Guest Editorials: The Illusion Of Democracy

By David Cromwell, Media Lens (UK)

Liberal Journalism, Wikileaks And Climate Deceptions

In an era of permanent war, economic meltdown and climate ‘weirding’, we need all the champions of truth and justice that we can find. But where are they? What happened to trade unions, the green movement, human rights groups, campaigning newspapers, peace activists, strong-minded academics, progressive voices? We are awash in state and corporate propaganda, with the ‘liberal’ media a key cog in the apparatus. We are hemmed in by the powerful forces of greed, profit and control. We are struggling to get by, never mind flourish as human beings. We are subject to increasingly insecure, poorly-paid and unfulfilling employment, the slashing of the welfare system, the privatisation of the National Health Service, the erosion of civil rights, and even the criminalisation of protest and dissent.

The pillars of a genuinely liberal society have been so weakened, if not destroyed, that we are essentially living under a system of corporate totalitarianism. In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges notes that:

‘The anemic liberal class continues to assert, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that human freedom and equality can be achieved through the charade of electoral politics and constitutional reform. It refuses to acknowledge the corporate domination of traditional democratic channels for ensuring broad participatory power.’ (p. 8)

Worse, the liberal class has: ‘lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.’ (pp. 9-10)

This pretense afflicts all the major western ‘democracies’, including the UK, and it is a virus that permeates corporate news reporting, not least the BBC. For example, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson has a new book out with the cruelly apt title, ‘Live From Downing Street’. Why apt? Because Downing Street is indeed the centre of the political editor’s worldview. As he explains in the book’s foreword:

‘My job is to report on what those in power are thinking and doing and on those who attempt to hold them to account in Parliament.’ (Added emphasis).

[pullquote] ‘In many respects we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena.’ (McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The New Press, 2000, p. 260). [/pullquote]

Several observations spring to mind:

1. How does Nick Robinson know what powerful politicians are thinking?

2. Does he believe that any discrepancy between what they really think and what they tell him and his media colleagues is inconsequential?

3. Why does the BBC’s political editor focus so heavily on what happens in Parliament? What about the wider spectrum of opinion outside Parliament, so often improperly represented by MPs, if at all? What about attempts in the wider society to hold power to account, away from Westminster corridors and the feeble, Whip-constrained platitudes of party careerists? No wonder Robinson might have regrets over Iraq, as he later concedes when he says:

‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions.’ (p. 332).

4. Thus, right from the start of his book Robinson concedes unwittingly that his journalism cannot, by definition, be ‘balanced’.

But, of course, corporate media professionals have long propped up the illusion that the public is offered an ‘impartial’ selection of facts, opinions and perspectives from which any individual can derive a well-informed world view. Simply put, ‘impartiality’ is what the establishment says is impartial.

The journalist and broadcaster Brian Walden once said: ‘The demand for impartiality is too jealously promoted by the political parties themselves. They count balance in seconds and monitor it with stopwatches.’ (Quoted, Tim Luckhurst, ‘Time to take sides’, Independent, July 1, 2003). This nonsense suggests that media ‘impartiality’ means that one major political party receives identical, or at least similar, coverage to another. But when all the major political parties have almost identical views on all the important issues, barring small tactical differences, how can this possibly be deemed to constitute genuine impartiality?

The major political parties offer no real choice. They all represent essentially the same interests crushing any moves towards meaningful public participation in the shaping of policy; or towards genuine concern for all members of society, particularly the weak and the vulnerable.

The essential truth was explained by political scientist Thomas Ferguson in his book Golden Rule (University of Chicago Press, 1995). When major backers of political parties and elections agree on an issue – such as international ‘free trade’ agreements, maintaining a massive ‘defence’ budget or refusing to make the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – then the parties will not compete on that issue, even though the public might desire a real alternative.

US media analyst Robert McChesney observes:

‘In many respects we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena.’ (McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The New Press, 2000, p. 260).

As the Washington Post once noted, inadvertently echoing Ferguson’s Golden Rule, modern democracy works best when the political ‘parties essentially agree on most of the major issues’. The Financial Times put it more bluntly: capitalist democracy can best succeed when it focuses on ‘the process of depoliticizing the economy.’ (Cited by McChesney, ibid., p. 112).

