[NYTr] Breaking: Corporate Media Actually Report Some Real News!

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by MichaelP 

Op-Ed News - Dec 29, 2007
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_dave_lin_071229_breaking_3a_corporate_.htm


Breaking: Corporate Media Actually Report Some Real News!

by Dave Lindorff 

It was good to see reports in the national media, including the New
York Times and my own local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, on an
effort by the town council in Burlington, VT, to have the town’s
district attorney draw up a war crimes indictment against President
George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

But the publication of news about this noble effort, which while
thoroughly appropriate is unlikely to go anywhere even if the town
council does pass the resolution, raises the question of why such a
story would pass editorial muster, while the much bigger, and more
significant, story about a growing national campaign to impeach these
two criminals in the White House (on charges including war crimes)
continues to be virtually blacked out.

A few weeks ago, three members of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep.
Robert Wexler (D-FL), Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), and Rep. Tammy
Baldwin (D-WI), all senior, respected members of Congress, wrote an
op-ed calling for an immediate start of hearings into possible
impeachable crimes against the Constitution by Cheney. All of the major
publications to which they offered this important article (which
reported on their plans to call on the Judiciary Committee to act),
including the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald,
Philadelphia Inquirer and other leading publications—all of them—turned
it down.

Wexler went one further, setting up a website on which people could
sign their names calling for a start to impeachment hearings. In one
week, over 100,000 had signed it (there are 160,000 signatures now).

So far, there has been no news report in the corporate media about this
campaign. Nor does that broader impeachment movement, which has seen
over 100 towns and cities across the country, as well as the Vermont
state senate, pass resolutions calling for impeachment, rate much or
any coverage in print or in the electronic news media.

In their “wisdom,” the nation’s editors have apparently decided that
impeachment is a non-issue. Never mind that a majority of the people in
the country have repeatedly been found in mainstream polls to favor
impeachment of both Bush and Cheney, or that there is a bill in the
House, filed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a presidential candidate,
calling for Cheney’s impeachment, and boasting 24 co-signers. That,
apparently, is not news fit for the reading, listening or viewing
public.

Yet editors do clearly know they are playing dirty games with us. When
readers made a concerted effort to hold editors to a professional
standard, as many did in Miami and Philadelphia, deluging editors with
protests over the rejection of the Wexler/Gutierrez/Baldwin opinion
article, the Herald and the Inquirer both relented and ran it.

Only the Miami Herald, however, ran a news story about the impeachment
drive as well as the opinion piece (the Miami Herald, which actually is
in Wexler’s congressional district, chopped his column down
significantly). The Inquirer just ran the editorial, with no news
report.

How to explain this seeming dichotomy, in which a small town’s quixotic
attempt to indict a president on war crimes is news, while a serious
national campaign to initiate impeachment proceedings in the House in
accordance with the steps laid out in the Constitution in response to
clear abuses of power by the current administration is not?

I would guess that editors feel that the Burlington city council effort
is a kind of “man bites dog” story—offbeat enough to warrant
publication as a curiosity. The impeachment campaign story, though,
which gets at a fundamental crisis in governance that raises questions
about whether our entire political system has been undermined by
powerful forces bent on undoing the Constitution, is simply much too
serious a story to be allowed a public airing.

Several decades ago, when I still toiled as a producer of surplus value
in the vineyards of the corporate media (as chief of the county
government bureau of the Los Angeles Daily News), I had occasion to
write what was called an “enterprise journalism” piece about how much
of the Los Angeles County workers’ pension fund was invested in
companies that were on the apartheid boycott list—an issue at the time
because at that moment students in the UC system were occupying campus
buildings across the state to protest similar holdings by their
colleges’ endowment funds. My editor spiked the piece. When I asked
why, he initially told me he wanted, instead of an article that led
with the facts, a “reaction” lead, featuring a local county legislator
complaining about the investments. In other words, he was afraid of
having the newspaper appear to be crusading on the issue, and wanted it
to appear instead as if the story had been generated not by an
enterprising reporter but by an irate politician—in this case Kenny
Hahn, a white politician who represented the largely African-American
Watts area of the county. Grudgingly, I went to Hahn’s office, elicited
the requisite outraged quote, and wrote the new lead. The next day,
there was still no story in the paper. Inquiring again to find out what
happened, I was told by the story was “too anti-business.” It simply
would not run, regardless of how it was written. The editors, who
worked for a big chain, the Chicago Tribune Company, had lost the
courage to be real journalists.

The experience convinced me that corporate journalism was a job for
whores, and I left to work as a freelancer, where at least one gets to
chose one’s pimps.

Unfortunately, the demise of the Los Angeles Daily News as a real
newspaper was simply a harbinger of what has happened to virtually all
the mainstream media in the country.

We now see the results, most recently in the censoring of the
impeachment story (not to mention the shameful parroting of the
administration line on how the “surge” is “working” in Iraq).

It lifts one’s spirits to see that a concerted campaign to awaken some
sense of shame among editors in those corporate media whorehouses can
have an effect, as it did at the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia
Inquirer this month, but no one should be fooled by such isolated
successes. For the most part, we are being lied to and “protected” from
the truth in so many ways that no media campaign, however robust, short
perhaps of a mass boycott, could force these compromised companies to
let the truth out.

[DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The
Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now in paperback).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net ]