in all signatory nations. What we
actually are experiencing with GATT, NAFTA, FTAA, GATS, and the WTO
is deglobalization, an ever greater concentration of politico-
economic power in the hands of an international investor class, a
global coup d'etat that divests the peoples of the world of any trace
of protective democratic input.

In keeping with the liberal paradigm, the media never asks why things
happen the way they do. Social problems are rarely associated with
the politico-economic forces that create them. So we are taught to
truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something
different. Suppose we report, as is seldom reported, that the harshly
exploitative labor conditions existing in so many countries generally
has the backing of their respective military forces. Suppose further
that we cross another line and note that these rightwing military
forces are fully supported by the U.S. national security state. Then
suppose we cross that most serious line of all and instead of just
deploring this fact we also ask why successive U.S. administrations
have involved themselves in such unsavory pursuits throughout the
world. Suppose we conclude that the whole phenomenon is consistent
with a dedication to making the world safe for free-market corporate
capitalism, as measured by the kinds of countries that are helped and
the kinds that are attacked. Such an analysis almost certainly would
not be printed anywhere except in a few select radical publications.
We crossed too many lines. Because we tried to explain the particular
situation (bad labor conditions) in terms of a larger set of social
relations (corporate class power), our presentation would be rejected
out of hand as "Marxist" -- which indeed it is, as is much of reality
itself.

In sum, the news media's daily performance under what is
called "democratic capitalism" is not a failure but a skillfully
evasive success. We often hear that the press "got it wrong"
or "dropped the ball" on this or that story. In fact, the media do
their job remarkably well. Media people have a trained incapacity for
the whole truth. Their job is not to inform but disinform, not to
advance democratic discourse but to dilute and mute it. Their task is
to give every appearance of being conscientiously concerned about
events of the day, saying so much while meaning so little, offering
so many calories with so few nutrients. When we understand this, we
move from a liberal complaint about the press's sloppy performance to
a radical analysis of how the media maintain the dominant paradigm
with much craft and craftiness.
--

Michael Parenti's most recent books are To Kill a Nation:
The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso) and History as Mystery
(City Lights).


If you are interested in a free subscription to The
Konformist Newswire,  please visit:

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THE PENTAGON PAPERS: MEDIA PRAISE RINGING HOLLOW
By Norman Solomon   /   Creators Syndicate

         When they challenged the power of the White House by
claiming the right to publish the Pentagon Papers, the nation's two
most influential newspapers took a laudable stand. During the three
decades since then, praise for their journalistic courage has become
a time-honored ritual in the media world.

         Thirty years ago, the New York Times and the Washington Post
engaged in fierce legal combat with President Nixon. The U.S.
government got a temporary injunction to stop them from continuing to
inform readers about the contents of the Pentagon Papers, a secret
official study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The legal
battle went on for 15 days -- ending on June 30, 1971, when the
Supreme Court ruled (6 to 3) in favor of the newspapers and the First
Amendment. Publication of the Pentagon Papers resumed.

         This month, pundits have again applauded media stars in the
historic drama. On CNN, liberal Al Hunt declared that the Washington
Post's Katharine Graham and Benjamin Bradlee "are the most
significant publisher and editor of the last half century."
Conservative Robert Novak also paid homage: "There was a terrible
effort by the Nixon people to have prior restraint of a newspaper's
publication. ... I certainly credit Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham
for fighting for the freedom of the press."

         Meanwhile, farther north along the elite media corridor,
columnist Anthony Lewis likes to extol his bosses for their bravery.
Five years ago, he wrote about "the decision that, more than any
other, established the modern independence of the American press --
its willingness to challenge official truth. That was the decision of
the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers." He added
that "the episode had a galvanizing effect on the press" -- and
now, "the spirit is there to hold government accountable."

         Days ago, Lewis was at it again, assuring readers that the
Pentagon Papers marked a profound transformation of American
journalism: "What changed the attitude of the Times and other
mainstream publications was the experience of the Vietnam War. In the
old days in Washington the press respected the confidence of
officials because it respected their superior knowledge and good
faith. But the war had shown that their knowledge was dim, and
respect for their good faith had died with their false promises and
lies."

         In contrast to all the talk about the glorious defeat of
prior restraint, we hear very little about the ongoing and pernicious
self-restraint exercised by media outlets routinely touted as the
best there is.

         High-profile reporters and commentators like Hunt, Novak and
Lewis are much too circumspect to mention, for instance, the November
1988 speech that Graham delivered to senior CIA officials at the
agency headquarters in Langley, Va., where the Washington Post
publisher said: "There are some things the general public does not
need to know and shouldn't. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to
keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what
it knows."

