INFILTRATING FOX NEWS

IS IT TIME TO IMPEACH?

FOREIGN JOURNOS NEED NOT APPLY

I am shameless. I came away with a pretty red “No Spin Zone” tie, a “Fox and Friends” calendar, and a plastic American flag for my nonexistent rural mailbox. And, oh yes, there was the goat cheese salad cooked on the premises by a chef flown in from San Francisco’s Indigo restaurant to put a little West in some of the biggest mouths in the East.

Quiet as it is kept, I spent Saturday morning inside the real heart of media darkness: the FOX NEWS CHANNEL. I was booked as a guest on my least favorite morning show to talk about BEYOND JFK, the film I made more than a decade ago, in its new Warner Brothers DVD incarnation. It is the 40th anniversary of the Dallas massacre. I watched it on TV after it happened. Four decades later, to the day, I am on TV still talking about it.

(I am really proud of the work, but I can’t say Warner Brothers did a very good job placing it, promoting it or paying promptly. The latest indignity came Friday when the studio placed a quarter-page ad in the New York Times. It mentioned my co-director, whom I brought onto the project, and not your News Dissector, who made it happen. I ended up buried in the teeny-weeny small print.)

But good sport that I am and as a kind of surrogate for Oliver Stone whose company got me into making the film in the first place, I have been doing some interviews to promote it. To get into Fortress Fox, I was photographed making a fist for the camera in the lobby. The photographer said she never watches Fox and was amused that I asked if she did. Security guards and Fox plainclothesmen (not cops) lined the hall.

I was astonished and pleased that Fox agreed to have me on, though I feared I would walk into a buzz saw of debate with the “Oswald did it, you dummy” crowd.

FOX AND FRIENDS

Instead, the Foxy friends were quick, smart, very welcoming, genuinely interested and enthusiastic and filled with questions about the subject of the film. They did not seem to be ideologues, just TV hosts. They didn’t want me, though, for my criticism of the war coverage or Fox’s role in it. It is always safer to talk about conspiracies in the past than in the present.

The problem was that the segment was only 5 minutes long, hardly enough time to handle 5 nuanced conspiracy theories. They graciously plugged the DVD — at one point so energetically that I had to say, “I am here for the telling but not the selling.” They knew better. I will admit I was not fair and balanced in my few seconds of fame.

After I semi-dissected the conspiracy puzzle, it was time for the goat-cheese-salad food segment and I stuck around to sample the delicacy. Yum. I must say that everyone seemed to be having fun as they moved effortlessly from Michael Jackson and reprises of President Bush’s dalliance with the Queen to my JFK segment, which could have gone on for hours if the formatting had not been so tight and the smell of the salad so enticing.

INTO THE NEWS GULAG

I was given a tour of the Fox newsroom and program offices, which are packed into a bunkerlike basement. (Get it — a bunker?) The area is divided into “pods,” and yes, I took it upon myself to saunter into the holy ground of the so-called, self-styled O’Reilly “spin free zone.” (Eat your heart out, Al Franken!) O’Reilly was off on Saturday, but he wouldn’t have been there anyway. He and the other Big Foxes are not forced to stay in what could be confused with a fallout shelter. They have their spacious suites on the 17th floor.

I spent some time chatting with the staff members, most of whom admitted that they don’t watch the channel. One told me she only listens to NPR because all of television is stupid. She also freelances at CNN and finds the two rivals more alike than different.

Most of these folks are young and seem to be enjoying the notoriety of working for the channel that many love to hate and that, unfortunately, all too many love to watch. Hey, it’s a job. Frankly, they seemed less uptight than some of the progressive media folk I have been with of late. It felt like a frat house. The walls are plastered with ads proclaiming they are “Number One.” Heaven help us!There was also a sign that read “BOYCOTT FOX AND FRIENDS.” It reminded me of those signs the networks show during football games, signs praising themselves, as if the fans had more loyalty to their network than to the home team.

LANZMAN

One surprise came when the senior producer summoned me to the control room. My paranoia was in high gear. Did he know about my disgust with all things Murdoch? Would I be told what I couldn’t say? What fate would befall me?

No, none of that happened. This second-in-command showed me a small book; the cover had a picture of my grandfather Max Schechter. He told me that his grandfather got into America 90 year ago, thanks to my grandfather’s intervention. We were related through the interstices of a history none of us knew. We played Jewish geography. Small world.

When I told my daughter Sarah about this encounter, she quipped, “Would your Grandpa have done it if he knew that the man’s grandchild would become part of a Nazi propaganda machine?” I found that a bit harsh and thought of a book I once read called “friendly fascism.” I liked him. Now I have a friend, maybe even a relative, at Fox. I am down to one degree of separation. Scary.

