[Originally: July 26, 2010 ]

This piece was first published by the Hillman Foundation.

Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist—even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.

What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites… is a manipulation. Not just of a story, not just on behalf of a political philosophy. Manipulation of a society, its intentional redirection from reality and progress, to a paranoid delusion and the fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans…The assassins of the Right have been enabled on the Left.

— Keith Olbermann’s special comment on the Sherrod debacle

It has become fashionable to dismiss Keith Olbermann as an over-the-top ranter—or as the MSNBC host put it himself, “a mirror image of that which I assail.” But there was nothing over-the-top about his special comment about Shirley Sherrod. Every word he spoke was true. And the only thing that made his stance so remarkable is the abject failure of the mainstream media—especially this week—to accurately describe the source of the allegation against Sherrod, or to chronicle the long-term impact of the “complete perversion of journalism” practiced 365 days a year by Fox News (and the right-wing bloggers and radio hosts that make up the rest of this wackosphere).

The “enabling” Olbermann so accurately describes consists of a nonchalant attitude among most media swells toward Rupert Murdoch’s main propaganda machine—”oh, that’s just Fox”—melded with an inculcation by these same writers of the main “value” informing almost every judgment made in America today: if it makes a lot of money, it must be a wonderful thing.

The perversion of journalism produced by the fusion of these two attitudes has led us directly to the perversion of society we witnessed this week, when a Democratic White House and the nation’s oldest civil rights organization both behaved in a precipitous, craven, and disgusting fashion, purely out of fear of how they would be treated by a band of vicious charlatans—men and women who are inexplicably treated by everyone from the New York Times to the Today show as if they were actual journalists.

Here are some of the media choices, each of them chronicled by Full Court Press over the last two years, that have pushed us to this terrible place.

* A gushing page-one profile of Glenn Beck in the New York Times by Brian Stelter and Bill Carter, which celebrated his impressive ratings soon after his arrival at Fox: “Mr. Beck presents himself as a revivalist in a troubled land.… Mr. Beck’s emotions are never far from the surface. ‘That’s good dramatic television,’ said Phil Griffin, the president of a Fox rival, MSNBC. ‘That’s who Glenn Beck is.’”

* Time magazine‘s decision to ask Glenn Beck to assess Rush Limbaugh’s importance in America for the 2009 Time 100: “His consistency, insight and honesty have earned him a level of trust with his listeners that politicians can only dream of.”

* A decision by the editors of washingtonpost.com to allow Beck to host a chat there to promote one of his books.

* This hard-hitting assessment of Beck by Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, who gurgled on, “Sure, he may be selling a sensationalistic message of paranoia and social breakdown. But politics, or basic responsibility, aside, he has an entertainer’s sense of play with the medium of TV that O’Reilly, or perpetual sourpuss Neil Cavuto, don’t.” And why would anybody care about a basic sense of responsibility, anyway?

* A worshipful 1,943-word profile of Fox News founder and president Roger Ailes by David Carr and Tim Arango on the front page of the New York Times—which included this perfectly amoral quote from David Gergen, a perfectly amoral man:

“Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process.” And what a wonderful conversation it is.

* And finally, the most sickening piece of all in this splendid cohort: David von Drehele‘s obscenely sycophantic cover story of Beck for Time magazine, which told us that Beck is a “man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one’s listening all converge;” that he is “tireless, funny, [and]self-deprecating…a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies—if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking.”

In a rare and honorable exception to this parade of journalistic disasters, earlier this month Dana Milbank did mention the role of Beck in the creation of the current climate of paranoia:

These sentiments have long existed on the fringe and always will. The problem is that conservative leaders and Republican politicians, in their blind rage against Obama these last 18 months, invited the epithets of the fringe into the mainstream.… Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News since Obama’s inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama—as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck’s nightly “report.”

But far worse than the kid-gloves treatment of Fox and its friends was the inexplicably benign approach the MSM took toward Andrew Brietbart, the original source of the doctored video of Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP that started this whole sorry saga.

In the Washington Post, he was a “conservative activist and blogger”; in Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story in the Times, he was “a blogger” who “similarly…used edited videos to go after ACORN, the community organizing group;” in the Wall Street Journal he was “a conservative Internet activist” who “argued that the Obama administration is insufficiently sensitive to bias against white people”; in the Los Angeles Times, ”a conservative media entrepreneur” and to Associated Press television writer David Bauder a “conservative activist” whose website “attracted attention last year for airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.”

But to find out who Breitbart really is, you would have had to read (h/t Joe Stouter) Joe Conason in Salon, who, “recalling Breitbart from his days as eager lackey to Matt Drudge...warned from the beginning that nothing he produced would resemble journalism.”

Although there was not a hint of this in any of the stories I’ve quoted from above, O’Keefe’s ACORN story was actually a “‘scandal’ that became a national story only after wildly biased coverage on Fox News Channel, followed by sloppy, scared reporting in mainstream outlets, notably the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the national TV networks (some of whom flagellated themselves for failing to publicize this canard sooner!)” as Conason put it. He continued:

Investigations by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, California Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, among others, have served to exonerate ACORN of the most outrageous charges of criminality (while still criticizing ACORN employees and leadership). More important, from the perspective of journalistic ethics, those investigations revealed that the videotapes released and promoted by Breitbart’s website were selectively and deceptively edited to serve as propaganda, not news.”