         On an earlier occasion, Graham recounted: "There have been
instances in which secrets have been leaked to us which we thought
were so dangerous that we went to them [U.S. officials] and told them
that they had been leaked to us and did not print them."

         During the 1980s, the powerful publisher enjoyed frequent
lunches with Nancy Reagan, often joined by Post editorial-page editor
Meg Greenfield. Graham comforted the president's wife while the Iran-
Contra scandal unfolded.

         Graham developed close relationships with such high-ranking
foreign policy officials as Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and
George Shultz. But she has always denied any harm to the independence
of her employees at the Washington Post and Newsweek.

         "I don't believe that whom I was or wasn't friends with
interfered with our reporting at any of our publications," Graham
wrote in her autobiography, published in 1997. However, Robert Parry -
- who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last
three years of the
'80s -- recalls firsthand experiences that contradict her assurances.
Parry witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-
Newsweek executives and senior national security figures."

         Among Parry's examples: "On one occasion in 1987, I was told
that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through
Nicaragua's Catholic Church had been watered down because the story
needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house
guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors
that the story as written might cause some consternation." Overall,
Parry told me, "the Post-Newsweek company is protective of the
national security establishment."

         With key managers at major news organizations deciding
what "the general public does not need to know," the government
probably won't face enough of a media challenge to make a restraining
order seem necessary.
____________________________________________________

Norman Solomon's weekly syndicated column -- archived at
www.fair.org/media-beat/ -- focuses on media and politics. His latest
book
is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media."

ACTION ALERT: "Political Dynamite" Fails to Explode

Extreme proposals of Treasury's O'Neill mostly unreported
June 13, 2001

http://www.fair.org/activism/o'neill.html

FAIR
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
130 W. 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
ACTION ALERT: "Political Dynamite" Fails to Explode

Extreme proposals of Treasury's O'Neill mostly unreported
June 13, 2001

When a high-level government official calls for drastic changes in
U.S. law, it ought to be big news. But in an interview reported by
the Financial Times' Amity Shlaes (5/19/01 & 5/22/01), treasury
secretary Paul O'Neill called for sweeping changes in U.S. tax and
social policy, and some three weeks later, those statements have made
hardly a ripple in the U.S. media. Most Americans have probably not
heard a word about them.

In the interview, O'Neill called the current U.S. tax system "an
abomination" that required changes to its "very structure." His
preferred changes? O'Neill "absolutely" supports the elimination of
taxes on corporations-- and the shifting of the tax burden to
individuals, saying government would work better if it "collected
taxes in a more direct way from the people."

He also called for the abolition of Social Security and Medicare, on
the grounds that "able-bodied adults should save enough on a regular
basis so that they can provide for their own retirement, and, for
that matter, health and medical needs." In fact, O'Neill believes the
U.S. should reconsider the whole purpose of taxation: "National
defense is a federal responsibility," Shlaes paraphrases O'Neill as
saying, "but all other outlays need review."

And O'Neill assured Shlaes he was not speaking only for himself: "Not
only am I committed to working on this issue, the president is also
intrigued about the possibility of fixing this mess."

The Financial Times described O'Neill's comments (approvingly)
as "radical" and "political dynamite." Yet the story has so far
failed to take hold in the U.S. press.

Three columnists at New York's Newsday noted O'Neill's remarks:
Robert Reno (who said the Treasury Secretary "comes across as a man
who has paid a lot of taxes and clearly resents it"-- 5/27/01) Marie
Cocco (5/31/01) and Paul Vitello (5/24/01). An obviously irked
Vitello took it the furthest, actually calling O'Neill's spokesman at
Treasury to confirm that these were not "made-up quotes":

"The secretary didn't really mean to say that no matter how old, no
person who has paid into the Social Security system all his or her
life would be entitled to benefits until he or she is physically no
longer able to work? He didn't really mean to say that ExxonMobil and
Time Warner should be treated as we treat the church-- as tax exempt?

"'Yes,' said the spokesman, 'that is our position. The quotes were
all accurate.'"

Thomas DeFrank of New York's Daily News also reported O'Neill's
comments (5/22/01), but he apparently got a different response from
the Treasury Department. "Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said
O'Neill's comments on Social Security reflected his personal views,
not the Bush administration's," he noted.

Outside of local New York papers, the story was harder to find. Cox
wire service reporter Scott Shepard filed a story (5/20/01), which
noted only O'Neill's description of the tax system as
an "abomination" and the claim that the president was "also
intrigued" about major changes, including cutting corporate taxes. A
short piece in the May 22 Investor's Business Daily ("A Whiff of
Reform in the Air") did the same, and was echoed in its approving
tone by a column in the May 23 Washington Times ("Signals for Tax
Repair?").