ON TO SOUTH AFRICA

I am writing the night before the big trip. Tomorrow I’m off to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s AIDS concert. MTV is already beginning to hype it. I am going from late fall to late Spring, from the crazy weather of New York to the balmy clime of Capetown, the “mother city” on the Southern tip of Africa. I was happy to read today that South Africa’s government will soon be mass distributing AIDS drugs.

JFK QUESTIONS

The Oliver Stone film did mobilize support for a campaign to get all the JFK assassination records released. A commission was finally formed and a federal judge from Minnesota was appointed to head it. The commission did its job diligently. I met the Judge and wanted to do a documentary on some of the tantalizing material he uncovered, but I couldn’t finance it. The press take was “no smoking gun, nothing new, case closed.” Just last week ABC reported that the new documents revealed nothing.

Not so fast. The judge’s hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, actually sent their top reporter Eric Black to talk to him. (It appears that ABC had not.) In an article headlined “Kennedy Assassination Expert from Minnesota still has Questions,” Black reports,

The Minnesota judge who has seen pretty much every known piece of evidence relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 40 years ago today still cannot reach a final, unshakeable conclusion about some key questions in the case.

U.S. District Judge John Tunheim of Minneapolis believes the official government conclusion — that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy. But he knows that most Americans don’t believe it. And Tunheim, 50, isn’t as sure as he would like to be.

He is bothered by the lack of a good explanation for why mob figure Jack Ruby killed Oswald. He is waiting for still more scientific analysis of police radio tape recordings that might yet settle the question of how many shots were fired and possibly prove that Oswald couldn’t have acted alone.

Tunheim has come to one conclusion, the firmest lesson he took from five years of service on the Assassination Records Review Board: The nation has paid a large, tragic price for Washington’s penchant for unnecessary secrecy.

So many of the assassination-related documents he reviewed, documents that had been classified for years or that had been released with big portions blacked out, contained information that didn’t need to be secret and that didn’t support the theory that dark forces within the government had plotted to kill JFK.

By keeping that information secret, government agencies created a climate in which conspiracy theories sprouted and thrived. “All those redactions gave people the opportunity . . . to just guess at what might be hidden by the government, when in most cases it wasn’t very important and it wouldn’t feed the suspicion at all,” Tunheim said.
( www.startribune.com/stories/484/4227247.html )

NEW POLL OF INTEREST

The Sunday papers are reporting more strife and death in Iraq. Reuters reported that the number of US soldiers dead now EXCEEDS the number killed in the first three years of the Vietnam War.

Are Americans waking up to this parallel? Some are. I was cheered by a new “retro poll.” Here’s the pollster’s press release:

TIME TO IMPEACH?

At least one in three Americans believe that George W. Bush should face impeachment for misleading the public and Congress about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to create support for war on Iraq. This is a new finding from a national survey conducted by the Retro Poll organization between October 29 and November 12. The actual proportion supporting impeachment was 40% but with a margin of error of plus or minus 8%, 1 in 3 remains a conservative population estimate. “We are seeing a rising tide of public anger that no one is paying attention to,” said Dr. Marc Sapir, Retro Poll’s Director.

Currently 47% of those polled know that Saddam’s Iraq had no connection to the 9/11 attacks, up from 36% in a Retro Poll last April. Of that 47% who are now clear on this fact, 52% favored impeachment. Even more dramatic was the strength of support for impeachment among those who know that the Al Qaeda-Saddam connection was also a media-government fabrication, based on little evidence. Of the still small 32% who know that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were never partners a whopping 73% favor impeachment and 78% think the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq. (54% of the total sample said the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq which is consistent with recent findings of major polling organizations).(www.retropoll.org/press_release_poll03.htm)

LAND OF THE FREE PRESS

As I leave these shores, I read about stepped up FBI surveillance, the testing of the MOAB “Mother of all Bombs” in Florida and the new Patriot Act working its way through Congress. If that’s not bad enough, there’s this from Australia:

An exclusive interview with pop diva Olivia Newton-John turned into a humiliating story for New Idea magazine editor Sue Smethurst, who was handcuffed and body searched by Los Angeles airport security staff.

Ms Smethurst says she will lodge a formal complaint with US authorities after she was treated as a threat to national security and deported back to Australia after more than 12 hours of interrogation and detainment.

“I was marched through the airport with my hands handcuffed behind my back,” she told Channel Nine news.

“I was body searched, I’ve had every part of me groped beyond belief.”

“(I was) shocked more than anything, disbelief, total sense of disbelief, humiliated.”
. . . .
She said she had a visa she had used on eight other occasions.

But security staff withheld clearance and kept her for four hours and took her fingerprints and mug shots before leaving her in detention for a further 11 hours.
. . . .
She was released after the Australian consul intervened and helped win her freedom.

(tinyurl.com/wbj5)

REPUBLIC OF FEAR

Sometimes I feel like a foreign journalist in my own land. Sometimes I write like one. I hope I don’t have trouble getting back in. I hope Sue Smethurst knows that most Americans do not support the paranoia that has so disgraced us all.