The Harshbarger report, commissioned by ACORN’s own board of directors, pointed to signs of chicanery when it was released last December. Although O’Keefe, his associate and fake “prostitute” Hannah Giles and Breitbart all refused to speak with Harshbarger, his researchers at the Proskauer Rose law firm were able to make preliminary comparisons between audio and video files on the Big Government website…

Amazingly, the New York Times never covered the Harshbarger report and gave little or no coverage to the other deconstructions of the Big Government “scoop” by law enforcement. Last March, when Hoyt finally offered an excuse for the failure of the Times to adequately correct and explain the complex truth behind Breitbart’s ACORN scam, it sounded weak.

The report by Harshbarger…was not covered by The Times. It should have been, but the Acorn/O’Keefe story became something of an orphan at the paper. At least 14 reporters, reporting to different sets of editors, have touched it since last fall. Nobody owns it. Bill Keller, the executive editor, said that, “sensing the story would not go away and would be part of a larger narrative,” the paper should have assigned one reporter to be responsible for it.”

So, having repeatedly blown the aftermath of the ACORN story, the Times compounded its error by giving its readers no hint whatsoever this week of Breitbart’s nefarious background.

The single most ridiculous story of the week was written by “media reporter” Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. Howie — as only Howie could, being a man of limitless energy and no judgment — decided the most interesting angle of the Sherrod affair was Fox’s lack of responsibility in promoting it. “Ousted official Shirley Sherrod blamed Fox, but other outlets ran with story,” was the headline over Kurtz’s report.

Kurtz said this was true because Fox did not mention the story until after Sherrod had been forced to resign — and he reported that Fox Senior Vice President Michael Clemente had seen an e-mail to his staff which said: “Let’s take our time and get the facts straight on this story. Can we get confirmation and comments from Sherrod before going on-air? Let’s make sure we do this right.”

However, Clemente’s memorandum did not prevent Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity from convicting Sherrod of her alleged crime on both of their programs on Monday night, even though neither of them had reached Sherrod as Clemente had directed. And it didn’t prevent the wall-to-wall character assassination which the network engaged in all day Tuesday, until the full, exonerating version of the tape of Sherrod’s speech was finally made public by the NAACP Tuesday night. (As one wise FCP friend observed, “It’s great to know they do have standards–even if they never bother to observe them.”)

Kurtz’s piece prompted FCP to ask him, “Did you ask anyone at Fox why every program there ignored this e-mail from Clemente and ran the story into the ground all day Tuesday–before getting confirmation or comments from Sherrod?”

This was Kurtz’s reply:

My focus was on what if anything was reported before Shirley Sherrod resigned. Lots of media outlets, including CNN and MSNBC and a zillion Web sites, ran with the story on Tuesday once the Agriculture Department fired Sherrod. Fox may have done it with more frequency and more enthusiasm, but it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t a story at all once the firing was confirmed.

Of course there was one small difference between Fox and CNN. While the conservative network spent thirty-six hours constantly repeating the false charge of racism against Sherrod, CNN actually tried to locate the truth about the allegation against her.

That allegation, by the way, was even more disgusting because of these facts: Shirley Sherrod’s father was murdered by white men who were never prosecuted for that crime. And as the indispensable Doug Ireland has pointed out, Sherrod’s husband, Charles Sherrod ”was a real hero to many of us in the ’60s for his key role as a leader in SNCC in building an INTER-RACIAL civil rights movement. Charlie left SNCC when Stokely Carmichael took it over, expelled white folks, and adopted ‘black power’ as its ideology, in order to continue building a black-and-white movement in Georgia. The notion that Charlie’s wife could have been guilty of what’s being called ‘reverse racism’ against whites is therefore douibly ludicrous. Some of us who knew Charlie back when, however, haven’t forgotten his shining example.”

Thanks to Rick Sanchez’s intrepid producers, CNN tracked down the farmer Sherrod had supposedly discriminated against, because he was white, and learned that farmer revered Sherrod, because her efforts were the only thing which had prevented him from losing his farm twenty-five years ago. (Brietbart responded by attacking the “purported story of the farmer”–which is one more reason that Olbermann’s description of Breitbart is so accurate: “a pornographer of propaganda.”)

Since Kurtz has written laudatory profiles of Ari Fleischer, Rich Lowry, Bill Kristol and yes, even Sean Hannity, it was not a big surprise that the Washington Post reporter pointedly ignored Fox’s true role in the Sherrod affair.

For that you had to watch Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night, when she pointed out that Fox’s hyping of the Sherrod story was just part of the same old pattern of exaggerating the sins of ACORN, hounding Van Jones out of office, and making the alleged harrassment of voters by two members of the New Black Panther Party into a story just slightly less significant than World War II.

All the network was doing, Rachel explained, was to continue the 40 year-old Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, which can be summarized this way: “Be afraid, white people. There’s a threat to take you over. The black people are coming for you…and you better band together to not surrender, to fight back.”

And it was because Fox has stoked these fears so effectively that the Obama White House and the NAACP behaved so badly in response to the latest ludicrous accusation against one of its appointees.

As David Ehrenstein pointed out in a comment on FCP’s previous post about Sherrod, “As you well know, Charlie, being that Rachel Maddow is liberal — and therefore “biased” in the eyes of the “Mainstream Media” — her words are to be ignored. By contrast conservatives (or more to the point in Breibart’s case fascists) are never to be ignored. Their every word and deed must be regarded with utmost seriousness. The situation is so bad that the offhand snark of a conservative writer, Dave Weigel, comically dissing other conservatives, cost him his job at” the Washington Post.