O'Neill has made several television appearances since the Financial
Times interview, but a search of the Nexis.com database turned up
just two TV references to the remarks, neither on a Big 3 network.
The Financial Times' own Robert Thomson teased his paper's interview
at the end of a May 18 appearance on CNNfn's "The N.E.W. Show" whose
main subject was the Lucent/Alcatel merger. And Fox News Sunday host
Tony Snow asked O'Neill about the idea of "getting rid of the
corporate income tax" on June 3. (O'Neill declined to answer, saying
only that "we need to fundamentally look at the way our tax code
works.")

What about the country's major outlets, the place one would look for
a story of such import? So far, O'Neill's radical statements have
made it into the New York Times. USA Today ran an Associated Press
column (5/22/01) that placed O'Neill's calls for eliminating taxes on
corporations at the end, after discussion of estate taxes
and "simplification" of the tax system, and noted only that the
Treasury Secretary has plans for "reform" of Social Security. (AP's
original headline on the piece: "O'Neill: Further Tax Relief Coming,"
5/21/01.)

Washington Post columnist John O. Fox used O'Neill's "abomination"
quote to shore up his own argument about the U.S.'s "monstrously
complicated" tax code, but ignored the rest of his statements. And
the Post's David Broder made no reference to the Financial Times
interview in his June 6 column, which referred to Bush administration
plans to "open [Social Security and Medicare] up to market forces."

Broder did note congenially that "as Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill...reminded me the other day, what makes the task so difficult
is the need to educate people about the current system, before they
can be persuaded that it needs to be changed as the administration
proposes."

Indeed, the American people could use "educating" about just what the
Bush administration and its Treasury Secretary propose. But where
will they get it if not from the mainstream news media?

COKIE ROBERTS. One of her principals lies, that her late father, Cong. Hale Boggs [D.,La.]believed a "lone assassin" [not the American CIA] assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Cong. Boggs sat on the Warren Commission which concluded that a "lone nut" blew out the brains of JFK in an open car in Dallas. By 1971, Cong. Boggs had misgivings. He began making public statements that J.Edgar Hoover's FBI was wire-tapping Congress and blackmailing public officials. Boggs had misgivings at the "lone assassin" finding of the Warren Commission panel of which he had been a part in 1964. Boggs was reportedly prepared to make public statements that Richard M. Nixon was complicit in the JFK murder. Nixon was there all day, that bloody time in Dallas, although falsely stating he left that morning by plane. [I was on a Dallas radio show with a former Director of Pepsico Bottlers, whose counsel in 1963 was Nixon. He said Nixon did not leave that morning and when the murder was announced, Nixon, unlike the others gathered for a business convention, wanted to continue conducting business as if nothing had happened.]

Cokie's brother, super-fixer and "lobbyist", Thomas Boggs, is reportedly a pay-off man in Washington. According to published accounts, Boggs has been the lobbyist for central american countries and their "death squads".

Cokie Roberts has made public statements that she and her mother are satisfied that her father the Congressman did, indeed, disappear on a plane flight to Alaska, 30 days before Nixon was re-elected President in 1972. Cokie is in a position reportedly to know she is lying. U.S. Military Intelligence, jointly with other U.S. espionage agencies reportedly found the Congressman's airplane but have concealed that. Apparently Boggs' airplane had been sabotaged to silence him on statements he was about to make about Tricky Dick. NOTE: one month AFTER Nixon was re-elected, 12 Watergate figures perished on a sabotaged plane crash in Chicago. Including Mrs. E.Howard Hunt, wife of the Watergate burglar. She had onboard two million dollars in securities she and her husband reportedly blackmailed out of Nixon for silence on Nixon's complicity in the JFK murder. The government attempt at cover-up of the crash as "pilot error" was wrecked when we "liberated" the entire government file, showing sabotage, and sued the fakers on the National Transportation Safety Board. Despite confronting NTSB with these documents at a re-opened public hearing, the NTSB continued the big lie. Rockefeller-owned United Air Lines, covering up the sabotage, arranged to stop in the printing cycle my book, "The Secret History of Airplane Sabotage" [Alas, no copies are now available.]

To give Cokie "muscle" as a promoter of the big lie, her mother is U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. [Previously the U.S. did not send an Ambassador to that theocracy, just a delegate.] Cokie's reward, as others who help cover up political assassinations? She was made a talking head pundit on ABC's Sunday morning network program.