[pullquote] In September, senior NASA climate scientist James Hansen had warned of a ‘planetary emergency’ because of the dangerous effects of Arctic ice melt, including methane gas released from permafrost regions currently under ice. ‘We are in a planetary emergency,’ said Hansen, decrying ‘the gap between what is understood by scientific community and what is known by the public.’ [/pullquote]

The public recognises much of this for what it is. Opinion polls indicate the distrust they feel for politicians and business leaders, as well as the journalists who all too frequently channel uncritical reporting on politics and business. A 2009 survey by the polling company Ipsos MORI found that only 13 per cent of the British public trust politicians to tell the truth: the lowest rating in 25 years. Business leaders were trusted by just 25 per cent of the public, while journalists languished at 22 per cent.

And yet recall that when Lord Justice Leveson published his long-awaited report into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the British press’ on November 29, he made the ludicrous assertion that ‘the British press – I repeat, all of it – serves the country very well for the vast majority of the time.’

That tells us much about the nature and value of his government-appointed inquiry.

The Flagship Of Liberal Journalism On The Rocks

Damning indictments of the liberal media were self-inflicted by its vanguard newspaper, the Guardian, in two recent blows. First, consider Decca Aitkenhead’s hostile interview with Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange in which he is described as a ‘fugitive’ who has been ‘holed up’ in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six months. Aitkenhead casts doubts over his ‘frame of mind’, with a sly suggestion that he might even be suffering from ‘paranoia’. She claims Assange ‘seems more like an in-patient than an interviewee […]. If you have ever visited someone convalescing after a breakdown, his demeanour would be instantly recognisable. Admirers cast him as the new Jason Bourne, but in these first few minutes I worry he may be heading more towards Miss Havisham.’

He ‘talks in the manner of a man who has worked out that the Earth is round, while everyone else is lumbering on under the impression that it is flat’. Aitkenhead continues: ‘it’s hard to read his book without wondering, is Assange a hypocrite – and is he a reliable witness?’ Indeed ‘some of his supporters despair of an impossible personality, and blame his problems on hubris.’

Aitkenhead asks him ‘about the fracture with close colleagues at WikiLeaks’ and wants him to ‘explain why so many relationships have soured.’ She gives a potted, one-sided history of why the relationship between the Guardian and Wikileaks ‘soured’, saying dismissively that ‘the details of the dispute are of doubtful interest to a wider audience’.

The character attack continues: ‘the messianic grandiosity of his self-justification is a little disconcerting’ and ‘he reminds me of a charismatic cult leader’. Aitkenhead concludes: ‘The only thing I could say with confidence is that he is a control freak.’

The hostile, condescending and flippant tone and content contrast starkly with the more respectable treatment afforded to establishment interviewees such as Michael Gove, Michael Heseltine, Christopher Meyer and Alistair Darling. Aitkenhead almost fawns over Darling, then the Chancellor:

‘His dry, deadpan humour lends itself to his ironic take on the grumpy old man, which he plays with gruff good nature. […] He reminds me of childhood friends’ fathers who seemed fearsome until we got old enough to realise they were being funny.’

Darling says that ‘I was never really interested in the theory of achieving things, just the practicality of doing things.’ Aitkenhead sighs:

‘One might say this has been Darling’s great strength. The pragmatic clarity made him a highly effective minister… But it may well also be his weakness – for at times he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare.’

Sometimes people would approach the Chancellor in public and demand that he fix the economy. Darling recalls that one chap accosted him at a petrol station:

‘ “I know it’s to do with oil prices – but what are you going to do about it?” People think, Well, surely you can do something, you are responsible – so of course it reflects on me.’

Aitkenhead asks him sweetly: ‘Is it painful to be blamed so personally?’

Two days after the Guardian’s hit job on Julian Assange, it was followed by the paper’s low-key announcement of its public poll for person of the year: Bradley Manning, the US soldier suspected of leaking state secrets to Wikileaks. The implication of the Guardian’s grudging note was that Manning had only won because of ‘rather fishy voting patterns’:

‘Manning secured 70 percent of the vote, the vast majority of them coming after a series of @Wikileaks tweets. Project editor Mark Rice-Oxley said: “It was an interesting exercise that told us a lot about our readers, our heroes and the reasons that people vote.”’

Although the short entry appeared in the Guardian’s online news blog, there was no facility for adding reader comments, thus avoiding any possible additional public embarrassment. Perhaps the paper is mortified that it has been shown up by Wikileaks and Manning for not doing its job of holding power to account.

As Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist, wrote last year:

‘The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.’

