Mainstream Media Racism

Our liberal Mainstream Media (MSM) has few qualms about stoking racial resentment. For example, we all know who the late Rodney King was. Why? Because we were bombarded with reports of his beating by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Having seen the video countless times as every other American over forty has, I’m persuaded the police were much more violent than the situation seems to have called for - beating King with a nightstick after he was prone and kicking him as well. That’s very difficult to justify. Their acquittal led to the worst black riots in LA history, killing 53 people, injuring 2383, starting 7000 fires, damaging 3100 businesses, and numerous black racist assaults against whites and Koreans.

We all know who Trayvon Martin was too. Why? Because we’ve been bombarded with coverage of his death. We’ve seen countless images of him as a sweet, 12-year-old boy with soft eyes who died after buying some iced tea and Skittles. We’ve been told that his killer, George Zimmerman, is a “white Hispanic” racist who killed the sweet little kid because of he was black and he was wearing a “hoodie.” Later, it emerged that Trayvon was six foot three, was on suspension from school for drug offenses when he was killed, and had earlier been in possession of burglary tools and a bag of women’s jewelry. He also had a Twitter account on which he called himself “NO_LIMIT_N***A” (without the asterisks). He’d evidently claimed to have assaulted a bus driver on this account and chose a more recent picture of himself looking anything but the sweet little boy with skittles. You won't see it in the Mainstream Media though. Are any pictures available showing George Zimmerman as a nice young man? Probably, but you won't see those either.

The facts of the King case have been thoroughly aired, but not so the Martin case. That the MSM chooses to magnify some information about that unfortunate killing that serves their agenda and ignore other information that contradicts it is the problem. News anchors like Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley, and their ilk on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, etc. would be indignant with the opening statement of this column and deny it vehemently, but it’s nonetheless true. They so over-report or sensationalize white-on-black crimes and so under-report or ignore black-on-white crimes, that Americans of all races get distorted views of what’s really happening out there.

More than 90% of blacks are killed by other blacks, but the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson don’t show up to protest those killings. Why not? Because they make their livings propagating the notion that young black men are under siege by a white power structure and not their own malignant subculture. In this, they’re assisted by the MSM who smugly think they know best what Americans should hear about and not hear about. Sharpton has his own show.Black-on-white crimes outnumber white-on-black crimes by a wide margin. According to Heather MacDonald writing in National Review Online:

There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined.

If you relied only on the MSM for your understanding of the problem, however, you’d likely conclude that it’s white racists who kill the most blacks. Young black men are far more dangerous to other young black men than white racists, but that’s not what the MSM depicts. And why is that? Because it doesn’t fit the collective world-view of the coastal, urban, elite, liberal, cocktail-party set that comprises the MSM. When Senator Barack Obama described red-state America as comprised of people who “get bitter and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them as a way to explain their frustrations,” he mirrored MSM condescension toward the broad middle of America. He was speaking to elite liberals in Marin County. To them, we’re ignorant rubes. We’re not as sophisticated as they are, so we can’t possibly understand that we are the problem. Young black male killers? They’re our victims. If MSM reporters really want to look for racists, they'll find more looking in the mirror.

Making things worse, young black men see the same skewed MSM reports and believe them. As a result, many feel justified when they target whites, Jews, or Asians. Some sing about it and the Hollywood elite glorifies their (c)rap “music” with televised award ceremonies. They even get invited to the White House.
The Mainstream Media are steadily losing audience share because they’re not the only show in town anymore. Americans are getting more balanced reports from alternative sources which reflect more accurately what they see around them, and that’s going to continue. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to deal with the widely-held misperceptions resulting from decades of skewed MSM reporting.

The Laptop Is Mightier Than The Tank

If the pen is mightier than the sword, the laptop is approaching omnipotence. Instantaneous flow of information changes our world so fast it’s hard to keep up. The power and scope of the internet is enormous and growing. It may have originated with government research decades ago, but it has grown so rapidly because government has had nothing to do with it since. It’s not clear how long that will continue though because we’re witnessing how vulnerable governments are around the world when citizens are informed. Their control over what citizens know or don’t know is diminishing fast.And it’s not just in the Middle East. Two years ago at this time, nobody in the United States ever heard of the Tea Party, but in about eighteen months it virtually took over the US House of Representatives. The United States government, however, is not so vulnerable compared to middle eastern dictatorships. Thanks to the First Amendment, we’ve always had a free press. Americans have been as informed as they wanted to be and our media has tended to keep government relatively honest throughout most of our history. Ours is a government designed to be responsive to the will of its citizenry - especially the US House of Representatives and state houses.

Here the internet threatens the mainstream media, which has become entrenched and complacent with a profound left-of-center bias. Lately, they have tended to protect politicians who share their political perspective, like Bill Clinton and the current White House resident. After wielding their power to depict George W. Bush as a moron and anointing his successor, Barack Obama, as a savior, the mainstream media ignored the Tea Party movement for about six months, then tried to portray it as an angry mob. It grew anyway, however, because the MSM no longer controls what the public knows or doesn’t know.

The New York Times’ motto has been: “All the news that’s fit to print” - the news its editors believed was fit to propagate, that is. Every evening, the alphabet networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasted pretty much what the Times printed on its front page - no more and no less. Today, however, people can find out whatever they want online and they do. They can also spread that information around to their friends and associates via email and social networks.

So, when Democrat congresspeople went home to their districts in the summer of 2009 and conducted “town hall” gatherings as they always had, they didn’t find the usual sleepy meetings where they could shake hands and renew acquaintances. Citizens had informed themselves about President Obama’s proposed health care bill and they asked questions the representatives could not answer. They knew more about the bill than their representatives did. They recorded congressional ignorance on video and put it on Youtube where it “went viral” as the expression goes, and most of those congresspeople were voted out last November in a conservative, Tea Party tsunami.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi never knew what hit her. She’d heard about the crowds her minions were encountering in their home districts back in 2009. She sensed how nervous they were too, but she insisted those crowds did not represent a grass-roots uprising of concerned citizens as her fellow Democrats suspected. She called the boisterous, town-hall gatherings “astroturf” as if they were rent-a-crowds ginned up by Republicans. Not recognizing that a new political phenomenon was emerging, she thought it was politics as usual and rammed Obamacare through her chamber. She found how wrong her assessment had been when she became the former Speaker of the House.

And it’s not just Congress. The Tea Party voted out governors and state legislatures across America and the new ones have started cutting government in formerly-Democratic enclaves like Wisconsin. The Democrats’ core constituencies - bloated, overpaid, arrogant, out-of-touch government unions are on the ropes and getting pummeled. Union demonstrators are the “astroturf” Pelosi thought she was seeing two years ago. Unions turned out their troops in Wisconsin, Indiana and elsewhere to protest state budget cuts and they were getting paid to do so by taxpayers. Public-sector parasites called in sick at their schools and civil service jobs and had tantrums at state capitols - hoping to keep the taxpayer money-spigot flowing.