DAN RATHER in 1963 was a much lesser known electronic journalist. He was standing in the shadows under the Triple Overpass Bridge, in Dealey Plaza, as the death car with Pres. Kennedy passed right under Dan Rather's nose. Rather was the only one on the planet to immediately be able to verify that JFK was mortally wounded. About six feet away from Rather, one of the several gunman had been shooting point blank at JFK from a little known sewer opening up on the railroad embankment. At my prompting, a populist paper in 1988 finally published the details after discovering the sewer cover right near where Rather was standing. Was it just a coincidence that Dan Rather was standing there? He alleged he was holding a bag of films to give to a TV network pick up courier. Thereafter, as a reward for his silence and complicity, Rather was made CBS White House correspondent and then, network evening news talking head. Paid millions of dollars per year for his assassination complicity.

Robert MacNeil, Canadian correspondent, just happened to be walking inside the building where the CIA "patsy" Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot JFK in the back of the head with a poorly built Italian Carcano rifle from a high window obscured by a tree. MacNeil helped promote the big lie of Oswald as the "lone assassin". MacNeil was rewarded with millions of dollars per year by a nightly PBS TV Program, called the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. Playing a role in the rewarding of MacNeil has been Sharon Percy Rockefeller, Public Broadcast dictator in the District of Columbia, long-time site of that News Hour. MacNeil, now retired, continues to own the TV show with Lehrer. Major sponsor of the show has been Archer-Daniels-Midland, soybean monopolist. ADM long-time boss, Dwayne Andreas, reportedly by corruption, escaped being prosecuted and jailed in the Watergate Affair for his money laundering for the Nixon White House.

MacNeil's sidekick, Jim Lehrer, who dines from time to time with the Clintons, has become a high-paid faker and apologist for the Clintons criminality.

One of the great secrets of the monopoly press is that those who help cover up political assassinations are greatly rewarded by being promoted to top positions. Most of such assassin whitewashers are not promoted because of merit. By the way, a woman newsfaker once heckled me for my slogan "Liars and Whores of the Press", taking it to mean just female liars and whores. Not so, the slogan applies to both male and female press liars. Compared to the above named propagandists, Hitler's Joseph Goebbels was an amateur. Watch for further parts to this type of story.

Reproduced from  Skolnick's Report

It has been now 18 days since the story on the lawsuit
against Ariel Sharon broke (June 4, 2001), and yet the
NY Times has yet to make mention of it anywhere in the
news!  

Dear all:

Please make noise.  Circulate this call around, and
above all, drop a note to the NY Times, even if one
line: letters@nytimes.com  (and bcc us at:
pmw-letters@yahoogroups.com ).

The NYTimes wants the world to believe that it is the
most respectable newspaper in the whole wide world,
and in fact it is able to behave in ways that fool the
world into believing them.  But there are instances
of censorship -- sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring
--that give insight into what the Times is really all
about.  The Times' decision to turn a blind eye to the
lawsuit in Belgium against Ariel Sharon is such an
instance. 

And so, we need to make as much noise as possible
about it.  We do not get many chances to denounce
blatant censorship of the news: often, their
maneuvering is more subtle (but no less nefarious) --
and so we must seize the moment.

It has been now 18 days since the story on the lawsuit
against Ariel Sharon broke (June 4, 2001), and yet the
NY Times has yet to make mention of it anywhere in the
news!  Not that the Times is not interested in stories
on war crimes: three stories in a row - June 6, 8 and
9 - focused on the Belgian case against the Rwandan
nuns, and today the Times came with a long story
titled: "Yugoslavia Expected to Pass Decree on War
Crimes". And yet, it insists on not mentioning the
lawsuit against Ariel Sharon!

Obviously, it appears that the fact a sitting Prime
Minister of America's closest ally -- a country that
receives $5 billion in financial and military aid --
is being taken to court for war crimes and crimes
against humanity is NOT newsworthy! At least that's
what the New York Times thinks.

The story of the lawsuit was mentioned briefly on June
18 on NPR, was prominently published on the
Philadelphia Inquirer on the 19, and even the
Washington Post found enough courage to put in
one-sentence mention by in an obscure corner of the
paper (also the 19th). But the New York Times has
decided that it is not newsworthy.

Many smaller papers, radio and television stations,
web sites, etc., highlight as news what the Times
considers as news. When the Times sweeps something
under the rug, it means that it is de facto not news.

Please impress upon the Times to publish a story on
the lawsuit and to take the lead on what is obviously
very newsworthy story.