So much for the British flagship of liberal journalism then.

Climate Betrayal And Deceptions

One of the biggest failures of the liberal class has been its inability to see, far less challenge, the inherently destructive and psychopathic nature of corporations.

We once wrote to Stephen Tindale, then executive director of Greenpeace UK, and asked him why they did not address this in their campaigning:

‘Let us see Greenpeace (and other pressure groups) doing more to oppose, not so much what corporations do, but what they are; namely, undemocratic centralised institutions wielding illegitimate power.’ (Email, January 7, 2002)

Ignoring or missing the point, Tindale replied: ‘We will continue to confront corporations where necessary […] we are an environmental group, not an anti-corporate group. We will therefore work with companies when we can do so to promote our campaign goals.’ (Email, January 28, 2002)

Corporate Watch has pointedly asked of nongovernmental organisations, such as Greenpeace: ‘Why are NGOs getting involved in these partnerships?’ One important factor, it seems, is ‘follow the leader’. Corporate Watch notes:

‘For many NGOs, the debate on whether or not to engage with companies is already over. The attitude is “all the major NGOs engage with companies so why shouldn’t we?” ‘ (Corporate Watch, ‘What’s Wrong with Corporate Social Responsibility?’, 2006, p. 2).

The sad reality is that Greenpeace and other major NGOs accept the ideological premise that the corporate sector can be persuaded to act benignly. To focus instead on the illegitimate power and inherent destructive nature of the corporation is a step too far for today’s emasculated ‘pressure groups’, whether they are working on environmental protection, human rights or fighting poverty.

Adding to the already overwhelming evidence of corporate power protecting itself at almost any cost, a recent book titled Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark (Pluto Books, 2012) exposes the covert methods of corporations to evade democratic accountability and to undermine legitimate public protest and activism. Using exclusive access to previously confidential sources, Eveline Lubbers, an independent investigator with SpinWatch.org, provides compelling case studies on companies such as Nestlé, Shell and McDonalds. ‘The aim of covert corporate strategy’, she observes, ‘is not to win an argument, but to contain, intimidate and ultimately eliminate opposition.’

Lubbers also points out that dialogue, one of the key instruments of ‘corporate social responsibility’, is exploited by big business ‘as a crucial tool to gather information, to keep critics engaged and ultimately to divide and rule, by talking to some and demonizing others.’ Lubbers’ book, then, is yet another exposure of corporate efforts to prevent civil society from obtaining real power.

And yet virtually every day comes compelling evidence showing how disastrous this is for humanity. A new scientific report this month reveals that global carbon emissions have hit a record high:

‘In a development that underscores the widening gap between the necessary steps to limit global warming and the policies that governments are actually putting into place, a new report shows that global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will likely reach a record high of 35.6 billion tonnes in 2012, up 2.6 percent from 2011.’

This is a disaster for climate stability. Meanwhile, a new study based on 20 years of satellite observations shows that the planet’s polar ice sheets are already melting three times faster than they were in the the 1990s.

In September, senior NASA climate scientist James Hansen had warned of a ‘planetary emergency’ because of the dangerous effects of Arctic ice melt, including methane gas released from permafrost regions currently under ice. ‘We are in a planetary emergency,’ said Hansen, decrying ‘the gap between what is understood by scientific community and what is known by the public.’

As ever, the latest UN Climate Summit in Doha was just another talking shop that paid lip service to the need for radical and immediate action in curbing greenhouse gas emissions in the face of climate chaos.

The failure of the liberal class to rein in, or seriously challenge, corporate power is typified by this appalling gap between climate change rhetoric and reality. The rhetoric is typified by the political call to keep the average global temperature rise to under 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. The appalling reality is that the rise is likely to be in the region of 4-6 deg C (but potentially much higher if runaway global warming kicks in with the release of methane). This gap – actually a chasm of likely tragic proportions – is graphically depicted by climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University in a recent powerful and disturbing presentation.

Anderson cites an unnamed ‘very senior political scientist’ who often advises the government. This adviser says:

‘Too much has been invested in two degrees C for us to say it is not possible. It would undermine all that has been achieved. It would give a sense of hopelessness that we may as well just give in.’

Anderson also reports that on the eve of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2010, he had a 20-minute meeting in Manchester with Ed Miliband, then the of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Miliband told Anderson:

‘Our position is challenging enough. I can’t go with the message that two degrees C is impossible – it’s what we’ve all worked towards.’

