ON THE ROAD IN LA

VIACOM BACKS BUSH

YOUR LETTERS ON THEIR LETTERS

LOS ANGELES: Let me begin with some good news. My film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) now has a distributor. The Cinema Libre Studio, the feisty folks who handled OUTFOXED and other progressive titles will be placing it in theaters. I will share more details when I know them. (For the details on the film, check in at www.wmdthefilm.com)

Over at CBS, there’s some fear and loathing now that the goody two shoes of the New Division, anxious to restore credibility and demonstrate their openness have appointed an investigator who may pursue the GOP agenda through other means. Why pick a former Republican Attorney General under Bush 1 to review these issues? (Karl Rove advised him on an earlier run for office Its may be Clinton signing off on Ken Starr who became his persecutor in chief in the days of the Monica soap opera.)

THE VIACOMESE BACK BUSH

Viacom chief Sumner Redstone who runs the parent company which runs CBS is now saying, “The election of a Republican administration is a better deal” for Viacom. The administration supports “things we believe in, deregulation and so on.”

David Podvin writes about the significance of this comment:

“In the wake of the Federal Communications Commission fining Viacom more than five hundred thousand dollars for broadcasting a glimpse of Janet Jackson’s socially corrosive right nipple, Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone has endorsed George W. Bush for president. ‘From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal,’ said Redstone. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people . . . but from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.

“The corporate media is so closely allied with Bush that the occasional FCC fine or public rebuke constitutes nothing more than a meaningless charade . . .

“Redstone’s endorsement destroys the conservative theory that Dan Rather and CBS were out to get Bush by highlighting his insubordination in the National Guard. When viewing the machinations of amoral manipulators, it is important to focus on the result instead of fixating on the process. The result of the CBS News investigation was to inoculate Bush from further criticism of his absence without leave in Alabama, thereby strengthening his political position.

“More importantly, CBS News has announced that as a result of the mishandled National Guard story, it is postponing a verified report that reveals Bush was brandishing phony documents when he claimed Iraq had tried to buy a lightly processed form of Nigerian weapons-grade uranium known as yellowcake. This is the story that could have really hurt Bush because it is tangible proof that the American people were deceived into supporting the invasion of Iraq, but now the facts will be withheld until after the election . . .

“It is no coincidence that after years of obsessing about the nonexistent scandals of a president who opposed further media deregulation, the corporate press has repeatedly botched reporting about the real scandals of a president who has lavished big media with lucrative deregulation and tax cuts?”

THE EMAIL WARS ON THE “LATHER OVER RATHER”

The heat is rising in the kitchen of confrontation. It comes with the territory. The big blast of righteous anger at my suggesting that the Dan Rather affair was inflated for political reasons seems to be receding like some big wave that hits a beach and then dissipates. There is some residue from those who want to get in another whack as in messages like this, “Dan Rather is looking for another producer to help him “gin up” some news stories. You should apply, you have the “right stuff.” A certain M Morahan has turned into my online stalker with non-stop blasts in a bid for continued attention.

“Lord, you are an even bigger fraud that I thought,” he writes, while nit-picking points (he did catch some small errors) and dredging up new epithets to call me “Danny the Dissembler” and “Danny the Douchebag.” Spitting words like that out at me must make this correspondent feel good. I told him or her to take a chill pill and make sure not to let the ole medication lapse. I’ve decided not to engage any more with the insult brigade that thrives on this kind of verbal combat.

OUR READERS RESPOND

Happily not all the mail is in this genre. Here are some of your letters on this tempest in a tea pot. Dean @SurvivingOurselvesBlog writes from “deep in the Berkshires.”

“You are doing a great job. It is indeed laughable that the right-wingers are jumping all over Dan Rather for the FORMAT of his report, not the facts recorded in it. This format and framing of Bush’s lack of service is a deliberate black operation, a la Karl Rove. Repug operatives laid this snare. Where is the outrage about Robert Novak and the Valerie Plame affair? Is anyone on the Right demanding his resignation or censure ? (Pregnant pause ) Do we detect a leftist bias in Novak’s behavior ? ( NO !!! ) Blame the messenger, ignore the message — how easily the people forget. Again the laughter — CBS left-leaning ???

“They were, and are shameless and uncritical cheerleaders for Bush’s Dunderheaded war. If they had a critical bone in their media toolkit, they would start going after the story of how they were duped by a carefully coordinated right wing smear machine, but I doubt Dan Rather has it in him. He would do his country a great service if he did so. Taking Rather down, and the media onslaught that will go with it, will be OH! So useful to take folks minds off the election or selection to come.

