Here's a good editorial on the 4th Estate's dereliction of duty in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez travesty. Tom Lipscomb summarizes the state of the 4th Estate better than anything I've seen.
As an aside, I already knew that NBC had failed to report that their on-scene, in-the-house video cameraman had been hospitalized as a result of injuries sustained at the hands of government agents not-using-force (Janet said they weren't using force - they were just *threatening* force with their MP-5's. I guess that means if you stick up a bank and don't shoot anyone, and just rough up a few bystanders, you haven't used force. Orwell would be proud.) This is why there's no video from inside the house; the video cameraman got pummeled. I'm still surprised the still guy's film wasn't ripped out of his Nikon.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR> The U.S. Press Sells Out
by Thomas Lipscomb
Thursday, April 27, 2000
Comments: 132 posts
It’s official. With the Elian Gonzalez case the formerly free press of the United States has finally become a full-time propaganda agent of the Clinton administration.
Only a month ago, the press chose to ignore an assault by Secret Service agents on 10 members of the press presuming to ask Senate candidate Hillary Clinton questions during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Newsday columnist and editorial board member Marie Cocco attacked an Internet reporter for simply repeating an account by a WABC cameraman present. This week Newsday’s parent, The Los Angeles Times, carried a puff piece on the Secret Service headlined “Candidates and Their Protectors” and omitted the incident entirely. If the press is willing to ignore attacks by Clinton’s police on its own members these days, why should we expect them to care about their federal assaults on ordinary citizens?
Lone voices in the wilderness
As the Elian Gonzalez case heated up, press sympathy for President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno totally overwhelmed news judgment. Diane Sawyer ran an “ABC Good Morning America” interview with Elian where she carefully left out the most newsworthy part -- his appeal to stay in the United States. Then NBC’s “Today Show” decided to run as news the amateur-night psychic ramblings of a Hillary Clinton mediflunky.
The New York Times buried one of the most remarkable news photos of the past half-century: Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz’s picture of a screaming INS agent in full SWAT armor pointing a loaded submachine gun toward Elian Gonzalez and his rescuer, fisherman Donato Dalrymple. It ran a smaller black-and-white version on page 16. Its front page carried a full-color picture of a happy face reunion provided by Clinton and Castro’s shyster Gregory Craig next to a fan-magazine article about Janet Reno’s “Difficult Call.” One can imagine what a real newsman like Ben Hecht or Murray Kempton would have made of Reno’s latest “save the children” foray.
Janet Reno’s concern for her “tired” Fed hordes besieging the Branch Davidian families at Waco led to a massacre and the incineration of 30 children. This time she got tired herself while lying all night and only kidnapped one child with a fraudulent search-and-seizure warrant --- so it is good news. A Washington Post Easter editorial stated happily that “[t]he government did the right thing” and The Chicago Tribune cheered: “Well done, Ms. Reno,” while its columnist Eric Zorn stated that Clinton’s gestapo action “made me proud.” In short, the U.S. press now accepts the classic Marxist principle that the end justifies the means -- as long as it agrees with the end.
There were a few sour notes from cantankerous columnists. George Will stated: “The climate for this excessive use of force was set by a drumbeat from this administration echoed by disgraceful journalism." The irascible Christopher Hitchens pointed out the real danger under Clinton: “the transformation of the American democracy, the American republic, into a banana republic.”
Looking the other way
But the degree of complicity of the vast majority of the American press in supporting the Clinton regime is clear from their wide acceptance of The Nation’s Bruce Shapiro’s lie: “And when Lazaro González's Miami handlers published that alarming photo, Juan Miguel González responded within hours with photos of Elián reunited with his family, a smile on his face.” In this classic agit-prop job, a press photo released by America’s most respected news service suddenly becomes a PR manipulation, while a reunion shot provided by a Clinton-Castro lawyer that no member of the press witnessed is treated as authoritative.
Not surprisingly, after his most recent stay in the Clinton’s Lincoln rent-a-bedroom a few weeks ago, big donor Rick Kaplan, the head of CNN's news division, chose to treat the Diaz photo as just a “public relations problem” for the administration that had nothing to do with constitutional guarantees against unlawful search and seizure. CNN’s Judy Woodruff went further and passed on dark hints about “guns” from Reno and her assistant attorney general Eric Holder, asserting “a group of armed men” were in the house right next door to the Gonzalez residence. Finally Woodruff stopped, after she was confronted on air by a reporter who pointed out that none of the dozens of journalists on the scene had seen any sign of so much as a pea shooter.
During the attack on the Gonzalez household, the Federal goon squad hit an NBC soundman in the head with a gun and kicked a NBC cameraman in the stomach to prevent them from recording the scene and this, too, the press treated with almost total indifference.