Anderson also relates that he attended a Chatham House event where the message from both ‘a very senior government scientist and someone very senior from an oil company’ – which he strongly hinted was Shell – was this:

‘[We] think we’re on for 4 to 6 degrees C but we just can’t be open about it.’

Anderson warns that this deception is ‘going on all the time behind the scenes’ and ‘that somehow we can’t tell the public’ the truth. The consequences could be terminal for large swathes of humanity and planetary ecosystems.

In short, we desperately need to hear the truth from people like Kevin Anderson, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

To return to Chris Hedges on ‘the death of the liberal class’:

‘The liberal class is expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses while studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures. When dissidents step outside these boundaries, they become pariahs. Specific actions can be criticized, but motives, intentions, and the moral probity of the power elite cannot be questioned.’ (Hedges, op. cit., pp. 152-153)

and he warns:

‘We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilizations will blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites, who successfully convinced us that we no longer possessed the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe, will use their resources to create privileged little islands where they will have access to security and goods denied to the rest of us.’ (p. 197)

We must have the vision to imagine that, however bleak things appear now, things can change: if we put our minds to it and work together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Cromwell: Editor
editor@medialens.org
Born in Glasgow in 1962; studied natural philosophy and astronomy, then a PhD in solar physics; spell with Shell in the Netherlands, then a research position in oceanography in Southampton; left in 2010 to work full-time on Media Lens; author of Why Are We The Good Guys? (Zero Books, 2012); co-author, with David Edwards, of two Media Lens books: Guardians of Power (Pluto Books, 2006) and Newspeak In the 21st Century (Pluto Books, 2009); author of Private Planet (Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2001); co-editor, with Mark Levene, of Surviving Climate Change (Pluto Books, 2007).

Media Gets Targeted by Obama, Discovers No One Cares Except the Media

Welcome to the Freakshow

by BETHANIA PALMA MARKUS, Counterpunch

Why is this man still news?

I was watching the local network news one recent evening because apparently I like to torture myself. And what were they reporting on? Michael Jackson. My hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, also ran a story that day, May 22, 2013, about Michael Jackson.

Don’t get me wrong. Jackson is and deserves to be a cultural icon. That’s fine. But he died four years ago, so why is it still in the news? Can anyone explain to me why mainstream American news outlets are still “breaking” news with obsessive zeal about a 4-year-old story that has no bearing on anyone’s life?

Maybe it’s journalistic laziness or whoring to the public’s base desire for sensationalism and depraved celebrity gossip. But the news media has a role to play and it’s not entertainment.

This leads me to more salient matters. While my local press corps was babbling about some ancient history-Michael Jackson-related minutia bullshit, another media storm was brewing. Apparently the Associated Press and Fox News recently found themselves on the business end of the Obama Administration’s hostility toward journalists. The AP learned the Justice Department searched troves of their phone records. Meantime, Fox News’ James Rosen had his personal email account scoured by the DOJ and he’s being called an “aider and abettor” and “co-conspirator” in a criminal case regarding classified document leaks.

So now, all of a magical sudden, the news media in this country seem to be waking up. After years of either promoting or ignoring George W. Bush’s, then Obama’s constant infringements on the civil liberties of average Americans, the media suddenly think it’s a scandal now that they’re the butt of it. But while the AP and Fox News aren’t the first, they’ve never caused a stir about the U.S. government’s abuse of journalists until it hit them in the face.

Yemeni investigative reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who exposed a deadly U.S. bombing that killed dozens of women and children in the village of Majala, is sitting in prison after being convicted for terror-related charges in sham proceedings condemned by human rights groups worldwide. Thanks to public pressure, Shaye was about to be pardoned in 2011.

But in February that year, Obama personally called Yemen’s president and “expressed concern” over Shaye’s pending release, according to a White House summary of the phone call. As a result, Shaye continues to sit in prisons for doing his job as a reporter. He isn’t the only one. Under Bush, Al Jazeera journalist and cameraman Sami Al Hajj spent seven years in Gitmo. Pulitzer Prize winner Bilal Hussein was detained for two years by the U.S. military for doing his job – with cheerleading by the same right-wing blogosphere now howling over the attack on Fox’s Rosen.

