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about a Liberal Media |
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By Jack Nichols
One of the boldest lies promoted by conservative fundamentalist zealots says that the U.S. media is a slave to liberalism.
In the Reagan years when the Republicans began repeating their "liberal media" chant, I strained to determine who those few media liberals-- about whom they complained--might be. Even then-- two decades ago-CNN had quickly embraced timidity. Hardly, I thought then, did it qualify as any kind of helpful font of alternative views. Its earliest talk show interview host, the earnest and inquisitive Sandy Freeman, was quickly replaced by Larry King's always-safe politesse. CNN thought it editorially important, it appeared, to hire an interviewer incapable of frightening Nancy Reagan. The news networks, I discovered in 1975 during a nationwide book tour, are easily frightened by any controversial notion that is not of their own making or for which they find themselves intellectually unprepared. Nearly five years ago, GayToday introduced to its readers the unsettling topic of human cloning, as expounded by Randolfe Wicker, the pioneering early 1960s media whiz kid of the gay civil rights movement. As an immediate result of GayToday's prodding, Mr. Wicker quickly became the founder of the world's first pro-human cloning activist organization, a position for which he has proved well-suited.
Covering the recent protests of another long-time media-whiz kid, the Oral Majority's Bob Kunst whose 'Bush Stole the Election' crusade was accounted for in GayToday immediately following the November 7th election, it again became clear that America's mainstream media was almost unanimously refusing to raise those very questions that a GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court had hoped to squelch by illegally meddling in Florida's state affairs and thereby appointing George W. Bush the nation's president.
Alan Dershowitz's best-selling book, Supreme Injustice, provided facts about the court's
decision that the "liberal" media had been too timid to touch. Like ordinary Germans during the
rise of the Third Reich, American media moguls seemed to have vowed to keep their eyes
shut while the country's democratic institutions, amBUSHed, self-destructed.
In mid-January, following the high court's decision, it had become necessary for 673 U.S. professors of law from nearly 150 universities, to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times wherein they jointly accused the U.S. Supreme Court of what activist Kunst believed to be the equivalent of treason. Why was it necessary for these 673 law professors to pay ad revenue about an issue which the mainstream news media had refused out of fear to face straightforwardly. In a late January conversation with a mainstream assistant managing editor, I brought to her attention the law professors statement: www.the-rule-of-law.com and asked why, after I'd once before told her about it, had she opted to ignore it? "Well," she sighed in boredom, "after all the election thing is over. Its over." I fumed, "That's a very Nazi-era type reaction." "I don't have to take that!," she shrieked, and hung up on me. In the meantime, I now sadly gloat, her own Florida paper has been unable to ignore the findings of election illegalities by the faraway New York Times. It has been forced to reprint news of the Republicans' criminal manipulations of the state's crucial election process which pressed a small-minded and soulless corporate dictator into the world's singularly most powerful seat. Europe, according to last week's New York Times, detests and fears George W. Bush. All thinking persons should. But what about America's patriots of protest? Crossfire's official CNN "liberal" pundit, Bill Press, earned my admiration recently for having more than once said " Everybody knows Bush stole the election.". A few Democratic strategists are finally starting to speak up: www.Democrats.com and, as GayToday reported, even some prominent Democrats are once again reflecting on the events surrounding Election 2000's theft: Democrats: 'Florida's Vote Scam Shows Bush Uses Any Means!' http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/events/071701ev.htm But these moves are mere squeaks. Barbara Streisand assumed in her statement about the stolen election that those Democrats who refuse to face the fact of its theft are "nice guys" who "will finish last." Her phrasing is too kind. The motives of elected representatives who opt to keep quiet about the stolen election are hardly "good." They are merely self-serving. They too have corporate bosses to please. Which brings me to the point of this week's rant: I've been honored--along with the late Lige Clarke-as a recipient of high praise for work done in the 1960s in a wonderfully innovative new history of journalism, a textbook titled Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America (Columbia University Press, by Rodger Streitmatter, Professor of Journalism, American University.) Voices of Revolution is the first textbook of its kind to include the gay press in a history of the genre. Dr. Streitmatter has written a gripping and vital work now-in September-- to become available as a standard text that covers 200 years of socially-impelled American activism conducted by often obscure but effective editors and journalists. Those who spoke up for the disenfranchised, who spoke for free love, against the barbarism of lynching, or who advocated socialist or anarchist ideas. Streitmatter ably covers the rise of the Black American press, birth control advocacy, the Vietnam war protesters, the late 1960s counterculture, women's liberation, gay and lesbian liberation and the struggle against racial oppression. Among the opening lines Dr. Streitmatter quotes in his introduction is one from the American literary phenomenon, Upton Sinclair, who observed "early in the twentieth century," that "America's largest and best-known newspapers generally do not champion social change but, in reality, construct a 'concrete wall' between the American public and alternative thinking." |
Conservative Rush Limbaugh: About to Right the liberal CNN ship? 
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