Tea Party taxpayers showed up to counter-protest at their own expense. They paid to be there and realized that they were paying for the other side to be there too. They were even paying for the publicly-funded doctors who wrote phony sick notes to shield teachers from accountability in their districts.

Thanks to the internet, the Tea Party understood that they were funding public employees who don’t work as hard as they do, who have more job security than they do, who make more money than they do, who have a better medical plan than they do, who have more generous pension benefits than they do, and who pay less for it all than they do. President Obama supports his public-employee-union constituents and the mainstream media depicts them as sympathetically as possible, but it’s not working the way it used to. Citizens aren’t buying it. Why? They have their own sources of information now.

Old political play books have to be re-written everywhere. The internet is changing everything. The laptop is king.

The Sargent Schultz Routine

The arrest of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell at his grisly Philadelphia abortuary “wasn’t about abortion.” Feminists and other liberals insist there’s no association and if you say there is, you’re a hateful, misogynist bigot who would deny women their constitutional rights.

Gosnell and others are charged with murdering seven babies by cutting their spines with surgical scissors. Clinic workers familiar with Gosnell’s habits testified to the grand jury that he killed hundreds of babies by this method or just by “slitting their necks.” He’d been doing this for decades and would be still if federal agents hadn’t burst into his clinic. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer: “The investigation began last February, after federal and state drug agents and Philadelphia police raided the clinic at 3801 Lancaster Avenue on suspicion that Gosnell was illegally dispensing narcotic painkillers. (The federal drug-trafficking investigation is ongoing.) What they found, according to the report, was ‘filthy, deplorable, and disgusting’: Blood on the floor. The stench of urine. Cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women moaning in the waiting or recovery rooms, covered with blood-stained blankets. Broken equipment. Blocked or locked exits.”

Abuses at the clinic were reported over and over for decades, but regulatory agencies ignored them. For some macabre purpose, Gosnell preserved amputated feet of the babies he killed. There were lines of them on shelves throughout the “clinic.” Investigators found little corpses in freezers. One worker at the clinic said Gosnell tried to joke as a baby squirmed while he cut its throat saying it acted like a chicken with its head cut off. How could abortion clinic inspectors fail to act all those years? The Sargent Shultz routine of politically-correct liberals in government and the mainstream media for whom abortion is sacrosanct: “I see nothing. I know nothing.”

If you can believe abortion Doctor Gosnell isn’t about abortion, you can believe radical Muslim Doctor Malik Hasan shooting forty-three US soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” wasn’t about Islam. Liberals insisted fifteen months ago when the massacre occurred that there was no association. If you still insist there was, you’re an intolerant, hateful, racist, Islamophobic bigot. The denial reached absolutely unbelievable proportions. According to a report by US Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, the federal government knew Hasan exchanged emails regularly with radical imam Anwar Al Awlaki of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula and ignored it. Fellow officers knew of his radical Muslim beliefs because he was anything but secretive about them, but he was not arrested. He was not imprisoned. He was not courtmartialed. No. He was promoted! He was actually promoted by politically-correct, multicultural officers afraid of giving offense to a Muslim. We’re talking about our senior military here in a state of war with radical Islam. If we’re afraid even of offending them, how are we going to defeat them?

As the Lieberman/Collins report puts it: "The officers who kept Hasan in the military and moved him steadily along knew full well of his problematic behavior . . . They collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamic extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”

Are you with me so far? Okay. Let’s take it one step further. If you can believe Dr. Gosnell isn’t about abortion and Dr. Hasan isn’t about Islam, then you’ll also believe that hundreds of homosexual priests raping thousands of altar boys for decades wasn’t about homosexuality. If you still believe it was, you’re a hateful, homophobic bigot. In spite of report after report after report that upwards of forty percent of Catholic priests were homosexual and 85% of their victims were adolescent boys, the mainstream media outlets like The Boston Globe, which broke the story, insist homosexuality had nothing to do with it.

Abortion, multiculturalism, homosexuality. Are there three more sacred cows in politically-correct America? I don’t think so. Whenever they report on these things, we can expect our mainstream media’s Sargent Shultz routine to continue for as long as most Americans remain willing to accept it.

Bias? What Bias?

Graphs courtesy of Media Research Center

As a history teacher, I must strive for objectivity. However, I know it’s not possible for a thoughtful person to study history, politics, or economics and not develop biases. Best practice would be do disclose those biases to students because it’s inevitable that I’ll teach concepts I believe in with more enthusiasm than concepts I don’t believe in. It’s human nature. To detect this, students would need to understand the left/right political spectrum and the terminology used to describe it, so I sketched one out and taught it. Then I advised them point out my bias when they detect it. Those exercises train them to identify and to be aware of a presenter’s political perspective when any sort of information is promulgated.

As their own biases develop, students need to be conscious of them as well when they listen to information. Facts are facts, and when they learn things that contradict their tentative understanding of cause and effect, they have to be willing to do the work necessary to adjust it. Thoughtful, informed teachers and students inevitably develop a point of view on issues. Only a robot could play it completely down the middle every time.

The same would be true for a reporter. Some stories are just straight news and bias doesn’t come into play, but when a reporter researches background to find causes for example, it probably will. He or she will look for certain things and not others according to his/her understanding of cause and effect. An editor can mitigate that by suggesting alternative areas of inquiry to the reporter, but when the reporters and editors all share the same biases, that’s just not likely to happen, and that’s been the case for decades in our mainstream media.

Up to now, I’ve been pointing out unintentional bias, but evidence is increasing that Mainstream Media (MSM) bias is becoming more and more deliberate. By MSM, I mean the three major broadcast networks of ABC, NBC and CBS. I mean the big-city broadsheets like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. I mean the weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek, and I mean taxpayer funded media like PBS and NPR.

Although MSM influence is waning fast due to the rise of the internet, of talk radio and of cable news, it still predominates with much bigger audience share. The clearest example of MSM left-wing bias is their coverage of the last presidential campaign. Compare the merciless vetting of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin with the almost complete lack of scrutiny into Senator Barack Obama. Obama had been impressing crowds with his oratorical skills - especially compared to the hum-drum speechifying of Republican rival Senator John McCain. But when McCain picked Palin as his VP nominee, she gave a speech that electrified the GOP base and many independents as well. Then she followed up with another hard-hitting speech at the GOP convention and the MSM went after her relentlessly. One poll indicates that 90% of Americans believe he MSM actively helped Obama get elected and 70% believe they’re promoting his presidency.

When he promised to lower ocean levels by reducing carbon emissions, the MSM cooperated by hyping alleged human causes of global warming. When Democrats pushed Obama’s Cap and Trade bill, CBS’s Scott Pelley compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. When a hacker exposed the bias, lies and hypocrisy of global warming scientists in Europe and the United States just prior to the big “climate change” summit in Copenhagen, again the MSM ignored the story.

