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The Salon Interview: Bill Moyers



The conscience of American journalism speaks his mind about Bush, LBJ, Iraq, Vietnam, the triumph of America's global power and the withering of its democracy.

By Andrew O'Hehir

April 7, 2003 / To say that Bill Moyers [ http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/moyesrbill/moyersbill.htm ] is an exceptional case among former White House press secretaries is almost to damn him with faint praise. Love him or loathe him, Moyers has become one of the most recognizable and celebrated journalists in television history since leaving President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War.

Some on the left have never quite forgiven Moyers for his role as the voice of LBJ's fateful Vietnam escalation, an experience he still talks about with sharp regret. But he is far better known for his subsequent work, especially his questing, long-form interviews with world leaders and deep thinkers, in the all-but-forgotten tradition of legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. Moyers is the intellectual's version of Barbara Walters -- or rather, Walters is the celebrity-struck populist's version of him.

It's fair to say that other occupants of Moyers' old job have not become quite so prominent in later life. Most have traded on their fading celebrity to garner more or less respectable perches somewhere in the intertwining thickets of public relations, finance, law, publishing and policy-think. Jody Powell, once Jimmy Carter's press secretary, now heads a Washington P.R. firm, which is pretty much the default setting. (He deserves special credit for once having poured a glass of red wine on Sam Donaldson aboard Air Force One.) Former Clinton flack Dee Dee Myers, a professional talking head and consultant, and onetime Reagan/George H.W. Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater (the only press secretary appointed by two different presidents), have at least been having fun; both have worked as consultants on "The West Wing."

Gerald Ford's onetime press secretary, Ron Nessen, tried to resume his career in broadcasting. He once hosted something called "The TV Book Shop" on the Nostalgia channel, whatever that is or was. (Nessen actually has a perfectly honorable job now, directing P.R. for the Brookings Institution.) Then there's the case of former Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, who died in February. Only Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes can challenge Ziegler's supremacy as the all-time West Wing misleader and prevaricator (although don't rule out current occupant Ari Fleischer). Ziegler followed his disgraced boss into exile, and then got to find out what purgatory was like while he was still alive, spending 11 years as chief executive of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.

It's tempting to suggest that the combination of noble ambition and tragic miscalculation that characterized the Johnson White House acted as the spur to Moyers' later journalistic career, with its blend of skepticism and open-minded search for the Big Idea. He himself says that his experience with LBJ, and his childhood in the segregated South, were the defining events of his life.

Since first going into television in 1971, Moyers has produced and hosted hundreds of hours of programming for both CBS News and PBS (exclusively for the latter since 1986). His themes have been consistently large and general: religious faith, the United States Constitution, the power of storytelling, the nature of artistic creativity, freedom vs. secrecy, addiction and recovery, death and dying, bigotry and hatred, poverty and inequality, the corruption of democracy and, pervading it all, the question of America, its history, identity and destiny. It may be easy to make fun of his endless series of interviews with the pseudo-Jungian myth-chronicler Joseph Campbell, a PBS fundraising gold mine of the '80s, but the ideas aired were actually far from juvenile and their influence on the culture was immense. (On the other hand, the less said about Moyers' special "A Gathering of Men With Robert Bly," the better.)

Rather than mellowing with age, Moyers, now 68, has arguably become the lone radical on television, openly challenging our national failure to confront fundamental issues of class, money and power. On his current magazine-style show, "NOW With Bill Moyers [ http://www.pbs.org/now/ ]" (which airs Friday nights on PBS), he has the same shock of schoolboy hair -- now completely white -- and the same air of polite, bespectacled concern as ever. He still looks and sounds like the über-square Texas divinity student and ordained Baptist minister he once was.

"NOW" sometimes indulges in the wandering, sweet-natured interviews with poets and artists that have always been part of Moyers' métier, and occasional segments -- like an October tribute to a Seattle Latino community center [ http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_laraza.html ] -- seem like defiant examples of old-school political correctness. (In a media landscape dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly -- who has feuded publicly [ http://www.current.org/news/news0222BillvBill.html ] with Moyers -- why the hell not?)

But the program's real strength is its political and economic reporting and its ability to look beneath the surface of current events, which have always been the areas where Moyers' unquestioned intelligence is put to best use. He and his affiliated teams of reporters -- Moyers' prestige allows him to work in concert with such other journalistic institutions as National Public Radio, the New Yorker and the New York Times -- have uncovered scandalous corporate handouts hidden in "free trade" agreements, the continuing evisceration of campaign-finance reform, rebellions against privatization in Latin America, the consolidation of media ownership, the pharmaceutical industry's ad blitz and offshore tax shelters for corporate fat cats.

Although he insists he is a political independent, and not a Democrat or a "liberal," Moyers makes no secret of his contempt for the secretive crony-fest of the Bush administration (or rather both Bush administrations, which he sees as an interrupted hereditary regime), his opposition to military intervention in the Middle East and his distrust of the "corporate conservative hegemony" he believes is strangling American political life. (Somehow Moyers can say that phrase and make it sound reasonable, where you or I would come off as a raving Leninist, even if we believe it's accurate.)

I think the secret to Bill Moyers' success is not merely his benevolent, avuncular manner but his gentle, almost singsong, folksy-yet-learned delivery (which he says he absorbed from the storytelling tradition of rural East Texas, where he was raised). If his writing can occasionally seem mannered, it also has a poetic verve and grace almost unknown in television. Here's how he ended a recent broadcast [ http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_bmjeuphrates.html ], ruminating on the ancient resonance of the headline "Marines cross Euphrates":

"And on these stones is all that remain of conquests, rebellions and battles -- the violent death of rulers -- prisoners of war disposed of by execution. For 5,000 years the story repeats itself, the victory of one, the defeat of the other. Tribes and gods turn on each other. Even Genghis Khan met his match trying to get here. The last word has always been written in the sand. Cities and states lie buried beneath it. The great figures who once held sway here -- Ashurnasirpal II, Tiglath-Pileser III, Shamshi-Adad V, King Nino, Queen Semiramis, King Shar-kali-sharri, Suleyman the Magnificent, the Ottomans, the British -- have all been carried away. Five thousand years from now, who will be crossing the Euphrates? What will remain from our time? And what will be remembered?"

Without much hope of answering these questions, I recently joined Moyers for a chat in the sixth-floor office at WNET in New York where he and his wife of 49 years, Judith Davidson Moyers, run their production company, Public Affairs Television. His bookcases are stacked with Emmy Awards, although, in fairness, only a dozen or so of the 30-plus he has won seem to be on display. Wearing a rumpled Ralph Lauren dress shirt, he sat down opposite me, offered me a Diet Coke, and began to ask probing, Moyers-esque questions about me and about Salon. Eventually, however, I got him to move on to other topics: the state of journalism today, radical Islam and globalization, and the failing health of American democracy.

When you look around at American journalism right now, how are we doing on reporting the war in Iraq and its repercussions around the world?

If you look hard enough, you can find a variety of information and insight. But you have to look hard, you have to create your own kaleidoscope. That's what I think is both exhausting all of us and confusing all of us. If you watch the BBC you'll get a different approach from any of the American networks. But you have to watch those American networks in order to judge the BBC.

Then you have to turn to the Internet and the alternative press. It does seem to be a constantly turning kaleidoscope. If you keep turning it long enough, and you get the right angle so the light's just right, you get a good sense of the whole. But I don't know where the typical citizen, who's not working at what I work at all day -- trying to make sense of it -- turns to get an overview.

You have to watch Al-Jazeera, which I do here. You have to read Romenesko [ http://www.poynter.org/medianews/ ] and you have to read the BBC Web site [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/ ] and the Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ ], all of it. It's a full-time job, editing your own virtual newspaper every day. I go to Editor & Publisher [ http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/index.jsp ], and I find help from their coverage of the media coverage. I go to some of the committed, ideological Web sites, whether it's Brent Bozell [ http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/welcome.shtml ] on the right or FAIR [ http://www.fair.org/ ] [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] on the left. I compose my own front page every day, and my own arts section and my own war coverage.

For a professional journalist, it's media heaven. But for the typical citizen, it must be very confusing. For those who settle on one thing, for those who settle on Fox News, where journalism becomes nationalism becomes chauvinism, if that's the only place you're getting information, you're not going to have any overall view. You have to work at it. It puts a great burden on the citizen. But the alternative is to have just three networks, as we did once upon a time.