We leave the last word to Keith Olbermann, because he had the very best advice for the president:

…You must, at long last, Sir, come to terms with the fact that while you have spent these first 18 months and one day of your presidency bending over backwards for those others, they have spent this time insisting you are not actually president, or you are a communist, or you are bent on destroying whatever is starring this week in the paranoid fantasies churned out by Fox News and the farcical Breitbart.

If only for the arrogance of the irony – that this Crusade to prove you a foreign influence is led by an Australian named Murdoch and his sons who pretend to be British, and his second largest shareholder Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia—you, Sir, must stand up to this attack on you, and on this nation. Their game-plan is transparent:

They can strand together all the forces of anti-black racism in this country, direct them at you and all for which you and this nation stand, and convince the great unwashed and unthinking out there that not only are they not racists, but you, you Barack Obama, and Van Jones, and Shirley Sherrod, you are the real racists, and so in opposing you they are not expressing the worst vestige of our past, but are actually standing up against it.

As you stay silent and neutral and everybody’s President, they are gradually convincing racists that they are civil rights leaders and you are Police Chief Bull Connor. And then some idiot at Fox news barks, and your people throw an honorable public servant under the nearest bus, just for the sake of ‘decisive action’ and the correct way to respond in this atmosphere.

Mr. President, please stop trying to act, every minute, like some noble, neutral figure, chairing a government of equal and dispassionate minds, and contemplative scholars.

It is a freaking war out here, and the imagined consensus you seek is years in the future, if ever it is to be re-discovered.

This false consensus has gotten us only the crucifixion of Van Jones, and a racist gold-shilling buffoon speaking from the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th Anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, and now it has gotten us Shirley Sherrod. And your answer is to note a “disservice” and an “injustice.”

Sir, get a copy of the Michael Douglas movie “The American President.” When you get to the line where he says “I was so busy keeping my job, I forgot to do my job”—hit the rewind button.

Twenty times.

About the Author

Charles Kaiser writes Full Court Press for the Sidney Hillman foundation. He is the author of The Gay Metropolis and…

Update: Shirley Sherrod’s speech is an extraordinary American document from an extraordinary American. Read the full text here.

Correction: Although O’Reilly and Hannity convicted Sherrod of her non-existent crime on Monday night, and much of Fox’s coverage on Tuesday did the same thing, beginning with Fox & Friends, the network also aired a reported piece on Tuesday morning by James Rosen, which included Sherrod’s version of the story, as well as the exculpatory part of Sherrod’s piece which had already run on another network. Rosen said that part of the speech “appeared to corroborate her claim that she was trying to unite her audience in racial tolerance.” 

FCP regrets the omission.

The idea that the uprising against the Syrian government is inspired by a grassroots movement thirsting for a pluralist, democratic state is a fiction. The opposition’s chief elements are Islamists who seek to establish a Sunni-dominated Islamic state in place of a Syrian government they revile for being secular and dominated by Alawi “heretics.” “Al Qaeda-linked groups…dominate rebel ranks,” notes The Wall Street Journal. [1] “There is frustration with the West’s inability to help nurture a secular military or political opposition to replace Mr. Assad,” echoes The New York Times. [2] “Islamic forces seem to be ascendant within the opposition,” observes Gerald F. Seib. [3]

Indeed, almost from the opening moments of the latest outbreak of Islamic unrest in Syria, the government has said that while some protesters have legitimate grievances, the uprising is driven by militant Islamists with foreign backing.” [4] It’s no secret that Saudi Arabia and Qatar- monarchies which abominate democracy—are furnishing Islamist militants with arms, while Turkey, Jordan, Israel, France, Britain and the United States are also lending support.

Syria’s post-colonial history is punctuated by Islamist uprisings. The Muslim Brotherhood organized riots against the government in 1964, 1965, 1967 and 1969. It called for a Jihad against then president Hafiz al-Assad, the current president’s father, denigrating him as “the enemy of Allah.” By 1977, the Mujahedeen were engaged in a guerrilla struggle against the Syrian army and its Soviet advisers, culminating in the 1982 occupation of the city of Hama. The Syrian army quelled the occupation, killing 20,000 to 30,000. Islamists have since remained a perennial source of instability in Syria and the government has been on continual guard against “a resurgence of Sunni Islamic fundamentalists.” [5] The resurgence, touched off by uprisings in surrounding countries, prompted Glen E. Robinson to write in Current History that the rebellion was a continuation of “Syria’s Long Civil War.” [6]

But the Western media, echoing former colonialist powers and high officials in Washington, would call it something different: a popular, grassroots uprising against a brutal dictator. Today, however, the flood of YouTube videos by Islamic terrorists, chronicling their killings of POWs, eviscerations of captured soldiers, and barbecuing of heads, has spoiled the narrative. It’s no longer possible to angelize the Syrian rebellion as a popular insurrection against dictatorship. Now even the Wall Street Journal and New York Times share Assad’s view.

Still, the rebels’ spin doctors aren’t yielding entirely. They insist that while the rebellion may be dominated by religious fanatics with a penchant for terrorism, that it wasn’t always so. Instead, they say, it began as a peaceful plea for democracy that was eventually hijacked by jihadists only after the government used brute force to crush a protest movement. At that point, protesters were forced to take up arms in self-defense.