The most outrageous federal government violation of the rights of private citizens since Waco received the unconditional support of America’s giant media companies from Time-Warner to The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the networks. After the fact, they chose to run cosmetic handouts from government agencies on what actually happened in Miami rather than do any reporting of their own. The media again passed on the lie about "guns" and found combat police operations experts to compliment the government raid, when the real issue was whether the raid itself was appropriate. The Washington Post's David Vise disgraced himself in his account of Reno's "sensitivity" to First amendment issues in allowing press coverage while her goons beat up an NBC TV crew and she shredded the Fourth amendment.
Media companies have already grown used to practicing a little constructive censorship on their own behalf. Why not protect an administration that has delivered them billions in free bandwidth confiscated from America’s citizens, and protected them from competing low-power stations? Media critic Steve Brill, and the publisher of the for-profit Brill’s Content, recently warned that the press's problem with credibility is growing as news divisions slant coverage to protect the mega-conglomerates' bottom lines. As an example, he cited a Disney/ABC 20/20 story about problems at a Disney theme park that never aired. But, as usual, Brill chose not to see the larger issue when it might embarrass his buddies in the Clinton junta.
Who are these guys anyway?
The larger issue could not be more clear. Consider that CNN’s Atlanta headquarters became a training ground for Defense Department spy-war operatives; or look at ABC’s disgraceful Leonardo DeCaprio “interview” of Clinton for Earth Day; or re-read Salon’s Daniel Forbes’ exposure of NBC and Fox writing anti-drug scripts of top entertainment shows for the approval of White House Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey in exchange for millions of classic payola ad revenue kickbacks (print news organizations like US News World Report, Parade, and USA Today’s Weekend and even The Sporting News were doing exactly the same thing with news features).
What does it matter anyway? As former MTV celebrity suck-up Tabitha Soren put it peevishly in a New York Times op-ed: “[F]ighting to keep the distinction between news and entertainment is, after all, pretty self-serving for journalists."
If few journalists seem to be interested any more in a little thing like the distinction between news and entertainment, why worry about pure government propaganda?
During the impeachment hearings the press kept repeating the Clinton line that lying about sex did not matter. One of Clinton’s former law students, Judge Susan Webber Wright, disagreed and nailed him publicly for perjury in a contempt-of-court decision that may eventually disbar him. Now Florida’s respected Democratic Sen. Bob Graham -- a “short-list” candidate as Al Gore’s running mate -- states unequivocally that Clinton lied to him in promising to avoid a midnight raid. Old Reno friend and Clinton supporter Aaron Podhurst tells us Reno lied to him, when he was negotiating with Elian’s Miami relatives, stringing him along on the phone while her Gestapo broke the family’s door down. And on Easter, Reno’s deputy Eric Holder got caught on camera lying to NBC’s Tim Russert during a previous appearance on “Meet the Press” as he denied that there would be a raid. But even after Clinton’s outrageous lies about the “nerve gas factory” in the Sudan and the fake “genocide” in Kosovo, the U.S. media still prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to the lies of the most corrupt and power-abusing administration in American history, rather than clear statements by decent Democrats like Bob Thomas and Aaron Podhurst
In the Gonzalez affair Clinton and Reno ran roughshod over their constitutional commitments while loudly proclaiming, “It is the law.” But for the first time in history, this year the justices of the Supreme Court, who know something about the law, failed to attend a State of the Union message. Still, at the spring dinner of Radio and Television Journalists in Washington, America’s first impeached president received a standing ovation from an adoring crowd supposedly dedicated to the truth, if not the law. We might well ask ourselves, as Butch Cassidy put it: “Who are those guys, anyway?”
The Orlando Sentinel’s Peter Brown has just completed a thoughtful study of today’s journalists. He found that they have become less and less like normal middle-class Americans. The evidence of just how out of touch they are with America in their taste, lifestyle, opinions and even net worth is shocking. But while the media favor the federal government’s long-form census for the rest of us, somehow no one has ever gotten around to a long-form census of just who makes up the press today.
The price of distortion
Now that Clinton’s media allies are completing their outrageously distorted coverage of the Elian Gonzalez case, their polling reveals that the majority of Americans agree with Clinton’s action. That certainly wouldn’t surprise one master politician who understood how to move the public as well as anyone today:
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.--Abraham Lincoln
It is time we learn a lot more about who “molds public sentiment” today.
Thomas H. Lipscomb is the director of the Center for the Digital Future in New York. An an editor and publisher for many years, most recently as head of Times Books, he is also the founder of two public companies in digital technology. He is also a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. His email address is tom@digitalfuture.org.