My impression is that the buildup to the war, and the first few weeks of the war, were all driven by the government's mission and the government's definition of what is news. Most of us were letting the official view of reality set our agenda. As the war has gone on and news has happened out there, we're beginning to get more important pieces, pieces that are much at odds with the official view of reality.

Do you think the major news institutions that most of us rely on -- the Big Three networks, CNN, the New York Times -- are beginning to do independent reporting, rather than just reacting to the government view of events?

I don't think they're reporting independently, no. I think what's happening is that other people are reacting to the government and they're able to justify what they're doing by reporting on what those other people are saying and doing that is at odds with the government. I don't think there's a lot of independent, entrepreneurial journalism which says, let's really ask if Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations is accurate or not. Once somebody does that -- an independent journalist in Britain gets on the Internet and tracks down that graduate student who wrote the heart of that piece 12 years ago -- everybody else picks it up. But I don't find the big, mainstream organizations doing entrepreneurial journalism. They accept the official version of reality, although I guess they accept it skeptically. They take it, play it and then hope somebody else challenges it so they can then say, "There's a debate about this."

How do you feel about "embedded reporters," a phrase that's now, I guess a permanent entry in the journalistic lexicon?

It's not as good as what we did in the Vietnam War. Remember, I was in the Johnson White House at that time. We made a very conscious decision that reporters were to go where they wanted to go. Sometimes they had to go with the military because there was no other way to get there. But Johnson was actually presented with a recommendation from the Pentagon -- we didn't think to call it "embedded," but it would have created the same situation. He said we shouldn't put that kind of limit on them. He railed against the press! He loathed the press, when they reported information that was at odds with him. But it was an important moment in journalistic history, because we didn't try to manage the press. We challenged the press, and we would snipe at the press, but we didn't try to manage the press.

Of course things got worse after that: the incursions in Panama and Grenada, and Gulf War I. It was total censorship. So this is an improvement over what has been happening. But it's not as good as Vietnam, where reporters had total and unrestricted access. Morley Safer was out there filming GIs torching huts with their lighters. He wasn't embedded; he just went along. Or Peter Arnett, who was then working for A.P. out of Asia; he could go where he wanted to.

So this is an improvement, and I greatly admire the courage and bravery of people who are embedded. I wish I knew that I had that kind of courage. I mean, I've covered minor wars. I went to Central America, I went to Africa. But I've never been exposed to the kind of fire that these guys are being exposed to.

It does mean that you're seeing through the eyes of the military. That's a problem, in a sense. But it's an advantage over anything else we've seen in the last 20 to 25 years. The other disadvantage is that you see what that unit of military is seeing, and you only see that.

But I'm glad the military is doing it. Overall, it's a plus. It's better to be there (in the field) than not to be there, relying only on military briefings, which is what we got in Gulf War I.

You mention your experience in the White House during Vietnam. We've started to hear people talk about parallels between this conflict and that one. Now, it doesn't seem possible that this war will go on even a fraction that long. But what parallels, or lack of parallels, do you see?

I think it's a very dangerous analogy, particularly on the military front. I don't believe there's any way the United States will get bogged down in Iraq for five, 10, 12 years. I'm no military expert, but I don't think that can happen. I mean, only Baghdad is left. One way or another, you can wait them out or go in and then weed them out. Militarily, we're not there for a long time.

Now, politically I think the analogy works. I heard Jim Webb, the former secretary of the Navy, who was in Vietnam as a Marine and worked for the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour" 20 years ago, on CBS the other day. Bob Schieffer asked him, "You wrote this big piece that was skeptical of the war, back in September for the Washington Post. Why?" Jim Webb said, "I covered Lebanon for the 'News Hour' [when a U.S. Marine barracks was blown up, killing 241 soldiers]. And I came out and I realized we should never be in this region permanently. This is not like any other part of the world."

I heard a terrific interview on NPR's "On the Media" yesterday with a British journalist I've never heard of -- I'm trying to track him down -- who said that this is having a profound unintended consequence. It's creating the first real pan-Arabism he had seen in a long time.

Since Nasser, maybe.

That's exactly what he said. So politically, the analogy with Vietnam is appropriate. Although we got out of Vietnam politically at the same time we got out militarily, we will not be able to get out of the Middle East politically at the same time we get out of Iraq militarily. The whole issue of reconstruction and nation-building that they're talking about, although I'm not sure how serious that is, could bog us down for a long time.

I did a little piece at the end of last week's broadcast, a little essay [ http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_bmjeuphrates.html ]. I saw the headline, "Marines cross the Euphrates." And it just hit me, because my graduate work was in theology and I had to take five years of Greek, so I studied all that history -- so did Alexander the Great! So I went back to the books and, sure enough, 5,000 years ago the story is the same. The defeat of this one, the victory of that one. The Marines cross the Euphrates, but the United States will not be able to get out. And the last word is always written in the sand.

So yes, the military analogy breaks down -- there's no way Iraq can hold out for 10 years or five years or even a year. But you can be in an Israeli-like situation in the Middle East that will make life very, very miserable.

And every day we're there increases the pan-Arabism, gives the other side, the extremist Muslims, their argument. The Saudis are allowing their press, which is very controlled, to start chastising America. And the clerics in Saudi Arabia, who've been kept quiet since 9/11, have been allowed to go back to the pulpit and castigate America. At the same time, the targeting of Iraq is taking place from an underground bunker in Saudi Arabia. I mean, the Saudis are playing both ends against each other. That may last for the moment. But one of the main reasons that Osama bin Laden and the extremist Muslims give for their resentment of America is the stationing of American troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. We didn't have anything like that situation in Vietnam.

Is this period of history -- the collapse of communism and the triumph of global capitalism, the troublesome 2000 election, moving through 9/11 to the current crisis -- one of those fulcrums of history that our children or grandchildren will look back on and say, that changed the direction of the world?

I believe that. I won't be around to see it, but I definitely believe this is a defining period of history. The last third of the 20th century created a kind of political certainty in the world, in this sense: There was the Cold War, which enabled two superpowers, wary of each other, to keep the other stable, to keep the other checked. There was a delicate balance -- there was the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift -- but the Cold War kept velvet gloves over much of the world. There were lots of bad things happening, but it did keep a certain kind of equilibrium in the world.

The other great phenomenon that came in the last half of the 20th century was the rise of the welfare state, with the sense of obligation growing out of the collapse of capitalism in the 1920s -- we had certain obligations one to another, there was a need for the government to intervene to correct gross inequalities in income and health and opportunity.

Both of those have gone now. The Cold War is over and the United States has risen as the great military power, which always brings consequences that powers don't want. And the collapse of the social contract -- the rise of the right wing, the rise of the corporate right and the political right in this country, which exercises hegemony now over our government -- is turning the market into every man for himself. Those two forces, disorder in the world and disorder at home, are creating appetites and responses and challenges and frustrations and angers and passions and winners and losers, and nobody can anticipate how they will reshape themselves. And the other factor, of course, is the rise of Islamic uniformity or conformity or whatever one wants to call it.

Yeah, I think we are in a very disturbing period. I've never seen anything like it. I've lived through the Depression, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, the rise of the conservative movement, the nuclear age, all of these changes. I've never seen anything like this.

You bring up Islamic fundamentalism, and we hear a lot of different things about that. Some people argue it's actually on the wane, while others, including some on the left like Paul Berman, feel that it's the new face of fascism. Do you feel that extreme Islam is actually the primary force opposing the United States and global capitalism right now?

I don't think it's the dominant force. I think fundamentalism is found around the world, whether in the Jewish occupation of the West Bank or the rise of the religious right in this country or Islamic fundamentalism, although they're not all necessarily the same. What we're seeing is the inevitable backlash to globalization, to the dominance of American ideas and American money and American goods and services. That's what's creating the backlash. Militant Islam gives it its front teeth, gives a bite to it.

We covered a story on "Now" last year about the backlash in Bolivia [ http://www.pbs.org/now/science/bolivia.html ] to the efforts by Bechtel to privatize the water supply. That was very powerful, what happened there -- 10,000 people rising up to protest the privatization of water! We would never have heard about that, probably, or factored it into our considerations of world dynamics. But once the teeth of Islam snapped on 9/11, all of us begin to wake up to other things going on in the world. Why aren't we seen as the benevolent force that we think of ourselves as? The benign force that Thomas Friedman wrote about in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," assuming that's what the world wanted.