I don’t recall any major news outlets reporting these cases despite the fact they’re obviously outrageous. In fact the first I heard of Hussein and Al-Hajj was in reading this eye-opening run-down in Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald. (http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/obamas_personal_role_in_a_journalists_imprisonment/)

I can personally recall recent instances where my local media corps sold out the public and kowtowed to authorities in direct opposition to their duties, causing members of the public to pay a painful price. When Occupy L.A. was raided at City Hall in November 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department told the media that they couldn’t cover it unless they were hand-selected by the LAPD. No one, not even the big dog in the room, the LA Times, took them to task on this, even though it was obviously unconstitutional.

Meantime the TV stations shut off their aerial camera feeds upon order by the LAPD. The result of this was, people were beaten and abused while in custody. Protesters had bones broken. But none of this made it into public view. Instead, reporters swarmed the next-day presser, eager to pepper the powerful with pandering, meaningless questions and hear the police chief and mayor crow about how smoothly things went. I guess it was smooth if you didn’t have your arm fractured by a bean bag gun, your ribs broken by a baton, or forced to piss on yourself while in custody. (http://egpnews.com/2011/12/reports-of-police-abuse-emerge-after-occupy-la-eviction/)

A similar thing happened during the Chris Dorner saga this February. At the culmination of their pursuit, with former LAPD officer Dorner pinned down in a Big Bear cabin, police told news outlets with aerial feeds to stop filming, so they did. We all know what happened next, because people listening to scanners had the presence of mind to record. The cops commenced with an apparently pre-planned “burn.” They fired incendiary devices into the cabin and Dorner burned inside. Would they have given that order if the news choppers were still filming overhead? Probably not. The media’s decisions to be obedient lapdogs to authority enabled authority to assume too much power, abuse protesters and extra-judicially execute someone.

Meantime, the reasons behind Dorner’s vendetta rang all-too-true to L.A.’s maltreated communities of color. His accusations of police brutality hit a nerve. But you don’t see L.A.’s news media aggressively digging into officer involved shootings, killings or beatings even though there is a history of police brutality in Los Angeles. If they report it, they usually source only the police, and they don’t follow up. They don’t put it in context. No one is held to task for the pattern of abuse on civil liberties and human rights in L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods. The police are given the benefit of the doubt, and people of color are treated like criminals. In fact, in an apparent collaboration with the LAPD, the media chose to redact the names of officers Dorner accused of being abusive when they published his “manifesto,” even though the un-redacted version was all over the Internet.

The American news media has made pandering to power standard practice when their mission should be speaking truth to power and “afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted.” In fact, new Orange County Register co-owner and publisher Aaron Kushner flat out told his newsroom that the long-held journalistic credo of “afflicting the comfortable” no longer applies. This runs parallel with fantastic displays of incompetence like the flagrant misreporting of facts surrounding the Boston marathon bombing by the likes of CNN and New York Post.

The result? The public no longer believes much of what the media reports and any trust in the Fourth Estate to expose truth and provide a voice for the voiceless is shattered. So it seems the public no longer gives a shit about the media, and it’s the media’s own damned fault.

But the public should care about recent developments, even though I understand why it doesn’t. The decision by Obama’s Justice Department to go after domestic journalists is grave. Why? The way this country is set up is reporters are the check on government. When the government gets out of line, the role of the journalist is to call it. But, if the government grants itself the authority to criminalize journalists for performing that role, it weakens the institution intended to keep the government from abusing its power. And that’s exactly what’s happened. Setting the precedent of criminalizing the press means the federal government has given itself limitless and unchecked power.

The current administration has gone after more leakers than any other, and without leakers, investigative reporting doesn’t exist. Investigative reporting in this country brought to light and forced accountability for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down. It revealed the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. Leaks by currently-incarcerated Bradley Manning to Wikileaks revealed the U.S. military fired on and killed a Reuters journalist and his team in Baghdad, among other “war on terror” atrocities.

People who leak government indiscretions and journalists who report it are the key to holding government accountable and limit it from overreaching its authority. They play a pivotal role in a functioning democracy and open society and are the gatekeepers against totalitarianism. The Rosen case is the first in U.S. history where the federal government has treated a domestic reporter as a full-scale criminal for doing his job as a reporter, while the AP phone record grab is the widest infringement on the working press in U.S. history. This is a chilling development. First Amendment, RIP.