This view is dishonest. To start, it sweeps aside the reality that the rebellion is dominated by Islamists who care not one whit for democracy and indeed are actively hostile to it. What’s more, it conceals the fact that the Assad government made substantial concessions in the direction of creating the kind of pluralist, democratic society the rebels are said to thirst for. The rebels rejected the concessions, and that they did, underscores the fact that the rebellion’s origins are to be found in Islamist, not democratic, ambitions.

In response to protestors’ demands, Damascus made a number of concessions that were neither superficial nor partial.

First, it cancelled the long-standing abridgment of civil liberties that had been authorized by the emergency law. The law, invoked because Syria is technically in a state of war with Israel, gave Damascus powers it needed to safeguard the security of the state in wartime, a measure states at war routinely take. Many Syrians, however, chaffed under the law, and regarded it as unduly restrictive. Bowing to popular pressure, the government lifted the security measures.

Second, the government proposed a new constitution to accommodate protestors’ demands to strip the Ba’ath Party of its special status, which had reserved for it a lead role in Syrian society. Additionally, the presidency would be open to anyone meeting basic residency, age and citizenship requirements. Presidential elections would be held by secret vote every seven years under a system of universal suffrage.

Here was the multi-party democracy the opposition was said to have clamored for. A protest movement thirsting for a democratic, pluralist society could accept the offer, its aspirations fulfilled. The constitution was put to a referendum and approved. New parliamentary multi-party elections were held. Multi-candidate presidential elections were set for 2014. A new democratic dawn had arrived. The rebels could lay down their arms and enjoy the fruits of their victory.

Or so you might expect. Instead, the insurrectionists escalated their war against Damascus, rejecting the reforms, explaining that they had arrived too late. Too late? Does pluralist democracy turn into a pumpkin unless it arrives before the clock strikes twelve? Washington, London and Paris also dismissed Assad’s concessions. They were “meaningless,” they said, without explaining why. [7] And yet the reforms were all the rebels had asked for and that the West had demanded. How could they be meaningless? Democrats, those seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and the Assad government, could hardly be blamed for concluding that “democracy was not the driving force of the revolt.” [8]

Elaborating on this theme, the Syrian president noted:

It was seemingly apparent at the beginning that demands were for reforms. It was utilized to appear as if the crisis was a matter of political reform. Indeed, we pursued a policy of wide scale reforms from changing the constitution to many of the legislations and laws, including lifting the state of emergency law, and embarking on a national dialogue with all political opposition groups. It was striking that with every step we took in the reform process, the level of terrorism escalated. [9]

From Washington’s perspective, the new constitution opened space for alternative political parties. Washington could exploit this new openness to gain leverage in Syria by quietly backing parties that favor pro-US positions—a plus.

From the Islamists’ point of view, however, there were only negatives. First, the constitution was secular, and not rooted in Islam. Second, it proposed to ban political parties or movements that were formed on the basis of religion, sect, tribe, or region, as well as on the basis of gender, origin, race or color. This would effectively ban any party whose aim was to establish an Islamic state.

There were negatives too for Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv.

First, the constitution’s preamble defined Syria as “the beating heart of Arabism,” and “the forefront of confrontation with the Zionist enemy and the bedrock of resistance against colonial hegemony on the Arab world and its capabilities and wealth.” This hardly accorded with Washington’s desire to turn Syria into a “peace-partner” with Israel and clashed with the Western project of spreading neo-colonial tentacles across the Arab world.

Second, the constitution formalized the political orientation of the Syrian Ba’athists. This has been summed up by Assad as “Syria is an independent state working for the interests of its people, rather than making the Syrian people work for the interests of the West.” [10] Accordingly, the constitution mandated that important sectors of the Syrian economy would remain publicly owned and operated in the interests of Syrians as a whole. Western firms, then, were to be frozen out of profit-making opportunities in key sectors of the Syrian economy, a prospect hardly encouraging to the Wall Street financial interests that dominate decision-making in Washington.

Ba’ath socialism has long irritated Washington. The Ba’athist state has always exercised considerable influence over the Syrian economy, through ownership of enterprises, subsidies to privately-owned domestic firms, limits on foreign investment, and restrictions on imports. These are the necessary economic tools of a post-colonial state trying to wrest its economic life from the grips of former colonial powers and to chart a course of development free from the domination of foreign interests.

Washington’s goals, however, are obviously antithetical. It doesn’t want Syria to nurture its industry and jealously guard its independence, but to serve the interests of the bankers and major investors who truly matter in the United States, by opening Syrian labor to exploitation and Syria’s land and natural resources to foreign ownership.

Prior to Assad drafting the new constitution, the US State Department complained that Syria had “failed to join an increasingly interconnected global economy,” which is to say, had failed to turn over its state-owned enterprises to private investors, among them Wall Street financial interests. The State Department also expressed dissatisfaction that “ideological reasons” had prevented Assad from liberalizing Syria’s economy, that “privatization of government enterprises was still not widespread,” and that the economy “remains highly controlled by the government.” [11]

Were Assad to demonstrate a readiness to appease Wall Street’s demands he would have departed holus bolus from the dirigiste practices that had irritated the State Department. Instead, he did the opposite, drafting a constitution that mandated that the government maintain a role in guiding the economy on behalf of Syrian interests, and that the Syrian government would not make Syrians work for the interests of Western banks, oil companies, and other corporations. This was effectively a slap in Washington’s face.