Maureen Dowd evokes our Republic of Fear (once the title of a book on Iraq) in her column yesterday:

James Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode wrote in The Financial Times last week that the Bush crew has snuffed the optimism of F.D.R., Ronald Reagan and Bush p貥: “Fear has been used as a basis for curtailing freedom of expression and for questioning legal rights long taken for granted. It has crept into political discourse and been used to discredit patriotic public servants. Ronald Reagan’s favorite image, borrowed from an earlier visionary, of America as `a shining city on a hill’ has been unnecessarily dimmed by another image: a nation motivated by fear and ready to lash out at any country it defines as the source of a gathering threat.”

Instead of a shining city, we have a dark bunker.

But the only thing we really have to fear is fearmongering itself.

(tinyurl.com/wbkx)

COPYCAT

Where George goes, Tony is sure to follow. Bill Bowles sends this across the pond from London: “As predicted here, the government is introducing its own version of the Patriot Act. Innocuously entitled the ‘Civil Contingencies Bill.’ If passed, it abolishes civil rights of all kinds under the cover of the ‘war on terror’ and an ‘emergency’.”
( www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0147.html )

YOUR LETTERS TODAY ARE ALL FROM F’URNERS

Wajahat Ali writes all the way from Karachi, Pakistan:

Perhaps I missed it, Danny, but I don’t think you mentioned anything about Rupert Murdoch’s threat to Tony Blair that he would shift the allegiance of his UK newspapers to the new Conservative Party leader Michael Howard. Rupert Murdoch controls 40% of the UK’s newspaper readership, as well as a large chunk of their television and radio, and if he were to turn against Blair at this juncture, it truly would mean the end of Blair’s reelection chances… what little he has. Now I’m no fan of Blair, but I think Michael Howard is supposed to be anti-European with strong neo-conservative leanings. So it seems that there will be more shifting of big media towards the right. Why is big media in the West so right wing? And what is being said about the state of the press and democracy in the “free” world when one man, one powerful media baron can threaten the leader of England, and impose his point of view on 40% of the press coverage in the country. Shouldn’t common British citizens be up in arms over this?

SOUTH AUSTRALIA AGITATED

Kay writes from Adelaide, South Australia:

I’m a little behind with reading your newsletters but I noted in the one for Thursday that Bush said “Freedom is a wonderful thing” in answer to the question, why is he hated so much. I’m sure that was the same quote that he used as the Green senators were bundled out of Parliament when they kept interrupting his speech here in Aussie. In fact, I am sure that I have read this reply somewhere else in response to another question. Obviously the man is a robot and has only one answer to any question. The irony with his answer is that he is removing freedoms from his own people, let alone the Iraqis and is encouraging it in countries such as the UK and Australia where we have puppet leaders who will do anything that this idiot wants.

I enjoy reading your newsletters and comments but please include some diatribe from this country. There might only be 20 million of us but a high number of us are against this invasion and occupation of Iraq. I would like to see some of the comments from our prime minister which are often lies and innuendoes and from a government which is just riddled with corruption.

CALGARY CONCERNED

Joaane Giza is back on the blog from Calgary in Canada:

A couple of quick thoughts - I’m listening to DemocracyNow on Pacifica and hearing the reports of the police-sponsored riots with the protestors - sheesh, tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tasers (what the hell are THOSE?), beatings -is this Miami or Belfast circa 1977??

One of the main questions coming from these peaceful protestors is: “why the violence?” Well, there is a simple two-word answer to that question - JEB BUSH. Note to all American activists: If its last name is BUSH, expect it to induce extreme violence. When you put a BUSH in charge of anything, you are just asking for a mindless, brutal assault on all the fundamental principles of democracy, whether at home or in the international arena. Don’t elect it if it is named BUSH. Remember the immortal words of General Santayana. History is repeating itself on an incrementally more horrendous scale within this aberrant example of DNA run amok.

Hope all is going well on the tour - I have a question though - you are travelling, speaking, book-signing, blogging, reading, answering emails (and these are just the parts of your day I know about!) - and I can’t seem to get the beds made and my writing done in the same day - HOW DO YOU DO IT?? Hot money-making tip: let us in on your secret, write a book and retire in comfort for however long we continue to have a planet.

Good question. Short answer: with great difficulty. It requires constant juggling. Sometimes I wonder if it is a life or a life sentence.

IN CLOSING . . .

I am leaving you in good hands. My partner Rory O’Connor will be blogging in my stead when he can. He’s a very astute analyst and great writer. In the interim I hope to have access to the email if you need to reach me. I hope to keep you apprised of my discoveries.

A Happy Thanksgiving to US readers except the Native peoples for whom it is a day of remembrance. Let’s give thanks that we are here and can keep struggling on. Back December 12.

You can still write to me at dissector[at]MediaChannel.org.