We suddenly discovered that this increasing inequality is not what the world wanted. We did a piece about Arundhati Roy in India -- here's a novelist who forgoes writing, to become an activist to stop these huge dams that were being built and displacing millions of people in central Asia. It turned out Enron had a big role in that, using American influence to bribe government officials. We probably wouldn't have paid much attention to that until we woke up on 9/11, specifically in regard to the terrorists, but also in regard to others out there. We began to look at ourselves in a mirror that they had thrust in our face.

I think most extremist groups run their gamut, and the Wahhabists and the others will also, although we're facing a long, tough time. I think the real phenomenon that is reshaping our world is that globalization breeds such inequalities. There is bound to be a reaction to it on many fronts.

OK, so here's what your friend Bill O'Reilly and the other guys at Fox News will say if they read this interview: Moyers just came out and admitted that the al-Qaida terrorists and the anti-globalization activists and the antiwar protesters are all on the same team. They all hate capitalism and hate America.

There are centrifugal forces at work here. There are counterforces at work here. There is clearly and ostensibly a reaction to dissent in this country in the most conspicuous way. Clear Channel organizes to arouse patriots to oppose antiwar demonstrators. Magid Associates advises radio and television stations around the country to play the national anthem, show the flag. Fox News taunts the demonstrators on Fifth Avenue during the protests and its ratings rise.

The right has been doing this for some time. The effectiveness of the right's echo chamber has been that every time the Democrats dissent, or people protest, they had this megaphone that was able to drown them out, make them seem "liberal," taint them with that word. There's an inevitable wartime pulling of the strings, to paint anyone as unpatriotic who disagrees with the war.

But if you go to the Web, there are so many new fronts of dissent opening up all the time. You can close the windows, you can pull down the shade, you can leave your car in the garage, but you can't keep pollution from auto emissions from coming into your house. That's the way dissent is. I mean, it's a huge phenomenon around the world.

Obviously George W. Bush has particular problems with the rest of the world, but is there a way for any U.S. president in this era of American dominance to be healer or bridge-builder?

This is the most disturbing consequence of the hegemony that has been achieved over our political institutions by (right-wing) ideology and money right now. I lived through one of the most fortuitous and dangerous periods in American history -- World War II and the postwar era, when the Soviet Union became a Goliath and we lived under the umbrella of the nuclear threat -- and our political leadership responded splendidly in that period. Whether it was Truman or Eisenhower, they understood. Eisenhower in particular understood -- he was a conservative, but he was moderate in the use of power.

The Republicans I remember from my days in Washington -- the moderate Republicans -- along with the moderate Democrats, were able to forge a bipartisan foreign policy that worked. It had its problems, but it worked. If I had been George W. Bush, I would have asked Al Gore to become head of homeland security. I would have asked Bill Bradley to become the planner for the reconstruction of Iraq.

It is a real problem for someone who by nature is a lone ranger. I think that George W. Bush is like that, he sees America as the Lone Ranger in the world, so he pulls out of this treaty and that treaty, one treaty after another. He isolates himself in the world at a time when we need the world. I do not understand this.

This period certainly does test political leadership. If Al Gore had been in the White House on 9/11, it would have tested him. Who knows how he would have reacted? But I would hope Gore would have seen, as I hoped Bush would see, that this transcends all politics. We need to create a leadership that represents the fullness of American life to confront a world that is in great disorder.

Doesn't that phrase, "the fullness of American life," remind us that Americans come from all over the world, and that perhaps more than any other country we are tied to the world? Of course it was the United States that was attacked on 9/11, but people from 40 or so different countries died in those towers. That seems to have been forgotten.

I'm still not sure it was an attack on America as much as it was an attack on the power of money and the power of commerce to change and challenge theology and ideology. Yeah, sure, they saw America as the Great Satan. But nobody stopped until much later to realize that they hit the United Nations down there, just not a building.

It was the United Nations of capitalism.

Exactly. It was the good side of globalization. I wish we could get rid of that word. I'd like to say that the protesters and the activists are not opposed to globalization as much as they're for global justice. And the United States is in a great position to take leadership in presenting the best side of our character, which is that we are drawn from the world, and now we can give back to the world.

I just did a six-hour series, five years in the making, on the Chinese in America. I thought the timing would be unfortunate, but it turned out to be fortuitous. This is the first series I've ever done, in 30 years, in which I actually found the answer to the question that provoked me to do it. I wanted to find out what the Chinese had to say about becoming American, about the American dream.

One woman I interviewed, out of the dozens of people I spoke with while making that series, explained it all to me. She began to talk to me about eating chicken feet. You've seen chicken feet in Chinese restaurants, right?

Yeah. They're terrifying.

Well, yes, they're ugly, they don't look particularly nutritious, people are squeamish about them. She said to me, "As an American, I can eat chicken feet. But I don't have to eat chicken feet. I can turn around and eat at McDonald's and nobody questions me." I said to her, "What the hell does that have to do with the American dream?" She says, "That is the American dream! That I can compose my own life. That I can invent who I want to be."

We are creating a new American identity, and to take our identity as being opposed to the world, instead of being of the world, is the greatest mistake that George W. Bush has made.

Obviously the country has been over and over this, and maybe it's a moot point now. But what do you make of the case the president made for going to war in Iraq?

I thought he did a good thing in going to the U.N. and getting Resolution 1441. I believe in international law, and I've been troubled that U.N. resolutions are not enforced. I thought it was working. It was slow and costly, but it was working. Saddam Hussein was isolated. The inspectors were back, and we had the world more or less with us. You know, I think if we had tried diplomacy in Vietnam, and let politics play out more, we would have come to a better end there.

I think Bush did the right thing in identifying Saddam Hussein. Not in relation to al-Qaida -- I don't think they've proven that connection and I don't think it exists, I think that's a different kind of society. But American liberal democracy should never stand by idle when someone like Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin or Milosevic is wreaking such havoc on his own people. I thought he was doing it the right way and I think it would have worked.

So I think Bush did the right thing in going to the U.N. and did the wrong thing by not playing it out patiently.

What's your assessment of George W. Bush's character?

I never pay much attention to the character of a president. I learned this from Lyndon Johnson, who was 13 of the most difficult people I've ever known. He was the best dancer in the White House since George Washington, but he could also be the most uncouth man the next morning. He could be generous and tolerant, he could be scathing and unforgiving. None of those mattered to me, compared to what the policies were. A president is there to make the best decisions for all of us that he can, and we should judge him by his decisions.

I've read the transcripts of Nixon's tapes and I can see that he was brought down by his paranoia, by his obsession with his enemies. If that's character, it's revealing. But I really look at a president's public persona and at the consequences of a president's choices. This president, whatever his character, is making choices whose winners are primarily the people who can win, the people who are ahead, at the expense of the people who are not. His character is not the issue to me. His policies are.

One of the striking things about your show is that you've consistently been covering the troubling economic consequences of major policy decisions made by the Bush administration -- and actually the Clinton administration too. You've exposed the fundamentally undemocratic character of much of the neoliberal free-trade agenda -- GATT, Chapter 11 of NAFTA [ http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingdemocracy.html ], Bush's fast-track trade agreements -- well before the mainstream media noticed widespread corruption in the business world. Is there a danger that we're just going to forget about economic justice in the context of war and terrorism?

Yes. As has been said, this is both a war to seek weapons of mass destruction and a war of mass distraction. There are fundamental political changes taking place that are not being reported and not being debated under the cloak of war. Forty-four million people are uninsured; our healthcare situation is in terrible shape. There's growing inequality in our country. Then there's what's happening to the environment. We can make a lot of mistakes in public policy -- we can make a mistake in tax policy and change it. We can make a mistake in labor policy and change it. We can make a mistake on housing and change it. But when you make mistakes on the environment, you can't change that. That's irreparable damage.

I did a two-hour broadcast two years ago called "Earth on the Edge," in which I looked at what nonpartisan research scientists were saying about us reaching the tipping point. They say that if we don't reverse certain trends by 2004, 2006, it's too late. When you lose that open space, it's gone. When you lose that wetland, it's gone. There's a lot of these -- they're not mistakes, they're deliberate policies of the Bush administration -- from which we will not be able to recover. Those are deeply troubling to me. These things are being done without debate from the Democratic Party, coverage by the press or awareness on the part of citizens.