Send your comments to:
          letters@nytimes.com

Make sure you bcc your letter to:
          pmw-lettersyahoogroups.com

If you want, you may save your letter dircetly to
PMWATCH's archives at:
          http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/letters

Yours,

Ahmed Bouzid
Palestine Media Watch
http://www.pmwatch.org

http://www.konformist.com/2001/apocalypse-culture-review.htm

Apocalypse Culture II
Book Review
by
Jaye C. Beldo
Netnous@aol.com

Carl Jung quipped once about the necessity of bringing darkness to
light and what a damn unpleasant and unpopular task it can be. No
wonder such compendium masterpieces as Apocalypse Culture II are
rarities in a publishing world rife with the kind of corporate
pabulum which only serves to distract us from the shadowed seemliness
of our freak show world. Feral House editor Adam Parfrey, who put the
volume together, has done for us a most unpleasant yet much needed
task. It's up to us to find some kind of light within the amply
sordid tome he offers.

Cutting through the general malaise which saturates Apocalypse
Culture II, one discovers that this volume was not published with
shock for shock's sake in mind, like such ill fated and
idiotic 'zines as Boiled Angel for example. Parfrey has chosen some
of the best writings in the Culture Noir genre to include in this
ample sequel volume. There is enough intelligence and foresight
within to actually encourage us to go beyond the human condition by
forcing us to go through it, page after page. Reading Apocalypse
Culture II is like touring one of the more unpleasant Bardo realms
found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, rife with Hungry Ghosts and
other discarnate forms of pestilence.

In spite of the explicit taint of the book, many of the essays,
articles, poems and letters contain qualities which are edifying and
transcendent. There is something strangely uplifting in regards to
recipes that require human baby meat as an ingredient, especially if
envisioned being negotiated in the hands of Martha Stewart on her
T.V. show when she's whipping up something for a dinner party. How
can one ignore the confessions of an academic wannabe cannibal
accompanied by pictures of his dismembered and half savored victim
(found in the piece "The Strange Crime of Issei Sagawa" by Colin
Wilson)? Surely Jerry Springer would invite the connoisseur onto his
show if he could somehow spring him from prison, encouraging him to
take full benefit of his prime time Trailer Trash democracy.

In the piece, "The Late, Great Aesthetic Taboos" by Ghazi Barakat,
pornography, the most prevalent expression of middle class
mediocrity/blight at the moment is treated as something
anesthetically redeeming. The paintings of the American exile/artist
Stu Mead whose work the printers of Apocalypse Culture II found
reprehensible enough to censor serve as a prime example. One can only
wonder why they didn't choose to black out an image of a Shirley
Temple facsimile working her eager little bald pudenda with the
handle of a riding crop. Maybe because she's enticingly adorned in
Nazi regalia made her image somehow morally acceptable enough for the
printers to leave uncensored.

One of the more disturbing essays "Pedophilia and the Morally
Righteous" by Chris Campion vacillates between gruesome descriptions
of child murder, rape to lofty expositions on Greek mythology and
Philosophy in attempt to have us Platonically recollect ourselves and
truly see the profound contradictions we are, at times, composed of.
After reading this, one would gladly want to escape into the realm of
eternal Ideas for a breather. Another worthwhile piece in this volume
comes from Michael A. Hoffman II, "The Scapegoat: Ted Kaczynski,
Ritual Murder and the Invocation of Catastrophe." In the spirit of
the late James Shelby Downard, the author charts out the latent
mystical toponomies in the Unabomber case and how the media
manipulated the collective unconscious of America via the scapegoat
archetype. The subliminal machinations of the cryptocracy are
adequately exposed in this essay. One cannot ignore the alchemical
import of the sacrifice and perhaps in the future will be able to
read between the lines of corporate media depictions of mad bombers
and other assorted lone nutters as to what truly is being manipulated
within our own psyches.

One clue hinting at the metaphysically redeeming quality within
Apocalypse Culture II lies directly upon the inside cover.
Unassumingly tucked within a squeamish montage of cretinous visages
to marvel at in Side Show fashion, is a picture of Avatar Meher Baba
in the lower right corner. How one of the most advanced spiritual
beings going in our cosmos shows up in the pages of such a patently
transgressive book is a most encouraging ambiguity indeed. I think
Baba is there to remind us all that the horrors within Apocalypse
Culture II are ultimately illusions of which we can substantially
transcend if not transform into a lasting understanding of humanity's
ongoing plight. If we can raise our vibe just a little, as Baba
encourages, we will intimately understand the persistence of
transgression in our culture. Perhaps reading Parfrey's well selected
articles which follow Baba's invitation, beckoned with his sublime
presence, will help us speed up the sanskara burning process by
allowing us to confront what we desperately try to project out and
away from ourselves over and over again. Maybe in the future we won't
need any more JonBenet Ramseys, Renee Hartevelts or Ted Kaczynski's
to dump our unresolved karma into in hopes it will be purged once and
for all through their sacrifices. Maybe we can sabotage the scapegoat
assembly line the media depends so much upon for its fodder as well.
Perhaps Apocalypse Culture II will inspire some of us on the
spiritual cusp of evolution to work through the kind of implicate
dreck depicted in its pages, within our very own psyches. It is most
difficult to write off Apocalypse Culture II with mere horrified
fascination or other irresponsible forms of morbid entertainment. One
has to be mighty deaf not to hear a response calling from our souls
to acknowledge the consequences of the perversion depicted in its
pages. If we listen, perhaps we can be actually compassionate towards
the Kaczynski's and McVeigh's currently roaming the planet in search
of a venue in which to detonate their essays.

