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The Big Republican Lie about a
Liberal Media
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ne of the
boldest lies promoted by conservative fundamentalist zealots says that
the U.S. media is a slave to liberalism.
In fact, America’s main news outlets remain anything but liberal. Or
even reformist, for that matter. They are the bastard children of the
nation’s top corporate powers. They depend on these major companies for
their revenue. The nation’s much touted free press, as a result, has
become a sad tool of the stock market while CNN now
hopes—because it is reportedly losing viewers to the rabidly right-wing
FOX News network, to persuade Rush Limbaugh to return to the
tube, taking his place among the news channel’s talking heads.
Yes, we’re talking about the very same Limbaugh about whom comedian Al
Franken wrote his classic Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.
Isn’t Robert Novak’s flash of his plastic smile on Crossfire
or on the Capital Gang a sufficient testimony to CNN’s
right-wing bias?
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, the publication I edit 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 my 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.
While his arresting think-pieces were welcomed by me, only one other
gay newsmagazine of those times, the Baltimore Alternative,
dared to print a mention of Wicker’s views. Today, Randolfe Wicker has
been embraced by the mainstream media as cloning’s foremost lay
spokesperson. Even FOX News has welcomed him repeatedly to
take cloning’s side in its debates with so-called bio-ethicists, while
the British Broadcasting Company, CNN, and ABC’s
Nightline have welcomed him aboard. Last week alone, he was
interviewed by a host of mainstream newspapers nationwide.
In any case, it took mainstream media nearly five years to catch up
with Randolfe Wicker.
Covering the recent protests of another long-time media-whiz kid, the
Oral Majority’s Bob Kunst whose ‘Bush Stole the Election’ crusade has been
accounted for in this column since the November 7th election,
it became quite 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 Betrayal,
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."
Read Jack Nichols',
THE
GAY AGENDA, and see why it was named 1997 Outstanding Book by
Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.
Tell them that Sister Taffy sent you.
Jack Nichols:
www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com/jackbio.htm
Oral Majority Online:
www.oralmajorityonline.com
Information about the Freedom Ride:
Bobkunst@mindspring.com
Telephone: 305-864-5110
Jack Nichols is the author of The Gay Agenda: Talking
Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus Books, 1996) Of Men’s
Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin Books, 1975) and
of Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove and The Pines
(St. Martin’s Press, 1976)
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