You're saying that George W. Bush is a dangerous president.

This is a presidency that is fundamentally changing the nature and character of American government. It's the most anti-government administration of my lifetime. I believe in our collective responsibility. I grew up in an America where that made a difference to my parents, made a difference to my community, made a difference to my culture. You have to go back to Warren G. Harding to find an administration that so opened the doors to its cronies to come in and exploit the public resources. That's very troubling.

I don't have any personal feelings about George W. Bush, any more than I did about Bill Clinton. I looked at Bill Clinton from the standpoint of his policies, and I had a lot of trouble with them.

I think my life, and certainly my career in journalism, have been informed by two things. One was being a Southerner. Whenever you learned about Southern life, you realize that when we drove the truth-tellers out of the pulpits, out of the editorial rooms and out of the classrooms -- people who were telling the truth about slavery -- that politics failed and we wound up in the Civil War, from which we still haven't recovered. We were still dealing with the aftermath of the Civil War in the 1960s, when I was in government.

We're still dealing with it now.

Oh, yeah. This is another subject that's off the table -- race! But being a Southerner informed me about what happens when a society closes the wagons around itself, when it doesn't tolerate good journalism or prophecy in the pulpit or truth-telling in the classroom.

The other thing was being a part of the Johnson administration, where we pulled the wagons around us on Vietnam, and we -- the government, the administration and the country -- paid a terrible price for that. So my journalism has grown steadily to be very skeptical, in the public interest, of any hegemony of thought or uniformity of ideology that's in charge. I'm deeply troubled by the lack of debate in the country, by the suppression of dissent, by the secrecy.

I fought hard for the Freedom of Information Act when I was in the White House. Johnson signed it; he hated it, but he signed it because Congressman [John] Moss just insisted. It was a great victory for openness in government. Every journalist will tell you that, every author will tell you that, every scientist will tell you that. And now, this is becoming the most secretive administration in American history, much more so even than during the Civil War.

Cheney last week was given full power by Bush to classify everything he wants. This is very troubling; this is a man who's indifferent to democracy, if not hostile to it. He's certainly hostile to transparency. He allows the energy industry to come in and write his energy bill, he talks to them about the oil fields in Iraq, yet all the records are closed. The main reason behind what they're doing with secrecy is to make it very difficult to follow their footprints on the policies that the first Bush and second Bush administrations are making.

It's a troubling time. They will regret it, just as we (in the Johnson administration) regretted it. And the country will pay for it, just as the country paid for our transgressions.

Why aren't we hearing more from the Democratic Party about this whole range of issues?

I think the primary reason is that the Democratic Party has bought into the same thing. It is as obligated to corporate fundraising, to money, as the Republicans. They have to raise as much money as the Republicans do, and they go to essentially the same sources for it: wealthy, privileged people, the 1 percent of this country that contributes most of the money to political campaigns. So the interests of the donor class come to dominate both parties. The people who get your attention once you're in office are not the people who voted for you but the people who paid for your price of admission.

Now, the Democrats have an old tradition, going back to the middle of the last century: labor and environmentalists and others. This country's history has been a seesaw between the power of organized money and the power of organized people. And there's been a balance. Now there is no real balance. It's money, private money, that is the dominant influence over public policy. And the Democrats go to the same trough as the Republicans do. That diminishes their ability to challenge the corporate conservative coalition that is now running the country.

That's one thing. The other thing is, just look at Lyndon Johnson and his reluctant decision to go to war. He, more than anybody else, as the tapes now show, had his doubts. But he remembered what happened in 1950 to '52, when McCarthy and the Republicans accused the Democrats of treason. Johnson was determined that would never happen to him. Kennedy, in '61 and '62, was just as determined that he, as a Democrat, would never be accused of being soft on our enemies. Today the Democrats are worried that if they do the wrong thing and oppose the war, they will pay the price in 2004. That's why, before the election last year, Tom Daschle led the effort to give almost unanimous approval to the resolution on Iraq. Let's pass it, he said, and move on to more important things. What did he mean by that? He meant the election, which they lost anyway.

Speaking of elections, let's touch on a subject where there's still a lot of bitterness among Democrats: Ralph Nader. People like me who voted for Nader in 2000 are still hearing about it from Democrats, how those 2.8 million votes cost Al Gore the White House. What's your perspective on that, especially since you think the Bush presidency has been so disastrous for the country?

I've always thought third parties played a valuable role in American political life. They release tension, for one thing. They release stress. They bring ideas in.

I thought Ross Perot running was a good thing. The Democrats were never going to deal with the deficit. I'm not a Democrat, I'm an independent, and I had gotten so disgusted with the Democrats when they had hegemony in Congress and refused to deal with the deficit. We would never have dealt with the deficits in the early '90s if Perot hadn't gotten his little chalkboard out and bought the TV time and went out there and educated enough American people that suddenly we began to see what was happening with this endless spending.

It took Perot to do that, and I thought Nader running would force the two parties to confront some issues. One thing his candidacy did was expose the hegemony of the two parties over the political rules in this country. It's a calamity the way they have become a racket to protect their own interests. But I wrote to him and urged him to run as a Democrat. I thought that inside the debates in New Hampshire and Iowa, he would get his ideas out in a way that would be politically realistic.

I can't condemn him for running. I believe in the pluralism of ideas and the competition of democracy. Having said all that, however, while I agree with Nader that Gore lost the election, I still think it's a reality that Nader's race probably did cost Gore the electoral votes he needed for a clean victory. That isn't to say it judgmentally, just to say there are consequences.

When you interviewed Nader [ http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/nader.html ] last August, you actually got him to admit that there are differences between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Well, there are differences. I said that earlier. Both parties are largely beholden to the same privileged and elite class, but there are traditional differences that make an impact on the margins. Clinton and Gore, for all their talk, didn't significantly advance environmental issues in eight years -- not until the end, when Clinton started signing all these executive orders to embarrass the next Republican president. But you have to gauge a president on the ultimate consequences of his policy on American life. Clinton did face the deficit, he did do the right thing on the economy, he did raise taxes on the wealthy to deal with deficits, he did finally go into Bosnia.

Looking ahead at the political calendar, it strikes me that the presidential primary process, which has always been pretty weird, gets worse every four years. Once upon a time, the primary season went from February well into May or June of an election year, and you got that sense of campaign-trail drama, where the candidates were tested in the public eye. Now they spend a year or more raising money, and the primary season has been packed into a ridiculous blitzkrieg of six or eight weeks. By the end of March next year, if not earlier, we'll know who the Democratic nominee is. And it's probably going to be the guy with the most money. Doesn't that sound like a democracy in danger?

I think democracy is in danger. I think democracy is gasping at the moment. The money people primarily determine who runs and wins in both parties. George W. Bush simply outspent John McCain in 2000; when Bush was in trouble in South Carolina, he was able to pour money in. Increasingly a small number of people determine who runs and therefore who wins. The participatory process is in paralysis. The mainstream press is largely owned by a handful of major corporations, so the debate is only on the periphery. It's on the Internet or out in the streets.

I do believe that the oxygen is going out of democracy. Slowly, but at an accelerating pace, the democratic institutions of this country are being bought off or traded off or allowed to atrophy. Political participation is one of them. There simply isn't any way for political candidates to engage in a true debate that people can watch and respond to. We don't hear many ideas anymore, just sound bites. Democracy is in great difficulty right now, and this troubles me about our country.

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

About the writer
Andrew O'Hehir is the editor of Salon Arts & Entertainment.

Copyright 2003 Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/04/07/moyers/index.html

[easymoney101]

Unceremonious End to Army Career
By Tom Bowman
The Baltimore Sun

Sunday 29 May 2005

Outspoken general fights demotion.
Washington - John Riggs spent 39 years in the Army, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during the Vietnam War and working his way up to become a three-star general entrusted with creating a high-tech Army for the 21st century.

But on a spring day last year, Riggs was told by senior Army officials that he would be retired at a reduced rank, losing one of his stars because of infractions considered so minor that they were not placed in his official record.

He was given 24 hours to leave the Army. He had no parade in review, no rousing martial music, no speeches or official proclamations praising his decades in uniform, the trappings that normally herald a high-level military retirement.