When Obama made his speech before Congress on health care “reform,” he used erroneous examples of people who allegedly suffered at the hands of insurance companies, but the MSM declined to investigate. When he made a speech in New Hampshire claiming surgeons would rather make $30-50 thousand on a amputation than treat a patient to save his leg, that was a whopper. Medicare pays $700-1200. Did you see any scrutiny of that? Not unless you saw it online, or on AM Radio, or on Fox News.

Then there was ACORN, the “Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now,” for which President Obama worked on and off while an attorney in Chicago. ACORN officials were filmed during a sting operation in five cities across the country offering to help people avoid tax laws, start prostitution services, and smuggle in underaged illegal aliens to work in them - all with public tax money. The MSM ignored the story until Congress cut off ACORN’s funds.

As a columnist, I deal in opinions. Pushing a point of view and is part of my job. However, my turf is increasingly encroached upon by people purported to be reporters in the MSM. They brazenly amplify stories reinforcing their point of view and they play down or ignore stories that contradict it. Do they do so consciously and deliberately? Evidence is mounting that they do, and that is the most insidious form of propaganda.

Going Rogue?

As we watch his administration unravel, it’s becoming apparent to the whole world that Barack Obama wasn’t prepared to become President of the United States. Many of us knew that and said so months before the election. During the campaign, however, the mainstream media covered up his glaring lack of experience, but they focused like a laser on Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s. Why?

Palin had been a mayor and governor - of a small city and a small state, yes - but she was a successful executive in both capacities. Barack Obama had been a “community organizer,” whatever that is, and a senator. Unlike executives, senators don’t do things. They discuss things. What do community organizers do? We could look to the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) for clues. Obama worked with them for decades.

We heard much about Obama’s Ivy League education at Columbia and Harvard because our media elite were impressed by that. Ordinary Americans aren’t. They adhere more to what William F. Buckley said about Ivy Leaguers: “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.” The state of our union after the first nine months of the Obama Administration only lends credence to Buckley’s assessment. It’s been a disaster and getting worse. Obama’s poll numbers are plummeting faster than those of any other president in history as Americans realize how the mainstream media have sold them a pig in a poke in the totally unvetted chief executive. The media elite anointed Obama as their candidate, and when Palin’s emergence threatened their anointed one, they had to take her down.

According to a recent Sacred Heart University poll, nearly 90% of Americans believe the mainstream media got Obama elected and 70% believe they’re actively promoting his presidency. Nearly half “have permanently stopped watching a news media organization, print or electronic, because of perceived bias.” Liberal, big-city broadsheets all over the country are hemorrhaging readers. Some are being sold and others have filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Americans are turning to other sources for news and political analysis.

Despite the media airing of every aspect of Sarah Palin’s life, despite the ridicule elitists have continuously heaped upon her over the past year, Americans like Sarah Palin. A surprise pick for McCain’s vice presidential running mate, she electrified voters with her convention speech, so Democrats - but especially their mainstream media minions - went after her relentlessly. In the face of this onslaught, the inept McCain campaign did just about everything wrong. While you’d never see Obama go on Fox News Sunday, for example, the McCain campaign set up interviews with liberal alphabet networks anxious to slice her up. In spite of all that, and because of it as well, Americans like her and identify with her.

It’s not all good for Palin though. Several women whose opinions I listen to with respect have doubts about Palin’s political ambitions, given that she has young children - one with a severe handicap. They like her positions on the issues of the day, but question her judgement in her seeming quest for national office in 2012 given her family obligations.

Palin’s book won’t be out until November 17th, but it’s already number one on Amazon, having sold a million and a half copies. Called Going Rogue, it would seem to be an account of her frustration over how certain key McCain aids seemed to sabotage her. It was bad enough being hounded by the other side, but her own as well? That would have been too much for anyone new to the national political spotlight, but this woman from Alaska has taken all the best shots either side can deliver, but - not only is she still in the ring - she’s still throwing punches. When David Letterman chased some cheap sexual laughs at her daughter’s expense, Palin went after him. Letterman offered a semi-apology, but continued trying to squeeze out chuckles from his liberal-elite friends with whom it’s the height of fashion to ridicule her. Since then, Letterman’s own indescretions have people calling for his dismissal. He had President Obama on his show two weeks ago, but Obama's ratings are nose-diving while Palin’s are climbing.

It was Palin Obama referred to in his desperate speech before a joint session of Congress last month, trying to salvage his doomed health-care “reform” bill. He claimed her “death-panel” comments were lies. The president had sent Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel after her on that point, but he couldn’t take her down. Liberal Democrats vehemently denied anything like “death panels” were in the bill, while they quietly removed them. All Palin did was send a message on Twitter to send Obama and his party minions scrambling.

Quite possibly, Sarah Palin is reading the political landscape more accurately than Democrats, mainstream media pundits, and Republicans as well. The title choice of her new book may portend more than any of them are considering at present. Could she be considering a third-party run?

Whatever else Sarah Palin may be, she’s certainly interesting. I’m keeping an eye on her.

Fourth Estate Failure

Stinking corruption in Chicago has been obvious for years, and President-elect Obama has been nothing but a go-along, get-along guy all during his twenty years there. It’s not a secret. I’m absolutely ripped that our mainstream media didn’t do their jobs and ignored it all during Obama’s two-year campaign - when it was out there for all to see. As an Illinois state senator, Obama was a top advisor to Governor Blagojevich in his first gubernatorial campaign along with Obama’s recently-appointed chief of staff, Congressman Rahm Emmanuel. They’ll claim this extremely corrupt governor is not the Rod Blagojevich they knew, even though he’s been under federal investigation for seven years. Obama said he didn’t know the Reverend Wright had been making those outrageous sermons for twenty years either, even he also said he was there in the pew every Sunday. He didn’t know Blagojevich’s bag man, Tony Rezco, was a crook when they did a shady real estate deal together. He said yesterday that he never spoke to Blagojevich about his Senate replacement, but his campaign manager, David Axelrod said he did. Give me a break.

Now, at a critical point in our nation’s history, our president-elect is tarnished - at the very least - by this scandal. We have him because the media delivered him to us. We’re at war and changing horses in mid-stream. Our economy is on the verge of collapse. We need a strong leader more than ever, but we have to do the vetting that should have been done before the election. I’m squeezing my jaw so hard I’m going to crack a tooth.

In Thomas Carlyle's 1841 book On Heroes And Hero Worship, he wrote: “[British politician Edmund] Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than them all.”

Our Fourth Estate has failed us, big time.