“I went out and saw Jim Hightower at Mt. Holyoke College last night. He had some great comments to make. One was that he did not need to read the NYT or watch CNN to know what is going on in this country. Because he is on a book tour, and is traveling constantly, he gets to hear the words of ordinary citizens. Hightower says that ‘the American people are revolting, and I mean that in the best sense of the word’. He also described Tom DeLay as ‘Newt Gingrich on Viagra’. Priceless!!!

“Keep wielding that Big Media Hammer, Danny !!! Your Dissections and BARTCOP and Buzzflash keep this activist/ blogger alert and active.

Virginia Weldon writes from Boulder, CO:

“I just read your newsletter & the op-ed article you wrote in Newsday. Contrary to some others, I loved it. IMHO, there is more to this CBS story than meets the ‘eye.’ I have to ask myself … who ends up with the gold ring when the dust settles, if it ever does? Will the truths embedded in this farce now be smeared with the paint of defaced documents … forever? Something really smells here. It has a distinct Machiavellian taint to it and, God knows, the feckless democrats have never been known to have taken instruction from the prince.

“How is it that Buckhead (Harry MacDouglald) & freerepublic.com determined (within minutes of the documents launch on the net) that very certain parts of those papers contained font peculiarities? I’m an ex proofer and this feat of detective work boggles my mind! Please keep digging on this one. You might really uncover a lulu!”

Jeanne Shultz fired thus off from Monterey, CA: “Hang in there. It’s not as if ALL Americans are idiots. Although, I must confess, little gives me evidence to the contrary. Suck it up; we’ll win.”

Lolly writes from Baltimore where I worked in the civil rights movement a lifetime ago:

“I’ve never written before, although I enjoy the News Dissector every day. Fortunately, I don’t know too many right-wing ideologues, but I received a tiny taste of their venom myself, earlier this summer. My uncle, who’s a commercial realtor, has a large email list and routinely forwards to everyone on it, so one day I receive a story from him about an injured Iraq War Vet, a below-the-knee amputee, who met Dubya at Walter Reed, while he was recovering from his injuries. Dubya found out the young man was a jogger and promised to jog with him, at the White House, after the young man was fitted with his prosthesis. Several months later, the young man has his jogging date with the president and the story was written up in the vet’s hometown paper. From there, it spreads all across the Internet to me.

“I read the story and felt conned by the tone, by the whole “heart-felt” story of the president’s “warmth and compassion”. Especially since I had just been reading a very different kind of story about another young vet who, while suffering from untreated PTSD, killed himself. His parents had sought help for him, even going so far as to commit him, but the VA released him after just a few days. I send my uncle the link to that story and I remarked in my email that I didn’t think a jog with Bush would have helped this vet. My uncle forwarded that letter and within an hour, I had a caustic email in my box that said, “Would you rather jog with Osama or Saddam”. At first, I wasn’t going to respond. I didn’t even know where to begin–this fellow so clearly equated opposition to the war to support of terrorism and then conflated terrorism with Baathist misrule–what common ground was there? I did respond, deciding to look for common ground–”support of the troops”–with a footnoted letter, showing him how Dubya had failed the soldiers by not supporting the VA benefits our vets need, nor providing enough armor for their vehicles or themselves, etc…This man actually wrote back and said, “you can’t throw money at everything”. Huh?!!!? What a patriot! Yikes.

“Anyway, I think you’re right to look at being on the Right’s hit list as a back-handed compliment. Think of what good company you’re in. BTW–for people who make harsh remarks about the looks of others, I’ve noticed that there are very few attractive conservatives–think Rush, Novack, etc…Richard Perle, now there’s a handsome man. Yikes! Keep up the great work–you help me keep my sanity.

AH writes from New York “do not become infected by nor affected by the intense negativity out there. we love you. you are the greatest? . . . DO NOT DISS THE NEWS DISSECTOR

Darryl Bowles writes from across the big pond:

“Sorry for being so informal but I somehow feel that I know you pretty well. All I want to say is Keep up the good work and don’t listen to the brain dead! Hell, if GWB told them to eat s**t as it was good for them they’d spend the next week with their heads in the crapper.

“Hope your film does well in LA. Any chance of it being released here in Europe soon? Would love to see it although we don’t have a cinema here where I live so it would have to be DVD? Cheer up and keep at ‘em!”

Alastair Mackay writes fromTowson, MD:

“While I don’t hold the same position as you do regarding the Killian memos forgery, I was saddened to read your Sept. 23 follow-up to the Newsday op-ed, “When the Right Attacks” (wasn’t there a Fox TV show, “When Sharks Attack! Or something…).(NOTE: IT was when PETS attack! You got it!”