Instead, Riggs went to a basement room at Fort Myer, Va., and signed some mandatory forms. Then a young sergeant mechanically presented him with a flag and a form letter of thanks from President Bush.

"That's the coldest way in the world to leave," Riggs, 58, said in a drawl that betrays his rural roots in southeast Missouri. "It's like being buried and no one attends your funeral."

So what cost Riggs his star?

His Pentagon superiors said he allowed outside contractors to perform work they were not supposed to do, creating "an adverse command climate."

But some of the general's supporters believe the motivation behind his demotion was politics. Riggs was blunt and outspoken on a number of issues and publicly contradicted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by arguing that the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan and needed more troops.

"They all went bat s- - when that happened," recalled retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, a one-time Pentagon adviser who ran reconstruction efforts in Iraq in the spring of 2003. "The military part of [the defense secretary's office] has been politicized. If [officers] disagree, they are ostracized and their reputations are ruined."

Little-Used Punishment

A senior officer's loss of a star is a punishment seldom used, and then usually for the most serious offenses, such as dereliction of duty or command failures, adultery or misuse of government funds or equipment.

Over the past several decades, generals and admirals faced with far more serious official findings - scandals at the Navy's Tailhook Convention, the Air Force Academy and Abu Ghraib prison, for example - have continued in their careers or retired with no loss of rank.

Les Brownlee, who was then acting Army secretary and who ordered that Riggs be reduced in rank, said he stands by the demotion. "I read the [Army inspector general's] report and made that judgment. I happen to think it was that serious. Maybe I have a higher standard for these things," Brownlee said in an interview. "I still believe it was the right decision."

Rumsfeld's office had no comment for this story, referring all questions to the Army, which issued a statement.

The two contracting infractions "reflected negatively on Lt. Gen. Riggs's overall leadership and revealed an adverse command climate," the Army statement said. "Based on the review of the investigation and Lt. Gen. Riggs's comments, the Acting Secretary of the Army [Brownlee] concluded that Lt. Gen. Riggs did not serve satisfactorily in the grade of lieutentant general."

Garner and 40 other Riggs supporters - including an unusually candid group of retired generals - are trying to help restore his rank.

But even his most ardent supporters concede that his appeal has little chance of succeeding and that an act of Congress might be required.

From the Ranks

Riggs' rise to three-star general was heady stuff for a man who left the family's cotton farm in Missouri and enlisted in the Army in 1965, the same year America deployed combat troops to Vietnam. After three years as a soldier, Riggs went through Officer Candidate School and soon was piloting a twin-rotor Chinook above the central highlands of Vietnam.

On March 17, 1971, Riggs flew the lumbering, troop-carrying helicopter on a voluntary medevac mission to a base at Phu Nhon which had been under heavy attack from a battalion of North Vietnamese soldiers, according to Army records. On his first approach to the base he was forced back by enemy fire, but he tried another flight path and was able to set down on a small and dusty landing zone.

The young officer flew out 59 wounded soldiers, 30 of whom "probably would have died if Captain Riggs and his crew had not acted as they did," said Riggs' citation for the Distinguished Flying Cross, a top medal awarded for "exceptionally valorous actions."

After the war, Riggs worked his way up through the ranks in the Army, serving in Korea and Germany as well as a stint with NATO headquarters in Brussels. He commanded troops from the platoon level to the First U.S. Army, which is based in Georgia and is responsible for training National Guard and Reserve troops east of the Mississippi.

Among Riggs' accomplishments with the First Army was the largest rotation of part-time troops since World War II, when the Guard's 29th Infantry Division, which includes troops from Maryland and Virginia, deployed to Bosnia for a peacekeeping mission in 2001.

In 2001, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army's top officer, asked Riggs to take over the Army's transformation task force. The group was organized to create an Army for the 21st century, centered on the Future Combat System, a series of armored vehicles, drone aircraft and sensors that would give soldiers greater control over future battlefields.

Those who worked with Riggs, as well as his endorsement letters, say the general worked hard at trying to turn the Army into a high-tech force.

The December 2002 Scientific American magazine singled him out as one of the country's top 50 technology leaders for his work. Riggs, the magazine said, was "leading the often contentious, even acrimonious debate among military planners about how to transform today's ground divisions into high-tech fighting units of the future."

But documents and interviews reveal that some of those who worked with Riggs chafed at the constant pace of work and the authority he gave to private contractors, whom he said he relied on heavily.

Riggs himself and investigation documents say he was the subject of anonymous allegations that he was violating the Pentagon's contracting regulations and having an affair with one of the contractors.

The Army inspector general's office opened a probe in the spring of 2003. At the same time, a criminal investigation also looking at the issue of contractors was launched by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command.

Only the inspector general came back with findings of fault. An October 2003 letter from Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, the inspector general, found two violations of contracting rules but concluded that the allegation of "an adulterous affair with a female contractor was not substantiated."

Memo of 'Concern'

The report prompted Gen. John M. Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer, to write a disciplinary "memorandum of concern" to Riggs. The memo found that a female contractor was allowed to draft congressional testimony, respond to congressional correspondence and communicate with Capitol Hill staffers.

Allowing a contractor to perform functions that should have been undertaken only by government employees was improper, Keane wrote.

Also, since the contractor was serving in a role similar to that of a deputy director or executive officer, that amounted to an improper "personal services contract" that should have been filled by a government employee. Riggs was put on notice "to comply with all regulatory requirements," but Keane wrote that the memo would not be filed in Riggs' personnel records.

Riggs was also questioned in the related criminal investigation, he and his attorney said. It produced no charges and, said Rigg's attorney, Army Lt. Col. Vic Hansen, "The investigation's dead, and it's not going anywhere."

A spokesman for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command said he could not comment on the status of any investigation.

Now retired, Keane said demoting Riggs based on a penalty that represents the "minimum administrative punishment" at his disposal was a "tragic mistake."

"It is outrageous that John Riggs was reduced in rank for such a minor offense, which should never outweigh his 30-plus years of exemplary service to the Army and the nation," Keane wrote in a letter to Army officials supporting Riggs' restoration as a lieutenant general.

Keane said the Army was partly to blame for Riggs' predicament because the service downsized its support personnel and forced officers to hire private contractors. "I believe we blurred the lines of contractors and department employees, so much so that many of the supervisors just saw it as one team," Keane wrote. "While John Riggs did blur those lines, we, the Army, contributed directly to that without a clear policy and clear command guidelines."

Candid Assessments

Riggs, long known for offering blunt, unvarnished opinion, wasn't chastened by the contractor probe.

He stepped on the toes of other generals in pressing for a modernized Army and advocated the planned Comanche helicopter, which he viewed as vital to the future Army. Riggs was instructed by the Army not to make a speech supporting the Comanche, which the Army decided to kill to save money.

"John Riggs had the moral courage to stand and be counted on the tough issues concerning [the Army's modernization efforts] when his contemporaries took the easy approach of agreeing with their seniors," wrote retired Army Gen. Larry Ellis, a Morgan State graduate who is supporting Riggs' return to three-star rank.

In a January 2004 interview with The Sun, Riggs said the Army was too small to meet its global commitments and must be substantially increased.

The interview made him the first senior active-duty officer to publicly urge a larger Army - and the first to publicly take on Rumsfeld and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who had repeatedly told lawmakers that such increases were not necessary.

After the interview appeared, Pentagon sources said, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz stormed into the office of the Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., and demanded an explanation for Riggs' views. Riggs said Casey called him that day and ordered him not to talk about troop increases but to "stay in your lane."

Casey, Riggs said, then asked him when he was planning to retire.

"I did become sort of a persona non grata," said Riggs.

Several days after Riggs' remarks on troop strength, Rumsfeld and other officials asked for a temporary increase of 30,000 soldiers for the Army, although they continue to argue that a permanent increase was not needed.

Handled Differently

What's striking about the Riggs case is the comparison with how the Army and the other services have handled even more serious cases.

Seven years ago, Maj. Gen. David Hale, the Army's inspector general, was allowed to hastily retire after allegations that he pressured the wife of a subordinate into a sexual relationship. An Army investigation uncovered other affairs with subordinates' wives, and Hale was later put back on active duty and court-martialed. But it took an Army review panel another six months after his conviction to determine that Hale should be reduced by one star to a brigadier general.