Objective Pretense

It was a bad week. Couldn’t start my column on Sunday like I usually do because the hard drive on my laptop crashed while I was away for the weekend. Monday morning I got it outlined on my back-up machine before leaving for school, but after school I had to drive a hundred miles (round trip) to drop my main machine off with the nearest Apple-certified technician. Tuesday after school I picked it up and hurried home to vote before the polls closed. Election results were depressing for conservatives like me. Wednesday morning I was pulled over for speeding on the way to school. Been driving that road the same way for thirty-one years, but oh well. I was going 55 in a 45.

Most of my students are Obama supporters. I’m not and they know it. I knew they would be giving me plenty of “I told you so’s” that day and I wasn’t looking forward to it. In the first class, students asked if I’d heard that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country and not a continent.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Where did you hear that?

“On television this morning,” said one student and another concurred right away. “She’s pretty dumb,” he said.

“What news show were you watching?” I asked. Neither could tell me, but I learned later that the information came from sources in the McCain campaign and was widely reported in the Mainstream Media. For two months, students had been repeating reports about how ignorant and inexperienced Sarah Palin was. I asked each class that day how many of them had seen reports like that. About two-thirds raised their hands. Several told me Palin spent too much on clothes, thought she could see Russia from her house in Alaska, shot animals from a plane, had a pregnant teenaged daughter, or avoided answering interview questions.

“Hmm,” I said. “Let me ask you a few questions. Did you hear that Obama claimed a few months ago that he’d campaigned in 57 states and still had one more to go?” In five classes with approximately 125 students, only one girl had heard it on the radio.

“Okay, how about this one: When Katie Couric interviewed Joe Biden about comparing our financial crisis to the Great Depression, he claimed President Roosevelt went on television to explain the 1929 stock market crash to the American people. How many of you heard about that?”

Not one had. Several students said television hadn’t been invented then. I told them it had, but televisions weren’t being sold because nothing was being broadcast until the late forties. We’d been studying the Great Depression and several knew that Roosevelt didn’t become president until 1933 - nearly four years after the stock market crash.

Then I told them that during the vice presidential debate, Biden claimed that “Article One of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States” (find it at the 4:00 mark) when actually, the executive branch is defined in Article Two. Not a single student heard about that blunder either.

Many times during September and October I’d had students turn to Article II in their textbook’s copy of the Constitution so they could read about qualifications, duties, and powers of the president and vice president. They’d also read several parts of Article I which outlines the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. “Biden has been a US senator for 36 years,” I said. “Don’t you think he should know this stuff?”

Many nodded gravely.

“So what’s the point I’m making?” I asked each class and waited for them to think it over. “I can show you Obama and Biden saying dumb things on ‘You Tube,’ but only one girl heard any of it. On the other hand, most of you heard plenty to make Palin appear foolish. What’s up with that?”

Students suggested that television stations don’t like to show bad things about Democrats. “That seems like a valid conclusion,” I said. “Our broadcast media had plenty of material on both sides, but only used it against one. Why would they do that?”

“Because they’re biased?” several asked.

“I think so,” I said. “Their reporting has certainly had an influence on you. Do you think it’s had a similar influence on Americans who vote?”

There were nods all around.

“Fox News seems to have a conservative bias, but all the rest have a liberal bias. The worst part, however, is that none of them admit it. They pretend to be objective.”

“You’re taking this too hard, Mr. McLaughlin,” said one boy as class was ending.

“Perhaps,” I said. "Been a hard week."

Power to the People

Control of media is power. There are many candidates for president in both major parties, for example, but Americans don’t know most of them. Why? Because they get little exposure in the media. When people asked me what I did over the summer, I told them I interviewed some presidential candidates. “Really?” they said. “Which ones?” When I went down the list, citing Republican Congressmen Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo as well as Democrats Senator Chris Dodd and Governor Bill Richardson, most replied: “Never heard of them.” Consequently, those candidates have little chance of getting elected. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on your perspective.

Who controls media? Cogent observers would have to say The New York Times is the single media organ with the most power right now. Why? It has a huge circulation - and not just in New York City, but across the country. Also, the three major networks base their evening news broadcasts on whatever appears on the Times’ front page. The big weekly news magazines are strongly influenced by it too and that gives the Times a lot of clout. Since the Times has a pronounced leftist bias, its power a good thing for liberal Democrats. If you’re a conservative Republican, it’s not so good. The enormous power exercised by the Times for many decades is diminishing rapidly, however. Media is not only changing, it’s decentralizing in every way - from sourcing to dissemination.

Historically, people were influenced by spoken words and by symbols - buildings like temples or shrines, and images drawn or sculpted. People had to be physically present - next to them - to be influenced by them. Writing was invented early and could be passed around to influence people more widely, but only the elite could read. The masses still had to be assembled to look, listen, and be influenced by speeches and symbols. Whoever could speak well had power. The expression “The tongue is mightier than the blade” is attributed to Euripedes in the 5th century B.C. As more people became literate the written word gained power to the point where, twenty centuries later, Shakespeare wrote: “. . . Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills.” In 1839, another English playwright named Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” The Times’ power derived from this.

In the first half of the twentieth century radio, then television, threatened the primacy of the written word, but the Times retained its power. In the second half, however, came the internet. The Times is still on top in 2007, but its publisher isn’t sure he’ll be publishing a hard copy newspaper in five years. Young people aren’t reading newspapers much and circulation is not only declining, the decline is accelerating rapidly.

Maine Senator Ed Muskie was a shoe-in for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1972 until voters saw and heard him cry during a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire. A tape went around the country and his candidacy was over. Vermont Governor Howard Dean looked unbeatable until his famous scream in Iowa three years ago. That went around even faster and his candidacy was over too. Such things travel still faster over the internet and most Americans access it regularly now. When Red Sox rookie Clay Buchholz pitched a no-hitter last weekend, for example, his parents watched him on majorleaguebaseball.com instead of television. How will the new media change politics? Hard to say, but there are a few hints out there.

Someone got ahold of a two-minute clip showing John Edwards primping before a TV appearance, dubbed in Julie Andrews singing “I Feel Pretty,” and posted it in YouTube. After hearing about his $1200 haircuts and hearing Laura Ingraham refer to him as the “Silky Pony,” I thought the clip was hilarious. Widespread viewing could kill Edwards’s hopes of http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifbecoming commander-in-chief. Anyone can send it out as an email attachment to http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrelatives and friends, who might each send it out again and so forth. It could go around the world in hours. People with digital video cameras record what candidates say in house parties or anywhere else on the stump. They can post videos on YouTube and be viewed around around the world. Students can record teachers in class and out go videos of lessons to whomever in cyberspace. People will be much more accountable for what we say and do in public.