He then compounded the sin by writing certain social rights into the constitution: security against sickness, disability and old age; access to health care; and free education at all levels. Now these rights would be placed beyond the easy reach of legislators and politicians who could sacrifice them on the altar of creating a low-tax, foreign-investment-friendly climate. To make matters worse, he included an article in the constitution which declared that “taxes shall be progressive.”

Finally, he took a step toward real, genuine democracy—a kind that decision-makers in Washington, with their myriad connections to the banking and corporate world—could hardly tolerate. He included a provision in the constitution requiring that at minimum half the members of the People’s Assembly are to be drawn from the ranks of peasants and workers.

Therein were the real reasons Washington, London and Paris rejected Assad’s concessions. It wasn’t that they weren’t genuine. It was that they were made to the wrong people: to Syrians, rather than Wall Street; to the Arabs, rather than Israel. And nor was it that his reforms weren’t democratic enough. It was that they were too democratic, too focussed on safeguarding and promoting the interests of Syrians, rather than making Syrians promote the interests of Wall Street, Washington and Tel Aviv.

The Syrian constitution clarifies the orientation of the Syrian Ba’athists and underscores why the Syrian government ought to be supported in its struggle against foreign-backed Islamist rebels. In short, because it is, on balance, progressive, and the forces arrayed against it are retrograde. The Syrian government is pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist. It is committed to secularism, non-sectarianism, and public ownership of the commanding heights of its economy. These are values that have traditionally been held high by the political left. Were the Syrian government to fall, it is almost certain that a US-client regime would be implanted in Damascus that would quickly adopt a pro-US foreign policy, abandon the Palestinians, capitulate to Israel, and cater to Western investors and corporations. The left project would, accordingly, be dealt a serious blow, and yet another state, dedicated to national liberation—not to say one with a sufficient democratic orientation to enshrine social rights in its constitution—would be crushed under the steamroller of US imperialism.

Stephen Gowans, a leading Canadian activist for social change, is What’s Left’s founding editor.

1. Adam Entous, “White House readies new aid for Syrian rebels”, The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2013.
2. Anne Barnard, “Syria campaigns to persuade U.S. to change sides”, The New York Times, April 24, 2013.
3. Gerald F. Seib, “The risks holding back Obama on Syria”, The Wall Street journal, May 6, 2013.
4. Anthony Shadid, “Assad says he rejects West’s call to resign”, The New York Times, August 21, 2011.
5. US Library of Congress. A Country Study: Syria. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sytoc.html
6. December 2012.
7. David M. Herszenhorn, “For Syria, Reliant on Russia for weapons and food, old bonds run deep”, The New York Times, February 18, 2012.
8. Zeina Karam, “In rare public appearance, Syrian president denies role in Houla massacre”, The Associated Press, June 3, 2012.
9. Bashar al-Assad May 19, 2013 interview with Clarin newspaper and Telam news agency
10. Bashar al-Assad May 19, 2013 interview with Clarin newspaper and Telam news agency
11. US State Department website. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3580.htm#econ. Accessed February 8, 2012.

•••

American democracy is in deep trouble. Cynicism and distrust of the political system, fueled at least in part by imposed ignorance, have grown steadily in recent years. There are several reasons for this, but few as important as the condition of our media. Many Americans, especially those on the left, know that after a generation of rampant consolidation and conglomeration, the American media are dominated by less than twenty firms—and that a half-dozen or so corporate giants hold the commanding positions. These firms use their market power to advance their own and other companies’ corporate agendas. And they increasingly commercialize every aspect of our culture. By any known theory of political democracy, this tightly-held media system, accountable only to Wall Street and Madison Avenue, is a poisonous proposition.

A healthy democracy depends on an informed and educated public, but the wealthy and powerful few who make the most important media decisions deny that as a possibility. Theirs is a system in which crucial political issues are barely mentioned, or are molded to fit the confines of their elite debate. The public is thus denied the tools it needs to participate as an informed citizenry. Moreover, the media system not only serves the ideological needs of our business-run society, but is itself a major sector of the economy.

One would expect to see an exploration of ways to fight back, among those who see the industry’s concentrated power and untrammeled commercialism as roadblocks in the path of democracy. Yet, for generations, the control and structure of the media industries have been decidedly off-limits as a subject of political debate on the left.

As long as this holds true, it is difficult to imagine any permanent qualitative change for the better in the American media system. Without reform of the industry, the prospects for the United States improving the quality of our democracy seem dim indeed. It is mandatory for the U.S. left to put media reform on its agenda.

Until after the Second World War, concern about media reform was less pressing, because labor and the left understood the importance of communicating with and educating their own members and supporters. Every labor union and political group had its own publications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the more successful and aggressive unions and political parties had extensive media outlets. In the early 1900s, Socialist Party members and supporters published some 325 English and foreign language daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines. Most of these were privately owned or were the publications of one or another of the 5,000 Socialist Party locals. They reached a total of more than two million subscribers.

Similarly, from the late nineteenth century on, just about every labor union had its own newspaper. In the mid-thirties, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations(CIO) was organized, it explained to its members that the labor movement could not thrive if the press remained the exclusive property of capital, and made the creation of labor and public service media a high priority. So did the more conservative American Federation of Labor’s central labor council in Chicago, which established a local radio station as a conscious first step in setting up a pro-working-class network. All of this was part of a broader effort during the period to establish a cultural popular front. It was overwhelmed by corporate opposition in the thirties, and was given the final blow with the start of the Cold War in the late forties.