Dr. Jung, alleged crypto fascist he may have been, would have truly
savored Apocalypse Culture II for its commitment to putting the
shadow, collective and otherwise, in the limelight and forcing it to
stay there long enough for us to discern, before scuttling back into
the obscured and cozy confines of our unconscious minds. Yet perhaps
Jung was wrong that shadow dredging is unpopular as evidenced by the
fact that Apocalypse Culture II was recently nominated for the
Firecracker Alternative Book award. Let us hope that it takes the
Blue Ribbon hands down and prove ol' Carl Gustav wrong.


http://www.konformist.com/2001/apocalypse-culture-review.htm
If you are interested in a free subscription to The
Konformist Newswire,  please visit:

http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist

WSWS : News & Analysis : North America

Salon and the decay of American liberal journalism
Comment by Patrick Martin
29 June 2001

Salon, one of the best-publicized online magazines, has plunged into 
a financial crisis which could lead either to its demise or its 
takeover by some media conglomerate. The company's stock price has 
crashed from $10 a share in 1999 to barely 30 cents today, with the 
threat that the stock could be delisted on Wall Street if the price 
falls any further.

The financial hemorrhage has been severe. Salon presently employs 80 
people, down from 150 at its height. Its total revenue in the most 
recent quarter was $2.3 million, less than 20 cents per reader per 
month, if the claim of 3.6 million monthly readers is accepted. 
(Industry analysts at Jupiter Media put the readership at a 
considerably lower figure, 1 million a month.)

The online magazine has taken a series of emergency actions to stave 
off financial collapse. It introduced a premium edition last month, 
with a monthly charge of $30 to subscribers who will receive 
exclusive access to a mix of political commentary and soft-core 
pornography. Publisher David Talbot is reportedly peddling the web 
site to potential corporate purchasers.

The crisis is part of the general collapse of the dot-com bubble. But 
it cannot be attributed solely to the puncturing of this speculative 
frenzy. There are wider implications related to the perspective on 
which the publication is based and the social layers to which it 
appeals.

The online magazine was launched in 1996 by Talbot and a group of 
fellow journalists mainly from the San Francisco Examiner —the Hearst-
owned daily newspaper—with the reported financial assistance of Apple 
Computer pioneer Steven Jobs. Salon professed to represent a 
combination of left-liberal politics and iconoclastic cultural 
attitudes, characteristic of the middle-class radical milieu that 
developed in the 1960s, most strongly centered in the San Francisco 
Bay Area.


Impeachment and democratic rights

The lack of either journalistic or political principle characteristic 
of the ex-radical milieu that spawned Salon became apparent during 
the Clinton impeachment crisis, when the web publication first came 
to widespread public notice. Salon aggressively criticized the anti-
Clinton campaign, and published some valuable material on the network 
of right-wing operatives that extended from white supremacist 
elements in Arkansas to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

However, in the fall of 1998, when the Republican-controlled House of 
Representatives moved towards impeachment, Salon published an exposé 
of the personal sexual conduct of one of the leading congressional 
Republicans, Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary 
Committee who spearheaded impeachment and led the House prosecutors 
in Clinton's trial before the Senate.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained at the time, 
http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/sep1998/lib-s19.shtml such scandal-
mongering was no substitute for an analysis of the political 
implications of impeachment. We wrote, "this episode illustrates the 
difference between the outlook of a liberal publication, oriented to 
a middle-class and bohemian milieu, and the outlook of the WSWS, 
which is based on socialist principles and oriented to the political 
education of the working class."

It was true that the Republican posture of outrage over Clinton's 
lies about sex was hypocritical in the extreme. But the primary issue 
in the impeachment crisis was not sexual hypocrisy, but the threat to 
democratic rights inherent in the attempt to overturn the outcome of 
two national elections by the methods of a backroom coup d'etat.