“Civil conversation ought to be possible. It ought to be promoted. I don’t see much point in throwing out red-meat and inflammatory insults, either right-to-left or left-to-right. I thought we already had enough problems.

“Anyway, I found your writing via the LGF website. I was writing in regard to the point you made that Dan Rather and CBS had made a stupid mistake, but that it didn’t merit the fury that’s been generated.

“You might be interested in an essay I wrote a few days ago. I set out some of the problems I saw with CBS’s conduct, as a prelude to a criticism of my home town newspaper, the Baltimore Sun.

The web-log entry’s URL is here:
www.theglitteringeye.com/archives/000273.html

Lee Ferrel comments;
” So . . . when are any of the big media outlets going to offer the all to likely possibility that Dan Rather was set up and stripped clean by a pure ‘dirty trick’ that has the smell of KKKarl Rove all over it?”

A Publisher of distinction writes, “Sorry your getting so beaten up by those miserable so-and-so’s, who must have a lot of time on their hands, or be very well paid… But I just wanted you to know that we love you. And there are a lot of us out there . . . Bon Courage ”

ON ANOTHER ISSUE

Mareena McKinley Wright comments on another issue:

“You quoted John Pilger quoting Ignacio Ramonet: “He proposes an international association of journalists, academics, newspaper readers, radio listeners and television viewers that operates as a ‘counterweight’ to the great corporations, monitoring, analysing and denouncing them. In other words, the media, like governments and rapacious corporations and the international financial institutions, itself becomes an issue for popular action”

“I think that already exists — it’s at Indymedia.org. That might be where I first found out about your blog!”

BRUCE ON POLITICS

Check out Jann Wenner’s interview with Bruce Springsteen. Here’s an extract:

“I didn’t grow up in a very political household. The only politics I heard was from my mother. I came home from grade school, where someone asked me if I was Republican or Democrat, and I asked my mom, “Well, what are we?” She said, “We’re Democrats, ’cause Democrats are for the working people.” I was politicized by the Sixties, like most of the other people of that generation at that time. I can remember doing a concert when I was probably in my very late teens, helping to bus people down to Washington for an anti-war demonstration.

“But still, basically, I wanted to remain an independent voice for the audience that came to my shows. We’ve tried to build up a lot of credibility over the years, so that if we took a stand on something, people would receive it with an open mind. Part of not being particularly partisan was just an effort to remain a very thoughtful voice in my fans’ lives.

“I always liked being involved actively more at a grass-roots level, to act as a partisan for a set of ideals: civil rights, economic justice, a sane foreign policy, democracy. That was the position I felt comfortable coming from.”

The Sundance Channel will be showing the Springsteen-led Voices for Change concert.

COVER-UP CHARGED IN MIDDLE EAST COVERAGE

Alison Weir writes;

“The most monumental cover-up in media history may be the one I’m about to describe. In my entire experience with American journalism, I have never found anything as extreme, sustained, and omnipresent:

“Three and a half years ago, when the current Palestinian uprising began, I started to look into Israel and Palestine. I had never paid much attention to this issue before and so, unlike many people, I knew I was completely uninformed about it. I had no idea that I was pulling a loose piece of thread that would steadily unravel, until nothing would ever be quite as it had been before.

“When I listened to news reports on this issue, I noticed that I was hearing a great deal about Israelis and very little about Palestinians. I decided to go to the Internet to see what would turn up, and discovered international reports about Palestinian children being killed daily, often shot in the head, hundreds being injured, eyes being shot out. And yet little of all this was appearing in NPR reports, the New York Times, or the San Francisco Chronicle.

“There was also little historic background and context in the stories, so this, too, I began to fill in for myself, reading what has turned into a multitude of books on the history and other aspects of the conflict. I attended presentations and read international reports.

“The more I looked into all this, the more it seemed that I had stumbled onto a cover-up that quite possibly dwarfed anything I had seen before. ..”

www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sides.html

HELP HAITI

More than 1500 people have died in Haiti with more to come as the relief effort seems to be a mess. You can help with donations to.

Friends of the World Food Program (Friends of WFP)
PO Box 11856
Washington, DC 20008

Or online at: www.friendsofwfp.org
Please inform your readers that they can help!

CAN WE BANK ON THE WORLD BANK?

For alternative perspectives on the 60th Anniversary meetings of World Bank and IMF taking place in Washington next week, see IFIwatchnet at www.ifiwatchnet.org. This brings together news and analysis from over 60 civil society organizations worldwide that are monitoring the international financial institutions, during the Annual Meetings.

That’s all I have for you on the fly here in Los Angeles. Back in New York tomorrow. A regular New Dissector’s blog will be posted on Wed.

Let me hear from you: Dissector@mediachannel.org