Whether the general public cares or understands these implications isn’t clear. But from the comments I’ve seen surrounding these stories, doesn’t look like it. If the public doesn’t care, what defense do the media have? A bunch of policy wonks, university professors and civil liberties lawyers yammering on a high level about the role of the free press in a democracy don’t resonate with a cynical, over-worked, under-informed public accustomed to seeing partisan hacks and incompetent, hyperventilating sensationalists talking about Lindsay Lohan, tailing car chases or acting like the danger they’re personally in after leaving their comfortable offices is the story.

Thanks to the proliferation of cable “news,” the line between ethical journalism and slanting or cherry-picking stories to fit an ideological narrative has been badly blurred. As a result, self-described liberals don’t give a shit about James Rosen because he works at Fox News, regardless of the ominous and universal implications of his case. And that’s because Fox News is a shitty, partisan hack organization that would have celebrated if any New York Times reporter was criminally investigated for doing critical, accurate reporting on the early stages of the Iraq war.

I wish though. No one did, and the media marched along wide-eyed with the war drum. Turns out, it was all a lie. While some corporations and individuals made off like gangbusters with war profits, the general American public is paying for the media’s green-lighting of the bungled Iraq war and failed policies in Afghanistan with utter fiscal decimation and violent blowback. Writing for Truthdig, journalist Chris Hedges estimates it was around this time television news officially hit the skids. (http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_day_that_tv_news_died_20130324/)

While reporters in the Vietnam era fanned out at will to cover that war uncensored, the post-9/11 media started out “embedding” themselves with U.S. troops to provide a bunch of biased crap journalism before getting bored and ignoring the wars completely. Now, no one knows what the hell their own government is doing with drones in places like Waziristan and Somalia, nor the futility and misery we inflicted in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because journalists no longer care to analyze current events, too few Americans understand how war spending and a tax code favoring the rich affects the country’s deficit, nor do people recognize “blowback.” Instead of informing people what their government is doing abroad, news organizations are making up fiction about food stamps breaking the budget, digging through Michael Jackson’s grave and conjuring silly bells and whistles like CNN’s holograms. A couple days ago I watched CBS News dedicate most of its allotted airtime to breathlessly following the last minutes of a police car chase.

Maybe that’s why no one gives a shit when Associated Press phones are spied on. And Rosen’s plight is at least in part a result of his own employer’s cheerleading of their pal Bush’s PATRIOT Act. Oh, the irony. Maybe if both had done their jobs when Al-Hajj, Hussein and Shaye were persecuted, this wouldn’t have been able to happen in the first place.

It remains to be seen whether the media will start doing its job now that it’s been subjected to a small taste of what the public has been bludgeoned with for years via FISA, CISPA, the NDAA, the PATRIOT Act, et cetera. All these laws basically allow unlimited spying on and detention of Americans without any due process guaranteed by the Constitution. There are signs of hope, I guess. For instance, I noticed the LA Times reported about drones last week when Obama decided to talk about it at a press conference. Still, the media’s silence on these issues has been bizarre and disturbing, and it’s still bizarre and disturbing that they only start covering something when “officials” officially talk about it.

But then again, they also wrote about Michael Jackson. It’s such a hot mess. But why do I care? Maybe I should just take George Carlin’s advice and be happy to have a front-row seat to the freak show.

Bethania Palma Markus is a former staffer with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group which covered East LA County from Pasadena through the San Gabriel Valley down to Long Beach. She hold sa Master’s degree in Middle Eastern/Islamic history. She has written for LANG, the LAist and the OC Weekly and Hunter Thompson-honoring, literary journalism zine Bat Country Word.

No paid vacation? You must be an American

Morales: Simply ignorant or a careerist boot licker?

Morales: To vacate or not to vacate, that is the question.

The U.S. is the only country CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research) examined that doesn’t mandate paid vacation time.

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By Allison Linn, TODAY

The Memorial Day weekend typically marks the start of the summer vacation season – which for about three-fourths of American workers will mean the possibility of some paid time off.

The United States is the only highly developed nation that doesn’t require employers to offer paid vacation time, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning economic think tank.

The report examined vacation policies in 21 developed countries, including the United States. The researchers found that every country they examined, except the United States, had laws requiring employers to offer somewhere between 10 and 30 paid vacation days a year.

France’s laws granted employees the most paid vacation, at 30 days per year. But several countries actually guarantee workers more total paid time off when you add in mandated paid holidays.

Japan and Canada were at the lower end of the list, with laws requiring employers to offer 10 paid vacation days apiece.

