The Fourth Estate - Blood on Their Hands

This week, I bow to the best journalist in my lifetime. In his special, Buying the War, Bill Moyer's dignity and integrity stands far and above today's media. The non-celebrity grunts at Knight Ridder also earn this distinction because they take their role as journalists seriously - they do the actual work of reporting that the hacks at the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) are too scared (lazy) to do. Their fear seems more connected to their personal bank accounts and status as celebrity journalists than it does to incurring the wrath of the junta. Even Oprah should be ashamed of herself - watch her slap down an audience member who dares question the war.

This story is also definitive proof that the Big Three and The New York Times are not liberal. Ever since I read "Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the Media" and saw "Manufactured Consent," I realized that while there may exist a liberal press in America -it is not mainstream nor is it referred to as journalism. More than often than not, the non-mainstream view is considered "out there cranks," "kooky and paranoid," and "anti-American."

When did questioning authority go out of fashion? On September 12, 2001? Or was it on December 12, 2000, when a non-violent coup d'etat led by the U.S. Supreme Court put the junta in power?

I remember coming to work the morning after John Kerry had been nominated as the Democratic candidate for President in 2004. The security at work was heightened and the headlines were not of Kerry but of then Attorney General, John Ashcroft, revealing a terrorist plot to blow up financial institutions, that the FBI had miraculously foiled. When I questioned the timing and the veracity of the claim, a consultant told me I was "out of control with the cynicism." Not cynical at all as it was later proven that the discovery of the plot had happened months before - with no fanfare or suggestions to tighten security - and the timing was to distract from Kerry's nomination.

The Moyers piece is five parts around 15 minutes each but it is well worth watching. If nothing else but to see the most overrated journalist in America, Tim Russert, flounder under Moyers succinct questioning.

I do wish Moyers had questioned Bob Woodward whose ascent to Chief Propagandist under the junta (until it was more lucrative to criticize it -unfortunately, that MO hasn't worked too well for George Tenet) almost, almost negates his role in bringing down King Richard.

France Stays Red

In France, it's Sarkozy. Eighty-five percent of the French electorate voted today.

85 percent of eligible voters voted.

Imagine asking Americans to vote twice within a two-week time period!
I had hoped it would be Madame Royal but fear seems to have won over faith. Maureen Dowd wrote her usual inane column today (with an inappropriate French word in the title. I'm pretty sure she didn't mean to say "The Countryside, That's Me" in her Louis XIV play on words) but she did provide an interesting description of Sarkozy, "the right-wing front runner is a brute, Rudy Giuliani without the restraint." Rudy the Rock, as Chirac called him - being compared to a French politician - quelle horreur for the right wingers in America! It would be interesting to see Rudy actually act with restraint in order to make an objective comparison. (LePen refers to a far-right, openly racist candidate. Sarkozy as Interior Minister once referred to immigrants in Paris' northern suburbs as "scum." He made these statements shortly before the three weeks of rioting in 2005).

Condi's Dad was a Black Panther
Just kidding - but that headline is an example of how the junta and the American media manipulated the march to war. I have never read about our Smoking Gun Secretary of State's father but in the Time's Lede blog post about the anniversary of Kent State this week, the following response was included. Dean John Rice, died in 2000 but the story below made me wonder what he would think of his daughter's role in this atrocious and unjustified war.

One college dean whose identity may surprise your readers was deeply disturbed by the Kent State shootings at the time. He was the father of our Secretary of State. Chip Berlet, who edited the student paper at Dean Rice’s institution, wrote this account in 2004:

“When I hear Condoleezza Rice defending the war in Iraq, I think of her father denouncing the war in Vietnam. Condi’s dad was a Dean in the college of liberal arts at the University of Denver in the early 1970s when I was editor of the student newspaper, the Clarion. His name was John Rice, but no student dared call him that. He was an imposing figure, and we all called him “Dean” Rice.

In her book "Bushwomen," Laura Flanders traces how Condi Rice was recruited by right-wing Republicans. Flanders recounts how Ms. Rice, speaking at the GOP convention in Philadelphia, said that her father “was the first Republican I knew,” and claimed “In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you come from; it matters only where you are going.”

That’s not what I learned from Dean Rice. I took his class “The Black Experience in America,” and continued to attend the seminars with his encouragement. The seminar was built around a series of invited speakers who lectured in a public form followed by classroom discussions. That’s where I met Fannie Lou Hamer, a black voting rights activist from Sunflower County Mississippi, who led the successful challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democrat Convention. That’s where I heard Dean Rice explain that he had always refused to register as a Democrat because that was the party of the bigots who had blocked his voter registration when he and his family lived in the South.

Dean Rice may have been registered as a Republican up North, but he taught me about working for progressive social change and opposing institutional racism.

He taught me that white people like me enjoyed privileges routinely denied to blacks. He taught me that the proportion of blacks serving in Vietnam was tied to economic and social policies at home. And he pointed out that along with this knowledge came an absolute moral imperative to act.

The seminar speakers invited by Dean Rice included a wide range of perspectives–from members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, to exiled South African poet Dennis Brutus, to Louis Farrakhan explaining the teachings of Black Muslim Elijah Mohammed, to Lee Evans and John Carlos who were organizing black athletes to resist racism. It was Carlos and a teammate who gave the black power salute after winning medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

I still have a tape of the lecture by Andrew Young who was then a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was long ago, but I think I remember Condi as a teenager all dressed up playing the classical piano introduction to Young’s speech. Condi was so smart and talented she was a bit scary. We all knew she was being groomed to go far, but we never suspected she would end up painting a public picture of her father that many of us would not recognize.

Dean Rice had high standards for all of us; and as his students we respected him enough to ask him to speak in May of 1971 at a campus memorial service for the students slain at Kent and Jackson State the previous year. Dean Rice eulogized the dead students as “young people who gave their lives for the cause of freedom and for the cause of eliminating useless war.” He read the names of those from the university community who had died in Vietnam. He spoke of the atrocities.

Then he challenged us all: “When tomorrow comes will you be the perpetuators of war or of peace? Are you the generation to bring to America a lasting peace? Or did your brothers and sisters at Kent and Jackson State die in vain?”

More than thirty years later I leaf through old issues of the University of Denver Clarion and old letters from Dean Rice. On the television I hear the Bush Administration justifications and rationalizations for the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, the endless wars. And I know that what I taught my child, and what I teach others, is shaped by the question asked by John Rice in 1971: “When tomorrow comes will you be the perpetuators of war or of peace?”

The Last Word
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