NowPublic is a startup news agency with a different approach. A July 30th article said, “In part of a trend referred to as ‘citizen journalism,’ NowPublic lets anyone with digital cameras or a camera-enable mobile telephones upload images or news snippets for dissemination via the Internet.” They claim to have 120,000 “journalists” around the world.” Will NowPublic fly? Who knows? Will people visit its web site instead of turning on the Today Show or the CBS Evening News? Maybe. Some already do and it claims to be growing by 35% a month while traditional news broadcasts lose viewers. It it one of the little mammals scampering around the feet of the dinosaur media? How will the new media affect the next election, still over a year away? Hard to say, but it’s bound to be interesting.

The Racist Card

Having been called a racist, a bigot or a homophobe more times than I can count, such accusations have no sting. Long ago I recognized them for what they were: ad hominem attacks by those who had run out of logical arguments. They’re still used often - most recently by President Bush against his own political base who oppose his illegal alien amnesty plan. Instead of quelling opposition however, Bush’s accusations inflamed it. What looked like a sure thing after Democrats won control of Congress is going down to defeat. Pundits are shocked. What’s going on?

Ordinary people are getting smarter as the mainstream media loses its power. That’s what’s going on. The New York Times doesn’t define political debate exclusively anymore. For decades, CBS, NBC and ABC followed the Times and broadcast the same stories the paper had on its front page and gave them the same spin. Now Pinch Sulzberger, owner of the Times and The Boston Globe, is losing circulation so fast he said he isn’t sure there will even be a New York Times in five years. What happened? Two things: the internet and talk radio, but especially the internet.

It used to be that if the Times ignored a story, so did the major networks and so did the weekly newsmagazines. The story died. People figured that if they didn’t see it on TV, it didn’t happen. Now however, The Drudge Report will publish an internet link and tens of millions of grassroots Americans will know about it within hours. Talk radio hosts keep a close watch on Drudge and they broadcast what he posts to millions more as they drive home from work. People exchange linked stories via email with relatives and friends after dinner. Now, the mainstream media may ignore a story but Americans still know about it.

And that’s not all. If the Times and their MSM cohorts deign to cover a story they consider distasteful and put a negative spin on it, they may find themselves objects of ridicule by millions of ordinary Americans the very same day. If you don’t believe it, ask Dan Rather. This is quite a comeuppance for our media elitists who for decades considered themselves sole arbiters of what people should know. They didn’t realize how insular they’d become attending the same cloistered universities and cocktail parties as our political elite. They didn’t comprehend how far out of touch with ordinary Americans they were.

To them, illegal aliens were not a drain on expensive social services or a tax burden. They were those nice housekeepers and gardeners for their McMansions. They were nice nannies for their children and nurse’s aides for their aging parent(s) whom they employed at low wages and without benefits. They felt all tolerant and multicultural and diversity-celebrating as they waved goodbye and drove to the office in their Volvos tut-tutting about the racist bigots who want to deport their nice “undocumented immigrants” and build a fence on the Mexican border.

They didn’t socialize with people who own small businesses trying to compete with outfits who keep an illegal alien workforce off the books and underbid them for roofing jobs and building contracts while had to pay minimum wages, social security taxes, workmen’s compensation and liability insurance. They didn’t socialize with tradesmen whose wages plummet because illegals work for less than half of what they were getting. They didn’t sit for hours in the emergency room listening to their kid moan as they wait for an X-ray on his arm while legions of illegals go ahead of them, knowing all the while that they’re paying astronomical health insurance premiums because illegals don’t pay anything. The elite didn’t send their kids to public schools mobbed with illegals who required expensive special services at $15-20,000 per kid per year. They didn’t stand in line behind them at supermarket checkout lines to realize they’re paying not only for their own groceries, but for the illegal’s groceries as well.

The elite don’t go to barbecues with cops who routinely stopped illegal drivers with no licenses, no registrations, no insurance and with stolen plates and be forced to let them go when federal immigration officials say they’re too busy to pick them up. They haven’t suffered property damage when illegal aliens ran into them with their uninsured junkers, then ran away. They didn’t seethe with anger viewing emails from relatives with pictures showing hundreds of thousands of illegals with Mexican flags on streets of American cities demanding their “rights.”

Ordinary Americans do this stuff every day. They know it’s not racist or bigoted to resent invaders who cut in line and expect a free ride in their own home towns. Our elites played the “racist card” thinking it was still a trump, but it isn’t anymore. Grassroots Americans have their own media. Times have changed.

Power of History

History has power, whether it’s factual or in a distorted form. It can be a positive force or a negative one. Those who distort history seek power as shown in two recent examples: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the Holocaust never happened. The late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat claimed there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon or by Herod. Many Muslims are taught this kind of history across the Middle East and believe it. Consequently, they see Israelis as evil invaders with no right to exist. For them, such distortions justify “wiping Israel off the map” as Ahmadinejad and Arab leaders threaten. Palestinians have already done so literally - the maps used by Palestinian schoolchildren do not depict the state of Israel - only Palestine. In these two cases, rewriting history would seem preliminary to perpetrating a second Holocaust.

Israel exists today because one of the first acts of the newly-created United Nations was to recognize Israel as a country in 1948. The western world felt pity for Jews because of what Nazis did to them. An ancient people, Jews had lived in what is now Israel for more than a thousand years before being dispersed around the world in the Great Diaspora after rebelling against the Roman Empire. It was Rome that destroyed the second Temple built by King Herod. Although a small number of Jews remained in the Holy Land after the Diaspora, most endured as residents of other countries - where they suffered countless persecutions for two more millennia. Some Jews became Zionists around the beginning of the 20th century and returned to their ancestral homeland in relatively small numbers. After World War II this trickle became a flood and the new Israel became a reality.

Dore Gold was Israel’s UN Ambassador from 1997-99. In an interview about his recent book, “The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City” he said, “I felt it was necessary to respond to the charges that Yassir Arafat made at the end of the Camp David summit in July 2000 that denied the core of our Judeo-Christian heritage. As you might remember he tried to assert that there never had been a Temple in Jerusalem. But what he essentially did was to throw a stone of historical lies into a lake and its ripples spread all over the Middle East.”

If Palestinian Arabs can be convinced that the Nation of Israel was foisted upon them out the blue by western countries acting through the United Nations, they can be convinced that their suicide-bomber sons who kill Israelis are heroes who will enjoy their virgins in Paradise. If other Arab Muslims can be convinced that their socioeconomic backwardness is a result of historical western oppression, recruitment of suicide-bombers and other terrorists to kill Jews and Americans will be much easier. That’s power gained through both selective history and distorted interpretations of history.

Soviet schoolchildren were taught that Russians invented the light bulb, the radio, the television, and many other things actually invented in the west. Soviet citizens grew up believing communism wonderful, capitalism evil, and that communism would eventually spread over the whole world. Thus they were willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to accomplish it. That’s power gained in the same way - distorting history.