Two Navy rear admirals were given letters of censure for not stopping lewd behavior at the 1991 Tailhook Association convention in Las Vegas, where dozens of women were groped and fondled by Navy and Marine Corps aviators. Both admirals retired at their two-star ranks.

More recently, the Air Force removed the four top officers at the U.S. Air Force Academy as part of a housecleaning after a sex scandal in 2003. While the superintendent was demoted from a three-star to a two-star rank, the other officers went on to jobs with similar responsibilities.

In March 2004, with his mentor Shinseki gone and his own future clouded, Riggs said, he saw the "handwriting on the wall" and put in his retirement papers.

Under Army rules, a general officer must complete the retirement process within 60 days or risk reverting to previous rank. By April 3, Riggs still had heard nothing so he sent an e-mail to Casey to remind him that time was running out.

"We are very conscious of time," Casey responded, according to a copy of the e-mail kept by Riggs. "Discussed with [the assistant secretary of the Army] yesterday. I expect some movement next week."

Eleven days later, Riggs got a terse letter from Casey, saying that the acting secretary of the Army, Brownlee, was embarking on a "grade determination" of Riggs.

He had just five days to respond because Brownlee was leaving on a trip.

A couple of weeks later, on April 29, Riggs said, Casey told him in a phone conversation that Brownlee had determined that his time as lieutenant general "had not been satisfactory" and that he would retire at a two-star rank. Riggs was told to sign his retirement papers the next day so he could leave the Army by the weekend.

Brownlee still has never talked to Riggs about the decision; Brownlee said Casey would do that in his role handling disciplinary matters for general officers.

Casey, who now is the top U.S. commander in Iraq, declined through a spokesman to comment or answer e-mailed questions.

Brownlee did send the decision to reduce Riggs' rank to Rumsfeld, who could have reversed it. But he chose not to. "The only thing I heard back [from Rumsfeld's office] was that it was noted," Brownlee said.

The decision cost Riggs $10,000 to $15,000 a year in pension benefits. But, he added, "what I've lost is a lot of my personal self-respect."

In a series of interviews, Riggs said he still wrestles with why he was demoted but believes his outspokenness was part of the equation.

"Do I think it is?" he said. "I thought it must have something to do with it. You've got to do it the Rumsfeld way, or you're not going to go forward.

"When you ask a general officer, 'What do you think?' you should be able to answer candidly. I think he's politicized the general officer corps by making the personal selections of everyone."

Brownlee dismissed the contention that his actions amounted to a political vendetta. "I know that's what some of them will assert," said Brownlee, an Army combat veteran in Vietnam who was the top staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It was not political."

During his 18 months as acting Army secretary, Brownlee could not recall any other general that he reduced in rank.

Praise for Riggs

Former Army Secretary Thomas White, who was fired by Rumsfeld over policy differences and was succeeded by Brownlee, praised Riggs' work and said he found the reduction in rank puzzling. But White, a retired Army brigadier general, questioned the notion that the officer corps had suddenly become politicized.

"It's always been political," White said. "It operates in a capital filled with politicians. I don't know if it's more or less than it was 20 years ago."

Nonetheless, several senior officers said they privately fear that Riggs' treatment could have a chilling effect on the willingness of other officers to provide their candid views, forcing them instead to bend to the political winds. Five of the retired officers who wrote letters urging that Riggs' rank be restored agreed either to be interviewed or to let their letters be quoted.

One of those was Shinseki, who himself had a stormy relationship with Rumsfeld and battled with the secretary over troop levels and spending programs. At his retirement ceremony in June 2003, Shinseki warned "our soldiers and families bear the risk and hardship of carrying a mission load that exceeds the force capabilities we can sustain."

Neither Rumsfeld nor his top deputies were in attendance.

In his letter of support for Riggs, Shinseki said, "There was no one who was more professional, more honest, more selfless, more dedicated, nor more loyal to the Army and to its soldiers than John Riggs."

An Outcast

Riggs has become an outcast, saddled with a reduction in rank that is one of the harshest and rarest punishments in an institution built on honor and rank.

Hansen, Riggs' military lawyer, said the Army could simply have retired the general and not demoted him. "Why do you put that last knife in the back? That's petty and mean-spirited," he said. "How do you tell him he didn't deserve to be retired at three-star rank?"

Riggs has filed the paperwork to the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records, an appeal process that could restore him to three-star rank, Army officials said.

A hearing officer will review the case and make a recommendation to a three-member panel. A final decision, expected this summer, rests with an assistant Army secretary.

"It's a stretch," said Hansen, Riggs' lawyer.

The investigations have taken both a professional and personal toll on Riggs. His marriage of 38 years fell apart. Now, the former general shuttles between Washington and Florida, spending his time on consulting and real estate work.

And while he is both saddened and sometimes angry about how his military career came to a close, he still has a great deal of respect for the Army. "It's the most noble institution we've got," he said.

But Garner, the retired lieutenant general, has a more hardened view of the Army's top brass and is troubled by what happened to Riggs, "this superb soldier."

"The real tragedy here," Garner said in an interview, "is that none of the leadership of the Army has the guts to stand up and say it's wrong."

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/053005Y.shtml

[easymoney101]

Great Lies of the American free press
12 comment(s).

by David R. Hoffman
Is freedom of the American press a myth?In several previous PRAVDA articles, I discussed the Bush dictatorship’s prominent use of Adolph Hitler’s "great lie theory" - the political tactic where a leader fabricates "great lies," then "eternally" repeats them until a significant portion of the population comes to accept them as truth. The Bush dictatorship also discovered a residual benefit of the "great lie theory": People are often so myopic or so embarrassed by their gullibility that, even after the "great lies" are exposed, they would rather reward the liar than acknowledge the lie.

This benefit, however, has also revealed the disquieting reality that far too many people in the United States, arguably the most powerful nation on earth, do not require legitimate reasons before they will acquiesce to the wasting of billions of tax dollars, and the sacrificing of thousands of lives, in wars based upon nothing but lies.

There, of course, are those who claim the "great lie theory" cannot work in democratic countries like America, because, unlike nations with government-controlled media, there is "freedom of the press." But this criticism is easily muted by the events that occurred a little over fifty years ago, during the height of the "Cold War" era.

In 1950, a politically ambitious senator named Joseph McCarthy, during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, held up a piece of paper that allegedly contained the names of communists who were employed by America’s State Department. This bold announcement helped to usher in an era of hysteria, fear, censorship and blacklisting that only began to wane four years later when an attorney named Joseph Welch asked McCarthy during the televised "Army-McCarthy" hearings, "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?"

Both McCarthy’s biographers and friends have stated that Hitler’s book MEIN KAMPF, which discussed the application of the "great lie theory," played an important role in the development of McCarthy’s political strategies. And even though the relatively new medium of television helped to diminish McCarthy’s power, the corporate-controlled news media also shared the blame for McCarthy’s ability to disseminate "great lies." During the Wheeling speech, no reporter asked to examine the list McCarthy held, and it is said that McCarthy himself later joked to members of his inner circle that nothing was on the paper but a reminder to pick up his laundry.

Meanwhile those in the television industry, now so eager to take credit for the demise of McCarthyism, were also fervent practitioners of blacklisting during McCarthy’s heyday. Mark Goodson, a renowned game show producer during the 1950s, wrote in an article for the New York Times entitled IF I’D STOOD UP EARLIER . . . (1991) that he had even been pressured into blacklisting celebrities simply because they shared the same name as suspected communists.

The legacy of McCarthyism demonstrates that, despite popular myth, America does not truly have a "free press." While the Bill of Rights guarantees that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of the press," it is usually nongovernmental factors - fear of losing readers, viewers and/or advertising dollars - that actually control the decisions made by corporate-controlled news media. These influences can also be labeled the three "P’s": Popularity, Prejudice and Profit. And, to accommodate the three "P’s," corporate-controlled news media have persistently ignored two others: the People and the Public Interest.

To achieve popularity, America’s corporate-controlled media censor legitimate and detailed news stories in favor of sensationalistic and superficial tripe. Although a celebrity in America cannot have flatulence without an army of reporters analyzing the smell, corporate-controlled news media, to avoid being "controversial," incessantly ignore topics that could actually educate or enlighten.