[/quote]
[This message has been edited by JimR (edited April 28, 2000).]
As an aside, I already knew that NBC had failed to report that their on-scene, in-the-house video cameraman had been hospitalized as a result of injuries sustained at the hands of government agents not-using-force (Janet said they weren't using force - they were just *threatening* force with their MP-5's. I guess that means if you stick up a bank and don't shoot anyone, and just rough up a few bystanders, you haven't used force. Orwell would be proud.) This is why there's no video from inside the house; the video cameraman got pummeled. I'm still surprised the still guy's film wasn't ripped out of his Nikon.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR> The U.S. Press Sells Out
by Thomas Lipscomb
Thursday, April 27, 2000
Comments: 132 posts
It’s official. With the Elian Gonzalez case the formerly free press of the United States has finally become a full-time propaganda agent of the Clinton administration.
Only a month ago, the press chose to ignore an assault by Secret Service agents on 10 members of the press presuming to ask Senate candidate Hillary Clinton questions during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Newsday columnist and editorial board member Marie Cocco attacked an Internet reporter for simply repeating an account by a WABC cameraman present. This week Newsday’s parent, The Los Angeles Times, carried a puff piece on the Secret Service headlined “Candidates and Their Protectors” and omitted the incident entirely. If the press is willing to ignore attacks by Clinton’s police on its own members these days, why should we expect them to care about their federal assaults on ordinary citizens?
Lone voices in the wilderness
As the Elian Gonzalez case heated up, press sympathy for President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno totally overwhelmed news judgment. Diane Sawyer ran an “ABC Good Morning America” interview with Elian where she carefully left out the most newsworthy part -- his appeal to stay in the United States. Then NBC’s “Today Show” decided to run as news the amateur-night psychic ramblings of a Hillary Clinton mediflunky.
The New York Times buried one of the most remarkable news photos of the past half-century: Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz’s picture of a screaming INS agent in full SWAT armor pointing a loaded submachine gun toward Elian Gonzalez and his rescuer, fisherman Donato Dalrymple. It ran a smaller black-and-white version on page 16. Its front page carried a full-color picture of a happy face reunion provided by Clinton and Castro’s shyster Gregory Craig next to a fan-magazine article about Janet Reno’s “Difficult Call.” One can imagine what a real newsman like Ben Hecht or Murray Kempton would have made of Reno’s latest “save the children” foray.
Janet Reno’s concern for her “tired” Fed hordes besieging the Branch Davidian families at Waco led to a massacre and the incineration of 30 children. This time she got tired herself while lying all night and only kidnapped one child with a fraudulent search-and-seizure warrant --- so it is good news. A Washington Post Easter editorial stated happily that “[t]he government did the right thing” and The Chicago Tribune cheered: “Well done, Ms. Reno,” while its columnist Eric Zorn stated that Clinton’s gestapo action “made me proud.” In short, the U.S. press now accepts the classic Marxist principle that the end justifies the means -- as long as it agrees with the end.
There were a few sour notes from cantankerous columnists. George Will stated: “The climate for this excessive use of force was set by a drumbeat from this administration echoed by disgraceful journalism." The irascible Christopher Hitchens pointed out the real danger under Clinton: “the transformation of the American democracy, the American republic, into a banana republic.”
Looking the other way
But the degree of complicity of the vast majority of the American press in supporting the Clinton regime is clear from their wide acceptance of The Nation’s Bruce Shapiro’s lie: “And when Lazaro González's Miami handlers published that alarming photo, Juan Miguel González responded within hours with photos of Elián reunited with his family, a smile on his face.” In this classic agit-prop job, a press photo released by America’s most respected news service suddenly becomes a PR manipulation, while a reunion shot provided by a Clinton-Castro lawyer that no member of the press witnessed is treated as authoritative.
Not surprisingly, after his most recent stay in the Clinton’s Lincoln rent-a-bedroom a few weeks ago, big donor Rick Kaplan, the head of CNN's news division, chose to treat the Diaz photo as just a “public relations problem” for the administration that had nothing to do with constitutional guarantees against unlawful search and seizure. CNN’s Judy Woodruff went further and passed on dark hints about “guns” from Reno and her assistant attorney general Eric Holder, asserting “a group of armed men” were in the house right next door to the Gonzalez residence. Finally Woodruff stopped, after she was confronted on air by a reporter who pointed out that none of the dozens of journalists on the scene had seen any sign of so much as a pea shooter.
During the attack on the Gonzalez household, the Federal goon squad hit an NBC soundman in the head with a gun and kicked a NBC cameraman in the stomach to prevent them from recording the scene and this, too, the press treated with almost total indifference.