Other people selectively interpret history to justify their inertia in the present. Some of my Irish ancestors were accustomed to blaming British oppression for whatever miserable circumstances in which they found themselves. The British certainly did oppress the Irish for centuries, but even though Britain’s domination had been over for generations, many Irish held on to it as an excuse for their largely self-induced misery.

Once I wrote a column urging Mainers to vote “No” on a referendum question that would have allowed Indians to open casinos in this state as they have in so many others. I questioned the status of Indians as citizens with different rights other Americans and whether that was justified. In that context I acknowledged that many Indian tribes suffered savage oppression at the hands of some European countries. However, I also pointed out that many Indian tribes had perpetrated similarly savage oppression against one another before the Spanish, French, English or Portuguese ever arrived in the Americas. Europeans had treated each other savagely at various times also and nobody has a monopoly on suffering. History shows us that very few escape.
Citing such politically incorrect aspects of history stirred up a hornet’s nest as Indians from around the country flooded my principal, my superintendent, my school board, and my state teacher certification office with angry letters, phone calls and emails declaring me unfit to teach. Clearly, a lot of Indians cherished their victim status even more than the Irish did, and they weren’t going to tolerate alternative viewpoints from this columnist. I even got a telephoned death threat.

History has power however it’s used, and pointing out its misuse as I did can be a very unpopular - even risky - undertaking. Still, it must be done. Now, about those "Bones of Jesus," . . .

Bothered By Today

Watching the Today Show bugs me and I try to avoid it. I tend to watch a Maine NBC affiliate for local news, weather and sports and the Today Show comes on as I’m leaving for work. Why does the Today Show bug me?

One thing is the crowd of people outside the studio window trying desperately to get noticed. They act like their greatest ambition in life is to appear on television, even if means that millions of Americans see them behaving like attention-starved adolescents. My guess is they don’t live in New York City. They’re tourists whose idea of an exciting vacation is standing in the cold for hours every morning outside the studio in case a camera should do a three-second pan of them returning from a commercial break. They jump around and wave their handmade signs so they can go back to wherever they came from and tell their friends what they did. Their signs should read: “I don’t have a life!” or “I’m desperate to be on TV so I’ll know I really exist!” or “Dignity? What’s that?” I think it’s the crowd that bugs me the most.

No. Maybe it’s not them. The hosts in the studio bug me too. When it was Katy and Matt, they sat and talked to the cameras while behind them through the windows we saw the crowd of American suck-ups gesticulate in their intense need to be recognized. Producers wanted the fawning crowd as a backdrop while Katy and Matt appeared cool and sophisticated as they told us what stories Americans should consider important. The message for viewers is: See how people want Katy and Matt to interpret the world for them? They know what’s best for us, so listen. The hosts behaved as though all this were the natural order of things. Later, they would go outside and mingle with the peasants as if granting a royal audience. Putting a microphone up to the bumpkins’ lips is like allowing them to kiss the ring. Many seemed about to pee their pants with excitement. Maybe it was the smug hosts that bugged me the most.

But maybe not. Katy Couric has been missing for months. Maybe it’s the incongruous programming that bothers me. Early in the broadcast, important guests visit and are questioned about weighty issues. Presidents and other powerful officials discuss the most pressing problems of our time. Doctors discuss medical breakthroughs. Yet these segments are followed by witless stories about clothing fashions. Anorexic women with pouty faces strut toward cameras wearing ridiculous-looking get-ups while the hosts ooh and aah. Is the show about news or is it about frivolous fashion trends? Politicians are guests. Actors and singers are guests. Last week, Katy’s replacement, Meredith Viera, said to Madonna: “You can kiss me if you want to.” Maybe she was kidding. Maybe not. Is this stuff a reflection of what America has come to? Maybe it’s the frivolous programming that bugs me most about the Today Show. I’m not sure.

Maybe it’s Matt Lauer. If someone bugs me, the shrinks say, it’s because he triggers something I’ve been avoiding in myself and I have to look at that. What is it about Matt Lauer that gets under my skin? Maybe he reminds me of guys I knew in high school who weren’t athletes, but talked about a sport as if they knew more than the people who played it. They were the guys who, when they talked to you, they seemed more concerned about how they sounded than what they were saying. Their words were not for your benefit, but for whomever else might be listening. They’d talk to you only if others more important weren’t available and if some showed up would drop you in mid-sentence and without a backward glance. Also, Matt seems genuinely interested in fashion trends and wedding preparations. No straight guy I know is interested in wedding plans or bridal dresses. A guy has to pretend to be interested if his fiancé is telling him, or if he has to pay for the wedding his wife and daughter are planning. Those are the only times. Okay, maybe one more. If his boss’s wife is talking to him about that stuff he’ll pretend he’s interested.

Wait. I think I have it. Maybe what bugs me the most is that the Today Show has been the most popular morning broadcast for many years running, so it obviously appeals to a broad segment of American Society. That means most Americans really like this kind of stuff and my tastes are out of synch with the rest of the country.

Yeah, that’s it. That’s what bothers me about the Today Show.

Who Are Those Guys?

News that six Sunnis were doused with kerosene and burned alive sickened me before I learned from conservative bloggers that it probably didn’t happen. There’s no evidence and only one questionable source. The Associated Press stands by its story, but given what’s becoming commonplace in mainstream wire services, I would bet a week’s pay it’s false.

The AP claims its source is “Captain Jamil Hussein” of the Baghdad Police and they’ve published several stories since last April based his information alone, each an alleged incident of Shiite violence against Sunnis. Trouble is, nobody but the AP seems to know who this guy is. The Baghdad Police don’t. The US government doesn’t. The Iraqi government doesn’t. Does the Associated Press itself know? Conservative bloggers have challenged the AP to produce him, but so far nobody’s been able to actually see “Captain Jamil Hussein.” The mainstream media - big-city broadsheets, network news and big weekly newsmagazines - are ignoring the story or suggesting that it’s “agenda-driven” by the “right-wing blogosphere.” What could bloggers possibly know? They don’t attend cocktail parties with Katy or Matt so why should anyone take them seriously? CENTCOM has officially asked the AP for a retraction.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about two Lebanese ambulances allegedly rocketed by Israeli warplanes. That probably didn’t happen either. The story was initially released by the Lebanese Red Cross, then spread by the Associated Press. After more than four months, the AP still hasn’t admitted its mistake, if it was a mistake. I’m beginning to have doubts about that. I suspect the AP knows its stringers come from the other side.

Why doesn’t the AP just produce “Captain Jamil Hussein” and let him be vetted? That would clear it all up, wouldn’t it? Maybe it’s afraid of scrutiny since one of its cameramen - a man named Bilal Hussein - was arrested by the US military inside an Al Qaeda bomb factory a few months ago. Old Bilal was producing remarkable photos he couldn’t possibly get without very close access to Al Qaeda terrorists. He took close-ups of “insurgents” firing rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, presumably at American soldiers, and also took staged shots of terrorists standing over the just-executed body of kidnapped Italian hostage Salvatore Santoro. When old Bilal was finally arrested in that IED factory, he had bomb residue on his hands. The AP is indignantly trying to get him released, even using Democrat Congresswoman Louise Slaughter to carry AP water on the floor of the US House.