Salon published an editorial defending its decision to publish 
personal information about Hyde: "Aren't we fighting fire with fire, 
descending to the gutter tactics of those we deplore? Frankly, yes. 
But ugly times call for ugly tactics."

Salon evidently shared the belief of Matt Drudge, the right-wing 
Internet gossip-monger who helped make public Clinton's affair with 
Monica Lewinsky, that revelations of private sexual behavior would 
shift public opinion. But the public reaction to the Lewinsky affair, 
the 450-page Starr report filled with salacious detail and the 
videotape of Clinton's grand jury testimony indicated a healthy 
distrust of the attempt by the right wing to use a sex scandal to 
seize political power.

Salon quickly cashed in on the notoriety it achieved from its 
revelations concerning Hyde—at one point House Republican leader Tom 
DeLay blustered publicly about a congressional investigation into the 
web publication. A few months after the impeachment drive ended in 
the Senate vote to acquit Clinton, Salon.com went public in an 
initial public offering that raised $23.6 million on the stock 
exchange.


A slide to the right

The influx of cash was accompanied by a steady shift to the right in 
the online publication. Typical was a July 10, 1999 diatribe by news 
editor Joan Walsh against the campaign for death row prisoner Mumia 
Abu-Jamal. Walsh wrote, "The Mumia cult sickens me like little else 
in American politics today."

Apparently poverty, social inequality, racism, and the institution of 
capital punishment did not spark equal revulsion in Ms. Walsh, to say 
nothing of the international crimes of American imperialism—this 
commentary being published only a few weeks after the American 
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which Salon supported.

In the course of the 2000 presidential campaign, Salon frequently 
targeted the obvious intellectual limitations of Republican candidate 
George W. Bush for ridicule, and occasionally criticized his 
policies. But its Washington correspondent Jake Tapper evinced a 
growing sympathy for the Bush campaign, culminating in an election-
eve prediction that Bush would win—and deserved to win—a sweeping 
electoral victory.

While Salon claimed in 1998 that it was necessary to "fight fire with 
fire" in relation to the right-wing attempted political coup, by the 
time of the 2000 post-election crisis the online magazine had 
concluded it was not necessary to fight at all. Salon was indifferent 
to the democratic principles at stake in the Florida conflict, 
presenting it as a bizarre and entertaining public spectacle.

Tapper's dispatches—and a subsequent book—took a "plague on both your 
houses" approach to the successful effort by the Republicans to 
hijack the election. Even the intervention of the US Supreme Court, 
ordering an end to vote-counting in Florida and proclaiming the 
doctrine that the American people had no constitutional right to vote 
for president, was treated in a cynical and light-minded fashion, 
rather than as a turning point in American political history.

This combination of derision and indifference to democratic 
principles characterizes Salon 's attitude to the first months of the 
Bush administration. Typical was Tapper's June 20 article in which he 
belittled the significance of health care as an urgent social need, 
describing congressional hearings on the proposed patients bill of 
rights as nothing more than "dueling horror stories."

Especially revealing of a lack of concern for democratic rights was a 
June 8 article by Alicia Montgomery on the release of the Civil 
Rights Commission report on voter disenfranchisement in the Florida 
presidential election. Montgomery described the report's release 
as "another partisan catfight," criticized the document for a "dearth 
of hard numbers," and approvingly quoted a Republican who criticized 
the report as purely partisan, writing, "She had a point."


The social and material basis

A highly flattering article on Salon published June 18 in USA Today 
suggests both the material and moral underpinning of the 
publication's increasingly right-wing orientation. The article 
trumpets the supposed independence of the publication, with the 
headline, "`Salon' does what it wants."

The tone of the article is one of gushing tribute: "A day spent at 
Salon's offices just off bustling Market Street shows what happens 
when people with an alternative sensibility gather behind a 
charismatic leader and use the freewheeling Net to do, well, whatever 
they want."

In what sense can Salon be said to represent an "alternative 
sensibility"? It certainly is not an alternative to the mainstream 
capitalist media. Its commentaries are well within the narrow 
spectrum of opinion that characterizes American bourgeois politics.

Nor are its personnel greatly distinguished from the rest of the 
bourgeois media, in either their ideas or their lifestyle. According 
to USA Today, the professional staff at Salon are paid salaries in 
the high five or low six figures, putting them in the top ten percent 
income bracket, a curious state of affairs for an "alternative" 
publication, but one quite typical of modern American journalism, 
whose representatives are typically ensconced among sated and corrupt 
layers of the upper middle class.