In sum, labor and the left’s declining interest in developing its own independent media can be traced to post-war labor-corporate accommodation and the disruption and decline of the broader left as a result of Cold War anticommunism. The process was aided, too, by the change in corporate journalism in these years from a more open conservativism to a new, ostensibly non-partisan or “objective” professionalism, a change designed to broaden the appeal—and the advertising revenue—of newspapers, magazines, and, later, television.

Then, too, labor and the left, like their corporate opponents, came to see the media largely as a form of public relations. Thus, they fell victim to the belief that the media were not important, that the “real action” for social change lay in organizing and militant activity. Attracting media attention became more important than having a means of communication that might educate members and leaders of progressive organizations.

After taking a beating in the media for fifty years, however, organized labor has begun to show some interest in media reform. Labor leaders today are more aware of the huge barrier that the corporate media presents to labor’s advance. Yet this sentiment remains largely inchoate. At the 1997 AFL-CIO annual convention, perhaps the most political and vibrant meeting in the organization’s history, the issue of media was not even mentioned in passing. Under John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO’s initial foray into media activity has not gone beyond the half-baked idea of spending a small fortune on TV ads and hiring PR firms in an attempt to massage the press. In contrast, the United Auto Workers (UAW) recently invested heavily in the United Broadcasting Network, a 100-station radio operation that also publishes a bi-weekly newspaper. The UAW tried something similar in the 1940s, in a failed attempt to combat the antilabor bias of the commercial radio broadcasters of that era. Yet aside from this effort by the UAW, the structural barriers to a democratic or pro-labor media remain unchallenged by labor, at both the national and local levels.

When one sees how labor and progressive social movements have fared in the U.S. media over the past fifty years, the importance of media reform becomes less abstract. In the thirties and forties, nearly every daily newspaper with a medium-to-large circulation had at least one full-time labor editor or beat reporter. When the Flint sitdown strikes established the UAW as a major trade union in the late thirties, it was front-page news. True, the coverage was often unsympathetic, but at least the public knew what was happening. Now, in the nineties, fewer than ten labor reporters remain on daily newspapers in the entire nation. Conversely, there are seemingly thousands of business writers who, daily, fill the nation’s papers with their stories. Thus, in 1989, when the largest sitdown strike since Flint took place in Pittston, Virginia, it went virtually unreported. When several leading U.S. trade unions formed a new Labor political party in 1996, that, too, was unreported in the commercial media. Labor coverage has been reduced to stories about how strikers are threatening violence or creating a burden for the people in their communities. If one read only the commercial media, it would be difficult to determine what good was served by having labor unions at all. I do not mean to suggest that corporate media hostility to labor is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the public. The 1997 Teamster strike against UPS elicited the usual right-wing hysteria about labor, but the remarkable public support for the strikers forced some of the media to deal more fairly with the Teamsters, despite the fact that the press was far from sympathetic to the union.

Meanwhile, the idea of organizing for structural media reform is ignored or opposed by the entire democratic left in the United States. Two of the three new progressive party groups—the Labor Party and the New Party—avoid any mention of media in their core platforms. Some chapters of the Green Party have made an issue of media ownership and control, perhaps influenced by Ralph Nader’s persistent call for stricter control over the publicly owned airwaves, but these are token gestures at best. The Progressive caucus of the U.S. Congress has shown only slight interest in the matter, although Rep. Bernie Sanders (Ind., VT) recognizes that “This is an issue that is absolutely vital to democracy, and that only the left can address. The New Party, the Green Party, the Labor Party, as well as progressive Democrats, should be all over this issue,” he says, though he laments, “for most of the left, it’s not even on the agenda.” Sanders, the most successful American socialist politician in half a century, is unequivocal about the importance of media reform: “The challenge of our time is to make media relevant for a vibrant democracy.”

To a large extent, the absence of informed media politics reflects the power of U.S. media corporations to control and dominate not only mainstream debate, but also debate on the left. After all, why pick a fight with these guys when the chances for success seem so slim, and when there seems to be little public recognition of structural media issues or opposition to the status quo? The corporate media may well be the most powerful adversary in the ranks of capital. They control what the general public sees and reads about the political process in the United States. Critical discussion of media structure is the last thing they want the general public to consider. They prefer to leave analysis of media ownership and advertising to the business pages and the trade press, where such questions are covered solely from investors’ point of view. In this climate, it is no surprise that even left critics of the corporate media rarely discuss organizing to change the system; the very prospect seems implausible.

But the left’s disinterest in media is not merely the product of ignorance or intimidation. Some on the left dismiss media activism as a waste of time. Their arguments are rarely the result of sustained thought, and range from the idea that the media system is unreformable to the notion that the corporate media system isn’t that bad or that influential. The correct path, from this perspective, is simply to develop independent left media on the margins, while devoting organizing efforts elsewhere. Media reform struggles, therefore, are dismissed as the logical province of liberals and single-issue advocates with narrow political vision or platform. Real battles with the ruling class, from this viewpoint, should be fought elsewhere.

This approach is correct on a couple of key points. Firstly, media reform is no substitute for building a democratic left. But the options are not either/or. Virtually all leading left media critics incorporate media criticism into a range of broader political activity. Secondly, it is correct to argue that if we ever build a solid left or labor movement, it will have its own media and we will have less reason to be concerned about how the corporate media system operates. But that begs the question of why we have been incapable of building even a tiny left in the United States for the past thirty years. The corporate media system is not the sole (or even the primary) reason for the lack of a left or a strong labor movement, but it powerfully reinforces the ideological and political power of business.