The researchers found that 77 percent of U.S. workers do get paid vacation time, although their employers are not required to offer it. The workers who do receive paid vacation time get an average of 13 days a year, according to the analysis.

Full-time U.S. workers were much more likely than part-time workers to get paid vacation time, and higher wage workers also were considerably more likely than lower wage workers to have that benefit, according to the report.

In addition, people who worked for large employers were more likely than those who worked for small businesses to get paid time off.

The CEPR report argues that the data is evidence that the U.S. lags other countries when it comes to offering workers time off, and is especially tough on low-wage and part-time workers.

John Schmitt, a senior economist with CEPR and one of the report’s authors, said that even when U.S. workers have paid time off available, they don’t always take it. He argued that many U.S. workers may feel like they don’t have enough job security to risk being out of the office for a long period of time even if they technically have that time.

“I think what that means is that people get nervous about both asking for time off and taking time off,” he said.

But conservative thinkers counter that vacation is something that employers and employees can work out on their own.

“I don’t know of any compelling reason why the government has to decide for people in what way they want to get paid,” said Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar the the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

Schmitt said the data on U.S. paid vacation is little changed from the last time he did this same analysis six years ago. That’s despite the weak economy and extremely tough job market of the past few years.

He said it may be that employers didn’t want to reduce vacation benefits – which tend to be less costly than other benefits, such as health care – at a time when they were laying off some staff and asking other workers to take on more work.

“I think it’s something that’s difficult to cut back on,” he said.

For its analysis, the CEPR used data from the United Nations and the other countries themselves. Schmitt said CEPR then used two sets of U.S. government data to create an apples to apples comparison between the U.S. other countries.

The analysis excluded some very small European countries, as well as countries whose economies aren’t quite as developed as the United States.

Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

by Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report

Don’t worry about Barack Obama. He’s far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. “Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have his presidency threatened.”

This article previously appeared in YourBlackWorld [8].

“He is too effective at assuring the wealth gap metastasizes in growth while poverty is at its highest level since the early Sixties.”

I have a prediction about how the current scandals facing the Obama administration, from Benghazi, to the Associated Press intrusion, [9]to the IRS harassment of right wing groups, will resolve themselves: President Obama will walk away from all of these scandals completely unscathed. The worst that might possibly happen is that Eric Holder will be forced to resign.

In reality, even with all the friction Holder’s presence causes with Republicans, his exit should be no great loss to anyone on the left not plagued with the vapid diversity con game based on the politics of redemption, [10] which requires “brown and female faces in high places filling mercenary government spaces,” so the babies have people to look up to as role models. And this is what we think Dr. King died for?

In the face of Holder’s fecklessness on major issues – from investigating and prosecuting Banks [11] to his enabling of the FBI to infiltrate Occupy Wall Street [12], to his relentless willingness as a tool in the assault on Whistle blowers– [13] his presence won’t be missed.

You may ask, what would prompt me to be so sure that Obama will weather these controversies with minor damage, if any at all? Simple answer: Obama is the most valuable and important tool the guardians of American Empire have to implement the bone crushing agenda that must continue to be leveled against Americans at home and the world abroad for the benefit of the elite.

“Obama is the most valuable and important tool the guardians of American Empire have.”

From increased militarization of the continent through putting U.S. troops in over 35 African countries [14], to creating a new military doctrine that allows America to attack a country and completely overthrow its regime without any perceived threats to U.S. interests out of the pure charade of humanitarian civilian concern as in Libya [15], to international war crimes throughdrone attacks [16] on women and children in countries not in any military theater of engagement with the United States, to sending dog whistles allowing Israel to not only belligerently attack Syria [17] without provocation, risking a World War III scenario [18] via Russia, China, and Iran, but also having his administration publicly give Israel license to attack Iran [19], the Obama administration’s ability to carry out the most deadening foreign policy agenda since the beginning of Bush’s War on Terror marks a profound milestone in American history.

Being able to do all this while having a Nobel Peace Prize, while simultaneously having black and brown folk fawning to have you speak at Black college graduations like Morehouse [20]College makes Obama’s utility as America’s “more effective evil” [21] presidential choice unquestionable.

And that is only the international front. Let’s not mention Obama’s endless neo-liberal assault on public education through his horrid “race to the top” initiative that has caused a national epidemic of public school closings and teacher firings [22] that some are even deeming as racist [23].