The most recent example of this was revealed by the British newspaper The Guardian in its article THE FILM U.S. TV NETWORKS DARE NOT SHOW (May 12, 2005). This article discusses the resistance filmmaker Adam Curtis encountered during his attempts to locate a major American media outlet willing to show his documentary film, THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES.

Although this documentary examines the historical events that ultimately led to one of the most catastrophic events in American history - the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon - the cowardice of the American media apparently resides not in the film’s analysis of these events, but in its depiction of the "neo-conservative’s" exploitation of September 11th for political and personal gain.

According to The Guardian, the "neo-conservative" ideology originated in 1949 when "political philosopher" Leo Strauss argued that "conservative" politicians had to "invent national myths to hold society together and stop America . . . from collapsing into degraded individualism." Of course in today’s America "national myths" really mean "great lies," and the efforts to terminate "degraded individualism" really mean the death of the Bill of Rights-the very document designed by America’s founders to preserve individual rights and freedoms.

To advance these goals in recent years, "neo-conservatives" have propagated the myth (i.e. "great lie") that America’s news media are "liberal." Yet, from their disdain for the anti-war movement to their jingoistic hyperbole and treatment of war as a "video game," corporate-controlled news media’s coverage of the conflict in Iraq easily dispels this myth. Like the Spanish-American war a little more than a century ago, the Iraqi war will undoubtedly be remembered by history as an unnecessary invasion fueled by corporate-controlled news media’s lust to boost profits.

As I discussed in previous PRAVDA articles, the corporate-controlled news media’s self-serving promotion of the Iraqi war was accentuated when several radio stations owned by Clear Channel, one of the largest media empires in the United States, boycotted songs by the Dixie Chicks because of statements the trio made in opposition to the Bush dictatorship; when Sinclair Broadcasting refused to televise a segment of ABC’s NIGHTLINE, where the names of those killed in Iraq were read; when Ed Gernon, co-producer of the television mini-series HITLER: THE RISE OF EVIL, was fired from his job after comparing the demise of civil liberties in Hitler’s Germany to the demise of civil liberties in America; and when CNN Chief News Executive Eason Jordan resigned amidst allegations that he had claimed American troops were deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq.

By contrast, the corporate-controlled news media have ardently embraced the plethora of cowards who exploited the Iraqi war to advance their own careers while conspicuously avoiding combat duty themselves. Cable television’s CNBC rewarded comedian Dennis Miller with a talk show after he hawked the Iraqi war. And, unlike the fate of Ed Gernon, these media have permitted two "neo-conservative" cowards, Rush Limbaugh (who avoided serving in Vietnam because of an alleged "boil" on his posterior) and Ann Coulter, to utilize Nazi analogies with impunity when attacking those they oppose. Bill O’Reilly, who, despite his claims to be willing to "sacrifice" himself for Fallujah, remains safely ensconced in the studios of the Fox "News" (i.e. Propaganda) Network, frequently uses his talk show to demand economic retaliation against university professors and African-American hip-hop artists who express "unpopular" opinions, yet whined about unjust treatment after allegations that he sexually harassed a female coworker made him the subject of ridicule on late-night television. Even the so-called "liberal" Cable "News" Network (CNN) has made a media icon out of Nancy Grace, a narrow-minded former prosecutor who rarely allows her fanatical preconceptions to be diminished by factual realities.

The censorship practiced by corporate-controlled media has helped them build entire "news" networks upon great lies-that coverage is "fair and balanced," that it should be "trusted," or, perhaps the greatest lie of all, that the drivel disseminated deserves to qualify as "news."

The inevitable result of such censorship is that important news stories are frequently ignored until it is "safe" to report on them. Once this safe-haven arises, however, corporate-controlled news media consistently endeavor to conceal their previous censorship with an arrogant "we were concerned all the time" approach.

Today, for example, it would be a challenge to find anybody in the corporate-controlled news media openly praising the excesses of the McCarthy era. Yet during McCarthy’s heyday it was a challenge to find anybody in media openly opposing him.

This "belated concern" approach also was evident in media coverage of former Black Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, who served over twenty-five years in prison after being framed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Although the CBS Evening News did an excellent piece on Pratt while he was still incarcerated, much of the other corporate-controlled news media waited until after Pratt was released before denouncing the illegal tactics used to imprison him.

Where were these media when Pratt’s release was still uncertain? Ask Eddie Marshall Conway, a Baltimore Black Panther leader who remains in prison despite similar concerns about the tactics used to convict him.

While some may argue that localized injustices against African-American militants do not a national news story make, it was the illegalities and abuses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation that played a significant role in many of these injustices. Today, thanks to the so-called "Patriot Act," this very same agency is enjoying almost the same powers it abused in the past. If corporate-controlled news media refuse to remind Americans of these past abuses, history may be destined to repeat itself.

The second "P" spurring the corporate-controlled news media is prejudice. This not only explains their lack of interest in the Pratt and Conway cases, but also the abundance of right-wing "hate" radio dominating the airwaves.

This exploitation of prejudice, however, is not confined to radio: It is practiced by some of America’s premier pseudo-journalists. A few months ago one such journalist, Barbara Walters, sanctimoniously announced, to the applause of her predominantly white audience, that she would not interview former football star turned actor O.J. Simpson, who had been acquitted of murdering his wife and a family friend. Yet, subsequent to this announcement, Walters sycophantically interviewed Robert Blake, an actor who also had been acquitted of murdering his wife.

The key difference, of course, was that O.J. Simpson happened to be African-American, and his alleged victims were white, young, and attractive; thus his acquittal inspired outrage across white America. On the other hand, Blake and his alleged victim were both white, and she was older and not as attractive; thus his acquittal scarcely caused a whimper across white America.

Besides pandering to race, corporate-controlled news media convey their biases through "split-screen" interviews. During these interviews the questioner’s image occupies half of the television screen, while the image of the respondent occupies the other half. In most cases the respondent has no visual contact with the questioner, relying instead on an earpiece that simply transmits sound. As a result, the questioner can smirk, frown, scowl, or employ numerous other forms of non-verbal communication to indicate approval or derision, all without the respondent’s knowledge.

Media censorship can also be based on the personal biases of editors or telephone "screeners," who have the power to decide whether or not a news segment, comment, article or letter should be aired or published.

I experienced such censorship first-hand when I became interested in the plight of a local African-American man, who was serving a seventy-year sentence after being convicted by an all-white jury of crimes I believed he did not commit. I began writing letters and articles about his case, and my local newspaper initially published them almost verbatim. It was later discovered that I was indeed correct about this man’s innocence, and he was ultimately released from prison.

Not surprisingly, after his release, a police officer who had been involved in his case decided to adopt the media’s "I had concerns all the time" strategy in interviews and articles, even though she had remained publicly silent about these alleged doubts throughout this man’s years of incarceration. Although he eventually filed a lawsuit against local officials, including this police officer, seeking compensation for his years of wrongful imprisonment, a federal magistrate dismissed the case, claiming the man had not established that his arrest and conviction were made in "bad faith."

As an attorney, I always had misgivings about the "bad faith" standard, and many states have bypassed it by passing laws to compensate those wrongfully convicted. The state where this man resided, however, had no such laws; consequently I thought his case would provide a good opportunity to expose the egregious nature of the "bad faith" standard. So I wrote an article explaining that, aside from an admission of wrongdoing by police or prosecutors, the "bad faith" standard was practically impossible for a wrongfully convicted person to meet.

After submitting this article to my local newspaper, an editor informed me that my critique of the "bad faith" standard would not be published as written, allegedly because it could be construed as an attack on the professionalism of the local police department.

Subsequently I discovered that the editor who had reviewed my article and the police officer who had belatedly espoused her "doubts" were friends, and this was the real motive behind the censorship. Tragically, an opportunity to raise legitimate concerns about the "bad faith" standard and the injustices it engendered was obliterated by the personal bias of a lone editor.

The final, and most powerful, "P" driving corporate-controlled news media is profit. In their pure form, however, these media are incompatible with standard theories of capitalism.

Capitalism contends that companies manufacturing and marketing similar products will endeavor to improve those products to gain an advantage over their competitors, which, in turn, benefits consumers.

But news is not a product, simply a reporting of events. Nevertheless, to increase profits, corporate-controlled media have decided to "manufacture" and "market" news. Many radio stations owned by Clear Channel sponsored pro-war rallies, while Sinclair Broadcasting, shortly before the 2004 presidential election, sought to air a documentary hostile to candidate John Kerry.