The political “free market” right understands the importance of media far better than the left. Indeed, the relative success of the right in recent years is largely the result of the development of its own media and influence on the corporate media. Right-wing individuals and foundations have devoted considerable resources to campaigns that have pushed the media to support their programs—social as well as economic. Billionaire right-wingers establish political media primarily to propagate pro-business politics and push the range of political debate ever rightward. Since the seventies the right has worked mightily and with considerable success to establish right-wing journalism.

The political right leads the fight against all forms of noncommercial and nonprofit media. It also battles tirelessly to see that the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio stay within the same ideological boundaries as the commercial media. As a result of this pressure, PBS now refuses to permit labor to sponsor programs about workers, even while it begs business lavishly to subsidize programs extolling free enterprise. At the same time, progressive and mainstream foundations virtually ignore this right-wing assault. These groups fear being “political.” They end up trying to keep people from falling overboard while conceding the privilege of steering the ship to the right.

Making media reform a component of the labor and left agenda has many potential benefits. Although the issue receives scant public attention, there is evidence of growing public dissatisfaction with the hyper-commercialized media. In few areas are the conflicts between corporate rule and the needs of a democracy more apparent. The left can use media as an educational tool to explain the flaws in the existing social order and to present its vision of what a more democratic society would look like. Many people from across the political spectrum, as well as entirely depoliticized people, are appalled by the commercial carpet bombing of our culture (especially children’s culture), and by the collapse of journalism. The left can offer coherent explanations and viable, democratic solutions. Nobody else can.

Labor and the left can also use media reform as an issue that unites its disparate elements, such as environmentalists, feminists, civil rights advocates, and labor activists, along with journalists, artists, educators, librarians, parents, and many others who are discomfited by the commercialization of public life. We should not forget that if the left ignores media reform, it hands the game to the far right, whose bogus analysis and frightening solutions do not keep it from being an active player.

So what should the left do to address the commercial media system? First and foremost, it has to put media reform on its agenda and work to get its reform proposals before the general public. The core principle is that control over communication has to be taken away from Wall Street and Madison Avenue and put in the hands of citizens, journalists, and others whose concerns are not limited to the defense of corporate profitability.

In nations ranging from New Zealand and Canada to India and Brazil, democratic left electoral parties are increasingly making the break-up of corporate commercial media, and the establishment of a viable non-profit media sector, a main part of their platforms. This is a striking new development in the 1990s. In Sweden, the Left party—which represents those disenchanted with the Social Democratic Party’s move toward the right—has made media reform a cornerstone of its platform. In 1998, the Left party scored twelve percent of the vote in national elections, doubling its previous level. Moreover, in many nations there are nascent grassroots media organizations struggling to promote noncommercial and nonprofit media.

Here in the United States, there are a few new media reform efforts, but some are narrowly conceived and suffer from a lack of democratic vision. There is the drive to establish, for example, a civic or public journalism that is largely devoted to counteracting the sensationalism of print and television. Unfortunately, the movement works hand in hand with the very corporate chieftains who have created and molded the existing media. This version of public journalism, not surprisingly, is averse to what it calls “ideological” approaches to the news, opting instead for a supposed objectivity that avoids lively debate and political conflict. Instead it works toward the sort of boringly balanced and antiseptic newsfare that could put the entire nation into a deep, uninformed slumber. By claiming that they want to give readers news that is important to their lives, advocates of public journalism may in fact be assisting in the process of converting journalism into the type of noncontroversial consumer news that delights the advertising community. Such is the logic of a commercialized and depoliticized society.

Those who wish to increase the integrity of commercial journalism should advocate increased power for journalists, which in the commercial media can only be achieved by establishing strong, progressive unions. Media workers’ unions need to be supported. The assault on journalists’ unions in the United States has been an important factor in the decline of the quality of journalism. Ideally, journalists’ and media workers’ unions should negotiate for as much control as possible of the editorial and creative process. We need to work to eradicate the control of capital over our journalism and culture, without substituting deadening bureaucratic control.

Another burgeoning area of interest is the media literacy movement, whose aim is to educate people to be skeptical and knowledgeable users of the media. Media literacy has considerable potential as long as it involves an explanation of how the media system actually works, and leads people to want to work toward a better system. But the media literacy movement has a highly visible wing that accepts money from corporate media and advertisers. This version of media literacy implicitly buys into the line that the commercial media simply “give the people what they want.” So the media literacy crowd’s job is to train people to demand better fare from their presumably willing and obedient corporate media servants. Like public journalism, this attracts foundation support because it is noncontroversial. But this approach may simply help to perpetuate the current situation. “Hey, don’t blame us for the lousy stuff we provide,” the corporate media giants will say. “We even bankrolled media literacy to train people to demand higher quality fare. The morons simply demanded more of what we are already doing.”

Fortunately, some other media groups are more promising. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group launched in the 1980s, provides consistent analysis of media trends through published reports and its magazine Extra! FAIR’s work helps both those who wish to improve the quality of existing journalism and those who seek structural change. Similarly, the Cultural Environment Movement (CEM), founded in the mid-nineties, attempts to draw all sorts of nonprofit and public-interest groups into the campaign for media reform. Like FAIR, it works for improvement within the status quo as well as broader structural reform.