The only thing that today distinguishes Salon from the run-of-the-
mill punditry of the establishment media is its willingness to delve 
into certain areas, particularly those involving sexual mores, where 
the more staid corporate-controlled press has held back.

In the past month, for instance, Salon has devoted extensive coverage 
to an exposure of the sexual proclivities of conservative gay 
journalist Andrew Sullivan, giving it more attention than the 
controversy over the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Joan Walsh wrote 
that the Sullivan case and the reports of illegal drinking by Bush's 
daughter Jenna raised "the toughest and most fascinating questions in 
journalism today."

This focus on sex—one of the ten web sites that comprise Salon.com is 
entirely devoted to the subject—has a dual significance. It 
represents, of course, an attempt to find a profitable niche. Sex 
sells.

From a sociological and ideological standpoint, an obsession with sex 
is typical of a layer of the once-radical middle class who, having 
given up on any prospect of transforming society in a progressive 
direction, turn inwards and seek an individualized, "personal" 
solution to a crisis which is fundamentally social in character. This 
is a layer that has grown more conservative and cynical the more its 
stock portfolios have benefited from the speculative boom of recent 
years.

Whatever the outcome of its current financial travail, Salon.com has 
already demonstrated that to produce a genuinely independent online 
political journal requires more than radical posturing and 
sensationalism. Independence, if it is to have any real significance, 
must be rooted in a principled opposition, informed by an 
understanding of the historical lessons of the great events of the 
past century, to the social structure of America in 2001, and a 
determination to defend the interests of working and oppressed people 
internationally.



Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

I was for 15 years a journalist, a vocation in which you'd think you would learn a lot. I learned three things: The accused you've never met is more guilty than the one you've talked to. Truth and accuracy are not the same. Things are never, ever, as they appear to be.

Because I am less and less convinced of where the truth lies and more and more dubious of our ability to find it, I would like to point out a particular kind of responsibility -- a personal responsibility -- that I think is in danger of being unmet.

For better and often for worse, this is a pluralistic and democratic society. It is relatively new and still experimental; it is probably only three or four generations ago that the country was effectively governed by an oligarchy that protected us from the tyranny of the majority. As we come closer and closer to true democracy, we are ever more susceptible to a certain kind of mob rule in which popularity substitutes for principle and consensus is mistaken for wisdom.

It is, I suppose, inevitable that we must pay a price for our exaltation of the common man; if, for instance, we measure democracy's viability by what the citizens choose to watch on television, I think we're entitled to question how in the world this electorate is entitled to be in charge of anything.

But we have no better idea. We can only hope that the rule of law and our willingness to abide by it will protect against the worst of which we are collectively capable.

It is the law in this country, as in no other, that the individual has an extraordinary right to personal expression. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to speak and to publish; these rights and the degree to which they are safeguarded are the distinguishing characteristics of American society.

For that we have only the courts to thank. Americans seem to be almost completely uninterested in any point of view other than their individual own. We are absolutely up to our necks in groups and blocs and religious and economic interests certain beyond all reason that they are correct and actively interested in imposing their rules and values and self-selected morals on the rest of us. They prattle about democracy, and use it when it suits them without the slightest regard or respect for what it means and costs and requires. These people are -- please believe me -- dangerous.

The right to speak is meaningless if no one will listen, and the right to publish is not worth having if no one will read. It is simply not enough that we reject censorship and will not countenance suppression; we have an affirmative responsibility to hear the argument before we disagree with it.

I think that you think that you agree with me, that you are fair and open-minded and good citizens. But if we put it to the test -- if I make up some speeches about gun control, abortion, gay rights, racial and ethnic characteristics, political terrorism and genocide -- I believe that I can make you boo and jeer or at least walk out in protest.

We cannot operate that way. It's not difficult to listen to the philosophy you agree with or don't care about. It's the one that galls that must be heard. No idea is so repugnant that it must not be advocated. If we are not free to speak heresy and utter awful thoughts, we are not free at all. And if we are unwilling to hear that with which we most violently disagree, we are no longer citizens but have become part of the mob.

Nowhere is the willingness to listen more important than at a university, and nowhere is our failure more apparent than at the university whose faculty members or students think that it's legitimate to parade their own moral or political purity by shouting down the unpopular view of the day.

It will not be a week, and certainly not a month, before you will become aware that someone in your own circle of influence is saying something or thinking something very wrong. I think you have to do something about that. I think you have to help them be heard. I think you are required to listen.

Go to "Corrupt Media" Page II

Go to "Media Brainwashing" Page

Revised: July 18, 2010 .   Communication:   discoverer73(at symbol)hotmail.com     Go to Home Page     Go to Index of All Articles Pages       
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