The most outrageous federal government violation of the rights of private citizens since Waco received the unconditional support of America’s giant media companies from Time-Warner to The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the networks. After the fact, they chose to run cosmetic handouts from government agencies on what actually happened in Miami rather than do any reporting of their own. The media again passed on the lie about "guns" and found combat police operations experts to compliment the government raid, when the real issue was whether the raid itself was appropriate. The Washington Post's David Vise disgraced himself in his account of Reno's "sensitivity" to First amendment issues in allowing press coverage while her goons beat up an NBC TV crew and she shredded the Fourth amendment.
Media companies have already grown used to practicing a little constructive censorship on their own behalf. Why not protect an administration that has delivered them billions in free bandwidth confiscated from America’s citizens, and protected them from competing low-power stations? Media critic Steve Brill, and the publisher of the for-profit Brill’s Content, recently warned that the press's problem with credibility is growing as news divisions slant coverage to protect the mega-conglomerates' bottom lines. As an example, he cited a Disney/ABC 20/20 story about problems at a Disney theme park that never aired. But, as usual, Brill chose not to see the larger issue when it might embarrass his buddies in the Clinton junta.
Who are these guys anyway?
The larger issue could not be more clear. Consider that CNN’s Atlanta headquarters became a training ground for Defense Department spy-war operatives; or look at ABC’s disgraceful Leonardo DeCaprio “interview” of Clinton for Earth Day; or re-read Salon’s Daniel Forbes’ exposure of NBC and Fox writing anti-drug scripts of top entertainment shows for the approval of White House Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey in exchange for millions of classic payola ad revenue kickbacks (print news organizations like US News World Report, Parade, and USA Today’s Weekend and even The Sporting News were doing exactly the same thing with news features).
What does it matter anyway? As former MTV celebrity suck-up Tabitha Soren put it peevishly in a New York Times op-ed: “[F]ighting to keep the distinction between news and entertainment is, after all, pretty self-serving for journalists."
If few journalists seem to be interested any more in a little thing like the distinction between news and entertainment, why worry about pure government propaganda?
During the impeachment hearings the press kept repeating the Clinton line that lying about sex did not matter. One of Clinton’s former law students, Judge Susan Webber Wright, disagreed and nailed him publicly for perjury in a contempt-of-court decision that may eventually disbar him. Now Florida’s respected Democratic Sen. Bob Graham -- a “short-list” candidate as Al Gore’s running mate -- states unequivocally that Clinton lied to him in promising to avoid a midnight raid. Old Reno friend and Clinton supporter Aaron Podhurst tells us Reno lied to him, when he was negotiating with Elian’s Miami relatives, stringing him along on the phone while her Gestapo broke the family’s door down. And on Easter, Reno’s deputy Eric Holder got caught on camera lying to NBC’s Tim Russert during a previous appearance on “Meet the Press” as he denied that there would be a raid. But even after Clinton’s outrageous lies about the “nerve gas factory” in the Sudan and the fake “genocide” in Kosovo, the U.S. media still prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to the lies of the most corrupt and power-abusing administration in American history, rather than clear statements by decent Democrats like Bob Thomas and Aaron Podhurst
In the Gonzalez affair Clinton and Reno ran roughshod over their constitutional commitments while loudly proclaiming, “It is the law.” But for the first time in history, this year the justices of the Supreme Court, who know something about the law, failed to attend a State of the Union message. Still, at the spring dinner of Radio and Television Journalists in Washington, America’s first impeached president received a standing ovation from an adoring crowd supposedly dedicated to the truth, if not the law. We might well ask ourselves, as Butch Cassidy put it: “Who are those guys, anyway?”
The Orlando Sentinel’s Peter Brown has just completed a thoughtful study of today’s journalists. He found that they have become less and less like normal middle-class Americans. The evidence of just how out of touch they are with America in their taste, lifestyle, opinions and even net worth is shocking. But while the media favor the federal government’s long-form census for the rest of us, somehow no one has ever gotten around to a long-form census of just who makes up the press today.
The price of distortion
Now that Clinton’s media allies are completing their outrageously distorted coverage of the Elian Gonzalez case, their polling reveals that the majority of Americans agree with Clinton’s action. That certainly wouldn’t surprise one master politician who understood how to move the public as well as anyone today:
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.--Abraham Lincoln
It is time we learn a lot more about who “molds public sentiment” today.
Thomas H. Lipscomb is the director of the Center for the Digital Future in New York. An an editor and publisher for many years, most recently as head of Times Books, he is also the founder of two public companies in digital technology. He is also a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. His email address is tom@digitalfuture.org.
[/quote]
[This message has been edited by JimR (edited April 28, 2000).]