Local media alliances have also been established in numerous North American cities, to create alternative media and to watchdog the local commercial media. These local groups have shown some potential to draw the public into media politics by targeting issues like violence-obsessed local TV news, newspaper “redlining” of poor neighborhoods, the proliferation of alcohol and cigarette billboards in poor and working-class neighborhoods, and the commercialization of education.

Likewise, microradio broadcasting—unlicensed, low-power, noncommercial broadcasting conducted on open slots in the radio spectrum—has become a significant enterprise throughout the nation in the past few years. It offers poor, dispossessed, and marginalized voices an opportunity to be heard.

Slowly but surely, this activity is percolating its way from media activist groups to broader progressive political organizations. The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is now making media reform one of its primary organizing issues. In 1998, it held public hearings on the problems of media concentration in several U.S. cities, and it has earned the support of a few members of Congress, including John Conyers and Chicago’s Bobby Rush. This is a major breakthrough, but it needs to be aggressively followed up by other progressive constituencies.

That all of this activity has blossomed in the current political environment suggests that there may be a wellspring for further media reform activity. However, the movement lacks the resources to exploit this opportunity. This should be the province of organized labor and the philanthropic community. Not surprisingly, given the absence of a coherent political left, the movement also lacks an understanding of where media reform fits into a broader movement democracy. To be successful, media reform needs a resurgent left. But, conversely, for the left to succeed it will need to support the existing nonprofit media to a far greater extent (e.g., Monthly Review, The Progressive, Z, The Nation, In These Times, Counterpunch,Dollars and Sense, Adbusters, Left Business Observer, NACLA Report, MERIP, Dissent, Pacifica, Globalvision), create its own media, and fight for media reform.

For these two areas to reinforce each other, labor and the left will have to use their own resources to support and create better noncommercial media and agitate for better results from commercial media. Some labor unions and federations, for example, have begun to encourage the production of labor video documentaries. But all of labor needs to support newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations, and Web sites of their own, and give money and resources to existing community and nonprofit media without direct labor affiliation. This is crucial. Labor needs to grant considerable editorial leeway to media it subsidizes. Unless it does so, the media will tend to be timid, overly concerned with pleasing labor’s political hierarchy, and unlikely to produce anything vital or interesting to a general public.

Unlike the right, labor and the left can never consider funding alternatives or independent media a satisfactory media program in and of itself. The agenda and activities of the right mesh well with the corporate control of the media, and right media figures move comfortably at all echelons of the corporate media system. A well-established, independent, left media can and will influence mainstream media in a positive manner, but marriage is out of the question, given the differences in social status. The upper limit of this approach is to establish a strong left niche on the margins. This point holds true for the Internet which, for the most part, assimilated into the corporate media. Technology alone cannot undermine the media system.

In addition, labor and the left need to take another page from the political right, which masterfully manipulates traditional U.S. journalism. Like the right, labor and the progressive philanthropic community need to support think tanks of experts who can provide labor and left perspectives on social issues for commercial and noncommercial journalists alike. It can also monitor the massive right-wing campaigns to shape news coverage. The recently formed Institute for Public Accuracy, under the direction of Norman Solomon and Sam Husseini, is one example.

Government media policies also must be changed. There is nothing natural about the existing corporate media system; it is the result of laws, regulations and extensive public subsidies that have been pushed through by the corporate media lobby with almost no public awareness or participation in the legislative process. Our objective is a more diverse and competitive commercial system with a significant nonprofit and noncommercial sector.

There are several legislative proposals to organize around. First, we need to make it easier for people—not just rich people—to make donations to nonprofit media. Why not let everyone deduct $150 from their taxes if they donate it to a nonprofit medium? Second, let’s establish a bona fide noncommercial public radio and television system, with local and national stations and networks. The expense should come out of the general budget, though we need to establish a governing mechanism to keep the public broadcasters accountable but not suffocated by politicians. Third, let’s really make some demands on commercial broadcasters, and finally get something in return for letting them become filthy rich using the scarce public airwaves at no charge. Why not insist on eliminating advertising on children’s and news programs, and use five percent of the broadcasters’ revenues to subsidize three or four hours per day of children’s and news shows on every channel? And put the control over these shows in the hands of journalists and creative people, not advertising executives! And why not ban running any political ads as a condition for getting a license to broadcast? Fourth, let’s go back to the original spirit and intent of our antitrust statutes and break up the media giants, whose concentrations of power should be unthinkable in a democracy. (When the United States occupied Japan and Germany following the Second World War, it instituted policies discouraging media concentration, as this was seen as antidemocratic and fascist-promoting. What was smart policy in 1945 is smart policy today.)

If we won the reforms above, it would automatically add a strong progressive presence to the Internet, because all of the above media would necessarily have an online component.

There are numerous other policies that would promote democratic media. In the short term, however, the most important thing is to put the issue on the political agenda, have sympathetic members of Congress draft legislation that we can organize around, and get the discussion moving forward. This will not be an easy area in which to gain victories. Few mainstream politicians wish to tangle with the media giants. But it is an area with unusual promise for labor and the left.There is little evidence that people are captivated by commercial media fare to the extent the media giants’ PR declares. And the bottom line, so to speak, remains clear. Unless we can make some headway on the media front, it will be difficult to get very far anywhere else.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert W. McChesney teaches communication and library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This piece was originally presented at the “Back to Basics” conference, sponsored by In These Times, held in Chicago in October 1998.