When I say I have my doubts that all these shoddy AP stories are mistakes, am I implying that the Associated Press intentionally publishes enemy propaganda? That would be a serious charge. Al Qaeda’s former head guy in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (he’s in Paradise with his virgins now thanks to the US Air Force), said his number-one goal was to foment civil war between Sunnis and the Shiite majority as the best way to destabilize Iraq and force Americans out. Considering we’re at war, do AP stories and photos “provide aid and comfort to the enemy”? That would be treason, wouldn’t it?

Over the weekend of November 25-27, NBC’s Matt Lauer decided to start calling the Iraq theater of our war against Islamofascism a “civil war” and cited the “six Sunnis burned alive” story as a tipping point in his decision. Soon, other media followed his lead. On Monday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan did too. Is the “burned-alive Sunnis” story true? Very doubtful. Is it influential? Most assuredly. Is that a problem? You bet it is.

As columnist and author Michael Novak wrote in “National Review Online” two weeks ago: “Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war. Warfare is not, these days, won on a grand field of battle. Nor is it won by the force that wins series after series of military victories. Nor is triumph assured by killing far higher numbers of the enemy. The physical side of warfare no longer holds precedence. The primary battlefield today lies in the minds of opposing publics.”

Our military has made mistakes. So has our Commander-in-Chief. So has every military and every commander in every war ever fought in the history of the world. The biggest problem we face is that our mainstream media, which is more powerful that it’s ever been, focuses on nothing but the mistakes as if they want us to lose. When not doing that, they’re illegally publishing classified information that hurts us and helps our enemies. Thanks to our media, America is losing on the most important front - the propaganda war. Our enemy couldn’t possible beat us on the battlefield, but they’re beating us in our own media with the willing assistance of the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, NBC News, etc. If Novak is right that “The primary battlefield today lies in the minds of opposing publics,” and I believe he is, we have to ask ourselves: Is our mainstream media trying to persuade our public mind that we’re losing? I strongly suspect they are, and that’s the great tragedy.

Americans must demand the Associated Press produce “Captain Jamil Hussein” and let the vetting begin.

Editors Decide

On the first day of school I outlined what students would be learning, how they would be graded, and explained that current events were an important part of the curriculum. We would be covering stories in three newspapers each day.

“Editors decide what the biggest story is and put it in the headline above the fold,” I said, holding up the Sun Journal headline about three bodies discovered in Newry, Maine. “Why do you suppose this is the headline?” I asked.

No responses. That was not unusual for the first day and there were only a few minutes left. “Reading on, I see that all three bodies were women and they were murdered. Newry is a small town just north of Bethel and very similar to your town. A triple murder is big news, don’t you think?”

Some students nodded, but the others just stared at me shyly. It was time to move on to their next class and I dismissed them saying, “We’ll see what’s in the headlines tomorrow.”

The story got a lot more attention the next day and I picked up five daily newspapers at Jockey Cap Store before school. I held up the Sun Journal again and there were bold, big-font headlines about a quadruple homicide above a large, color photograph of the man arrested. He was doing the perp walk from the Oxford County Jail to the Oxford County Courthouse. A deputy held him by the arm. I explained that he had confessed to the murders and that three victims were dismembered. After giving them a little time to react to that disturbing detail, I told them that I didn’t want to discuss the murders, but analyze different ways media covered them. “Why do you think the editor chose this picture?” I asked the class. “There would have been dozens of others to choose from.”

Again, no answers.

I held up the Portland Press Herald, which also displayed above-the-fold headlines and a large, color photo. “Why did the editors of this paper choose a different photo?” I asked.

They looked at it for a few seconds before a couple of hands went up. “Because he’s smiling,” said a boy.

“Why is he smiling?” a girl asked.

“Good question,” I said.

“Is he crazy?” asked another student.

“Of course he’s crazy,” said another. “He’d have to be to do what he did.”

“That’s creepy,” said the girl.

“Do you think that’s why the editors choose this picture?” I asked. “Did they want to creep out readers?”

“I guess so,” she said.

“Definitely,” said a boy.

“These two papers were side-by-side on the rack over at Jockey Cap Store,” I said. “Which one would people be more likely to buy?”

“The one that shows him smiling,” said the boy.

“Why?”

“Because it’s scary,” he said.

“Do people like to get scared?” I asked.

Several nodded. “Some do,” said a boy.

“Do editors think about that when they’re choosing what photos to run?”

“Probably,” said a girl.

I held up the Boston Globe. “This paper, which has ten times the circulation of the other two, ran the story on the front page but below the fold. Why did they decide it was less important than the two Maine papers?”

“Because Boston is far away?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But people down there are familiar with Newry and Bethel because they come up here on vacations. Most of the skiers at Sunday River are from Massachusetts, aren’t they? The Globe’s editors know this, so they put the story on the front page but below the fold.”

Next, I held up The Boston Herald. The entire front page was taken up with a different photo of the confessed killer. “Why did the Herald’s editors choose this picture?” I asked.

“Because the killer is looking right at the camera in that one,” said a boy.

“So when you look at the guy, he seems to be looking right back at you,” I added. Students stared the photo more closely. “Do you think I’m reading too much into this?” I asked. “Or do you think editors really consider this stuff when they’re deciding what to put on the front page?” I held up three papers for them to see side-by-side. Nobody responded.

“Since you’re not answering, I’ll just tell you that editors think a lot about what stories and photos go on the front page, and which ones don’t. People in media are making decisions all the time about how you see what you see. They also decide what you don’t see. Remember that.”

News Control is Mind Control

There are parallels between the Vietnam War and our war with Islamofascists today, but not the ones our mainstream media look for. The first is media’s willingness to be manipulated by our enemies. The other is the fallacy of fighting a limited, prolonged conflict. When we don’t go all out, we’re at the mercy of the pampered, blame-America-first types who dominated our press corps then, as now, and who report only quagmire from their hotel rooms.

Teaching Vietnam as part of my 20th century US History course, I use PBS’s “Vietnam: A Television History,” a ten-hour series produced by Stanley Karnow in 1983. Karnow interviewed Viet Cong veterans after the war who boasted about setting mines and booby traps around villages, about shooting at US soldiers from civilian homes, then escaping through tunnels into surrounding jungle. They considered themselves heroes for hiding behind civilians and then sneaking away to let villagers suffer the retaliation they deserved. Karnow played television footage of burning villages and peasant wailing, the footage Americans back home watched almost every night on the evening news.