The manufacturing and marketing of news is even accomplished by deceiving people into believing they will be given a fair opportunity to articulate or defend their positions. Most television or radio interviews, unless they are aired live, are usually subjected to "editing." So even though an individual may provide several minutes of intelligent and well-reasoned analysis, the words are often condensed into a few seconds of "sound bites" that can be manipulated to give a deceptive, and even dishonest, impression of what was actually said.

During my brief legal career, rumors had been circulating in our local community that people were being unjustly purged from voter registration rolls. Since I specialized in constitutional and civil rights law, I was asked to contact the proper investigative agency about these alleged practices. Although I did so, I stressed to the investigator that nobody had presented any actual evidence to substantiate these rumors, so I would leave it to her discretion about whether or not an investigation was warranted.

I forgot about this matter until a few days later, when a reporter for a local television station requested an interview. During the course of this interview, I was persistently asked if I believed the alleged purging was the result of one political party trying to dilute the voting strength of the other.

Since I repeatedly replied that this was not the case, very little of the actual interview was aired. What noticeably appeared instead was this same reporter opining that the interview had left her with the impression one political party was attempting to dilute the voting strength of the other!

This experience alone indicates that the corporate-controlled media’s impetus to manufacture news rarely results in an honest product. Instead it compels these media to sink to their lowest common denominator, sacrificing truth, impartiality and ethics for the sake of ratings and profit.

This proclivity to sink to the lowest common denominator has even made members of the corporate-controlled news media susceptible to bribery. Armstrong Williams, a "conservative" African-American pseudo-journalist, was recently paid two hundred and forty thousand dollars ($240,000) by the Bush dictatorship to promote an education reform law on his syndicated television show. Another pseudo-journalist, Maggie Gallagher, was paid twenty-one thousand, five hundred dollars ($21,500) by the federal government’s department of Health and Human Services to encourage marriage. This same department also paid columnist Mike McManus ten thousand ($10,000) dollars to "train marriage counselors." Yet, according to the Associated Press (1/29/05), "all three columnists failed to disclose to their readers their relationship with the [Bush] administration."

But such bribery does not have to be strictly on a cash basis. During the build-up to the Iraqi war, one of the primary disseminators of the Bush dictatorship’s "great lies" was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. And during this time, in one of those remarkable "coincidences" that nepotism spawns, Powell’s son Michael was head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-the very agency that possessed the power to change FCC rules so monopolistic media empires could acquire even a greater share of the marketplace. In return all these empires had to do was endorse, or at least not dispute, the warmongering lies of the Bush dictatorship, and accept, or at least not question, the fraudulent results of the 2000 and 2004 presidential "elections."

Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of the corporate-controlled news media is that, while they expend a substantial amount of effort questioning or criticizing the actions of others, they are extraordinarily intolerant of criticism themselves. Whenever ordinary people attempt to criticize American media they are guaranteed at least one of three responses.

The first response, already discussed in this article, is censorship. My local newspaper, for example, has flatly refused to publish any of my letters criticizing its use of personal bias to censor legitimate stories. Since this newspaper is the only one with significant readership that reports on local issues, my voice regarding these issues is effectively silenced.

The second response is the "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" This response was ridiculed in a recent episode of the adult-themed cartoon SOUTH PARK. The main characters, all elementary school children, were told that their news program, which they broadcast across the school’s closed-circuit television system, was in danger of being canceled due to low ratings. To improve these ratings, the children simply began focusing their program on salacious gossip. When one character expressed concern about "dumbing" down his fellow students, his colleagues replied, "People are already dumb. We’re just giving them what they want."

The third response is, "Don’t blame the messenger." Even though, as explained above, the corporate-controlled media make ubiquitous efforts to manufacture and market news, they consistently seek to present themselves as mere "innocents" reporting upon events they cannot control.

Ironically, in today’s America, people who want real news or honest criticism are better served by not watching "news" programs at all. Comedy Central’s satirical program THE DAILY SHOW, for example, often covers current events with more insight than the so-called cable "news" networks, where "discussion" routinely consists of "experts" of dubious qualifications shouting and interrupting each other.

Following the South Park trend, a character on a recent episode of the animated comedy THE SIMPSONS rhetorically asked where America’s "koo-koo, bananas commander" intended to start the next "military quagmire." A character on the medical drama "ER" derisively mocked the Chicago Tribune newspaper for endorsing Bush in the 2004 presidential race, while the series itself devoted several episodes to the war in the Congo, where, as one character said, the suffering is largely ignored because "there is no oil."

Finally, on May 15, 2005, the Associated Press reported that many critics were comparing the decline of civil liberties and democracy in the new "Star Wars" movie REVENGE OF THE SITH to the decline of civil liberties and democracy in the United States. George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars franchise, acknowledged that much of the film was inspired by "historical transformations from freedom to fascism." Ironically, in a nation that boasts about "freedom of the press," it appears that only the fictitious adventures of characters in a "galaxy far, far away" might awaken Americans to the factual realities here on earth.

For the reasons mentioned above, the hands of America’s corporate-controlled news media are now dripping with the blood of those sacrificed in a war promoted and exploited for ratings and profit. May this blood that has been shed for their greed never wash clean, lest we forget how easily corruption, avarice and deceit can usurp democracy, blacken the hearts of humanity, and destroy the soul of a nation.

David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of PRAVDA

http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/15516_greatlietheory.html


http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6204

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: PBS Updates Editorial Standards ( AP Online )

WASHINGTON, Jun 15, 2005 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The Public Broadcasting
Service is hiring an ombudsman and revising editorial practices in the face of
criticism that its programming has given short shrift to conservative views.

Changes approved by the PBS board now go to the service's funding organization,
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for its consideration, and millions of
dollars in revenue for PBS could be at stake in the corporation's review.

PBS, which rejects accusations of liberal bias, said it has been reviewing its
procedures since before Republicans in Congress moved to cut its financing. The
Republican chairman of the corporation, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, specifically
accused the show "Now with Bill Moyers" - which Moyers no longer hosts - of
featuring guests hostile to conservative views.

Meanwhile, the corporation's inspector general is investigating $15,000 in
payments that were made to two Republican lobbyists last year, according to a
report on The New York Times Web site Wednesday night. People who are involved
in the inquiry but wished to remain anonymous told the Times that one of the
lobbyists was retained at the direction of Tomlinson.

The inspector general's office is also examining $14,170 in payments to a man
who provided Tomlinson with reports about the political leanings of guests on
"Now." None of the payments were disclosed to the corporation's board, the Times
reported.

In an e-mail to the newspaper, Tomlinson responded, "We are confident that the
inspector general's report will conclude that all personnel arrangements were
and continue to be made in accordance with the statutes and rules governing
CPB's use of funds."

Revisions adopted by the PBS board include a requirement that commentary and
opinion be labeled as such, and that program producers offer more information on
how they gathered material and made their editorial decisions.

PBS also said it would hire an ombudsman to review controversial programs.

About 15 percent of PBS' budget is from the federal government, with
appropriations approved by Congress and provided through the CPB.

About $55 million in funds for a variety of programs over two years is at stake
in the CPB's review of the new standards.

Jacoba Atlas, senior vice president of programming at PBS, described the new
standards as "some refreshing, not a total overhauling in any way."

"The American public believes PBS is trusted, valued and fair ad accurate," she
said, citing various polls. "We feel our producers have been doing an excellent
job, and the 1987 editorial standards to which all our producers adhered, did
stand the test of time."

CPB has begun reviewing the 70-page document that PBS submitted, according to
spokesman Eben Peck. The corporation has until Oct. 1 to share any concerns with
PBS over the standards.

The updated standards and policies are the result of more than a year of
evaluation by PBS, it said in a statement Wednesday.

PBS created a committee of experts over a year ago to review PBS content
policies.

The updated policies are not a significant departure from those PBS has used
since 1987, PBS said. The committee noted policies need only "minimal changes
and should be altered only as necessary to reflect evolving technology and
journalistic norms," PBS said.

PBS is a private, nonprofit media enterprise that serves the nation's 348 public
noncommercial television stations, reaching nearly 90 million people each week.

---

On the Net:

Public Broadcasting Service: http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/aboutpbs-standards.html

---

By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH
Associated Press Writer

Copyright 2005 Associated Press, All rights reserved

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