Compound that with his other neo-liberal private sector takeover via the beyond problematic Obamacare plan that already may deny millions of poor people coverage [24] while increasing Health Insurance costs over 30%. [25] Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have his presidency threatened by these abuses of power that have been exposed.

“Obama’s endless neo-liberal assault on public education caused a national epidemic of public school closings and teacher firings.”

Furthermore, we cannot forget Obama’s most important role as Wall Street’s personal protector [26], ensuring the banks maintain record profits in the age of austerity [27] after the sequester he demanded [28] chokes the life out of government function and he threatens to cut Social Security and Medicare [29] so that now he can wryly tout a worthless decrease in the budget deficit [30], while America is still mired in recession despite the illusion of recovery [31].

These are the reasons Obama shall be unscathed by these scandals. He is too effective at assuring the wealth gap metastasizes [32] in growth while poverty is at its highest amount since the early sixties [33]. Meanwhile, the Black community, who so blindly fawn over [34] his soul deadening policies, continue to cheer even as he puts Black Liberation heroine Assata Shakur on the FBI’s most wanted list. This is the “hope and change” we got in America’s first Black president.

I’ve used this quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in several articles when talking about Obama and the Black community. I find it relevant even now:

“The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pascal Robert is an Iconoclastic Haitian American Lawyer, Blogger, and Online Activist for Haiti. For years his work appeared under the Blog Thought Merchant:http://thoughtmerchant.wordpress.com/ [35] He can be reached via twitter at: https://twitter.com/probert06 [36] @probert06 or thoughtmerchant@gmail.com. [37]

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/why-obama-will-walk-away-unscathed-current-political-scandals

Links:
[1] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/education-public-education/race-top
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/taxonomy/term/1439
[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/obama-nobel-prize
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/irs-scandal
[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/benghazi-scandal
[6] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/ap-scandal
[7] http://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/ObamaBlackHat.jpg
[8] http://www.yourblackworld.net/
[9] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/obama-looks-to-do-damage-control-on-irs-benghazi-doj-seizures.html
[10] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/peculiar-black-“politics-redemption”
[11] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/01/eric-holder-too-big-to-jail_n_2993401.html
[12] http://dailybail.com/home/rolling-stone-inside-the-fbi-plot-against-occupy.html
[13] http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/obama-war-press-whistleblowers-drones-223724346.html
[14] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/26/headlines/us_army_teams_heading_to_35_african_countries
[15] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/15/irs-ap-benghanzi-not-real-scandals
[16] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/12/pakistan-us-drone-strikes
[17] http://rt.com/op-edge/israel-syria-bombing-crook-894/
[18] http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/07/302328/obama-runs-risk-of-wwiii/
[19] http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/04/22/Hagel-Israel-has-unilateral-right-to-strike-Iran/UPI-81571366614000/
[20] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/02/morehouse-faces-controversy-over-obama-critics-role-in-graduation-ceremonies/
[21] http://youtu.be/el7YVZXnwdk
[22] https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/16-4
[23] http://socialistworker.org/2013/03/26/behind-the-racist-school-closings-agenda
[24] http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/obamacare_glitch_may_exclude_poor_from_coverage/
[25] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/26/obamacare-medical-claims-costs_n_2956986.html
[26] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obama-wall-street’s-perfect-manchurian-candidate
[27] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/austerity-wall-street_n_1690838.html
[28] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/obama-sequestration_b_2758602.html
[29] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pascal-robert/why-nobody-should-be-surp_b_3041532.html
[30] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/the-dwindling-deficit/
[31] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-economy-in-crisis-recovery-is-an-illusion/5321394
[32] http://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
[33] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2302997/U-S-sees-highest-poverty-spike-1960s-leaving-50-million-Americans-poor-government-cuts-billions-spending.html
[34] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/how-can-blacks-love-obama-so-much-when-theyre-doing-so-bad
[35] http://thoughtmerchant.wordpress.com/
[36] https://twitter.com/probert06
[37] mailto:thoughtmerchant@gmail.com
[38] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fwhy-obama-will-walk-away-unscathed-current-political-scandals&linkname=Why%20Obama%20Will%20Walk%20Away%20Unscathed%20by%20the%20Current%20Political%20Scandals

The Shame of the Fourth Estate

From our archives: articles you should have read when they first appeared but missed.

The mainstream media’s long-time kid-glove treatment of Andrew Breitbart led directly to the unjustified ouster of Shirley Sherrod.

By Charles Kaiser

[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…

here.

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.