Reports from the Middle East today are similar. Al Qaida terrorists use Iraqi and Afghan homes and villages as bases to attack American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, then hide out in populated areas. American viewers see wrecked homes and women and children crying. Hezbollah terrorists shoot rockets into Israel from civilian homes in Lebanon, then let civilians suffer retaliation. Our media films the suffering while ignoring the cowardly tactics causing it. Reuters uses doctored photographs exaggerating civilian damage and deaths until US bloggers expose them. Vietnam is a blueprint for media coverage in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Lebanon: Exaggerate whatever suggests quagmire and ignore what may indicate progress.

After an all-out attack on American bases during the Tet “truce” in 1968, the Viet Cong and NVA were soundly defeated. Their defeat, however, was portrayed as a victory by our media. An account in Wikipedia describes it well: “Following [CBS anchor Walter] Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.’ Soon after Cronkite’s report, Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race.”

When Vietnamese village leaders resisted communism, the Viet Cong tied them up and cut off their heads in front of villagers. Radical Islamic terrorists kidnap Americans and Iraqis who cooperate with the US-backed government and behead them on videotape for internet broadcast. American reporter Daniel Pearl got his head cut off because he was Jewish and wrote for the conservative Wall Street Journal.

Mainstream media is unscathed so far. CNN voluntarily censored its broadcasts from Iraq under Saddam so they could remain in Baghdad. Walter Cronkite’s CBS successor Dan Rather fawningly interviewed Saddam Hussein. CBS’s allegedly tough journalist Mike Wallace obsequiously interviewed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Earlier this week, however, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a reporter and a cameraman for conservative Fox News. Will they be decapitated too?

How many times have American TV cameras filmed Muslims burning American flags and stomping on them? Dozens? Hundreds? Are they staged for the cameras? Why are the signs in English? The role media played in Vietnam is well understood by Radical Muslim terrorists today. They know their enemy but we don’t know ours. They play our media like a fiddle.

News control is mind control. It’s power. Whoever wields it decides what people see or don’t see, what they hear or don’t hear - what they think. In a democracy, people vote accordingly. Perception is reality and media controls perception in war. Limited, protracted wars like those in Vietnam and the Middle East are most vulnerable to media influence. If we’re going to fight, go all out or don’t go at all.

Former students who became soldiers are appalled by mainstream media coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. “All they show are the negatives. They ignore good things we do,” is a typical comment. By “mainstream media,” I mean the big-city broadsheets like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. I also mean the “Alphabet Networks” like ABC, CBS and NBC as well as newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek. Although their power is diminishing with competition from talk radio, weblogs and cable news like Fox, the mainstream media still have control over what most Americans know.

MSM journalists believe they were responsible for US forces leaving Vietnam and they’re right. However, they don’t believe they’re responsible for the consequences - millions of Vietnamese boat people and millions of dead Cambodians in the killing fields. If history is any guide, MSM coverage of today’s war may result in the premature pullout of American forces from the Middle East just as it did in Vietnam. Consequences for that will be more September 11s - or worse. The Viet Cong didn’t follow us home. Islamofascists will. They’re already here.

Bias in the Classroom

As a teacher who has been accused many times of conservative bias in the classroom, the stories caught my eye. Two teachers, one in Colorado and one in New Jersey, have been accused of teaching with a liberal bias during the last two weeks.

Both stories broke the same day on the Drudge Report. One teacher in Colorado, Jay Bennish, delivered a dizzying diatribe in his 10th grade world geography class that was recorded by a student using an MP3 player. The student provided the recording to a local radio talk show and it stirred up a hullaballoo. Rambling from topic to topic, Bennish claimed that capitalism was “at odds with human rights,” compared President Bush to Hitler saying there were “eerie similarities” between what Bush said in his State of the Union Address and “things that Adolph Hitler used to say,” and he claimed the United States was “probably the single most violent nation on earth.” Bennish was suspended with pay for a week pending an investigation.

The New Jersey teacher, John Kyle, taught a senior AP government class. With permission of his principal, Kyle was conducting a week-long “war crimes” trial of President Bush. Other teachers and students played roles of present and former government officials like Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld delivering different perspectives on Bush’s alleged war crimes. One “witness” is an Iraqi citizen claiming his family members were killed in a US bombing attack. Students researched their positions in preparation for the trial. Kyle’s assumption that there would be probable cause to try Bush as a war criminal seems dubious, but beyond that, his lesson plan allows for many points of view to be aired. If I taught in his school and were asked to participate, I would. Kyle’s school district has taken no action against him or his “trial.” That’s as it should be.

Anyone can listen to the MP3 recording of Bennish online. I did, and he was cranked up like a televangelist on steroids. It was obvious that Bennish believed passionately in his left-wing views. He tried to engage students, but it was mostly him. Capitalism would be a relevant theme in a world geography class in that it’s an economic system, but Bennish’s description of it was anything but balanced. Comparing Bush to Hitler and calling the US the most violent nation are questionable on their face and certainly obscure themes for a geography class. We can’t know if that 20-minute recording was representative of all Bennish’s classes, but if it was, he needs to be reigned in.

After a week-long investigation, Bennish was reinstated by school superintendent Monte Moses. “Some think Mr. Bennish should be fired. Others think he should be praised,” Moses said. “In my judgment, the answer is neither. Jay Bennish has promise as a teacher, but his practice and deportment need growth and refinement.” Fair enough. Bennish seems like a popular teacher. Several students demonstrated in his support after his suspension. Obviously an intense advocate for his views, that intensity is probably contagious in his classroom. The 28-year-old teacher promised to be more balanced in his approach to his subject.

Others students demonstrated in support of the student, Sean Allen, who recorded him. “I never wanted him fired,” Allen said. “I just wanted him to go back to teaching geography. Hopefully, he won’t be teaching the things he previously taught.”

Although Colorado’s Mr. Bennish obviously has a leftist bias, we can’t be certain about New Jersey’s Mr. Kyle, but I hope he has formed opinions about the war in Iraq. “Social studies” teachers - what we call history and geography teachers these days - should be passionate about their subjects and most of the teachers I’ve met are. If we’re thoughtful people and not robots, we’ve studied our subjects thoroughly and arrived at some conclusions about the major events in history - tentative conclusions at least. Therefore, we have biases in favor of some things and against others. We serve our students best if we disclose our biases and let them filter what we say accordingly. We’re bound to teach passionately what we believe passionately. Unless we’re talented actors, we won’t teach what we don’t believe as well. Students should be aware of that. As scholars, we must be thoroughly cognizant of arguments opposing our chosen positions and be able to articulate them competently if not compellingly.

Most complaints about me over the years have been from people who assume that I teach the same way I write, which I don’t. Nonetheless, I’ve been the subject of more than one investigation here in MSAD 72. It appears that both the Colorado and New Jersey school districts have handled their respective controversies properly and fairly. I’m happy to report that my district has handled questions about me fairly as well.