-Caveat Lector-
Who Are The Fringe People?:
Media and Protests 3
By Carla Binion
In Bush's inaugural speech, which he did not write, he spoke soaringly of our
nation's fate being led by angels in whirlwinds (or was it sugarplum
fairies?) and of including all Americans. However, in an MSNBC interview
aired the night before the inaugural, Bush dismissed the vast number of
Americans opposed to Ashcroft and other Cabinet nominations, describing his
opponents as "fringe people" (his exact words).
Who are the fringe people? The term is vaguely scary, invoking images of
wild, hairy Neanderthals, peering from caves with spooky intentions of rising
up and doing heaven-knows-what to the agenda of the wealthy.
Bush became teary-eyed during the inaugural, but where are his tears for the
millions of folks he and his media bulldogs routinely batter and malign, the
so-called fringe? His speech writers and think tanks put shimmering words of
unity and love into his mouth, but the actual unspun Bush-brain lets slip his
true prejudices.
Fringe is dictionary-defined as "a marginal or minor part," and "at the outer
edge." Bush and his mainstream media mouthpieces repeatedly describe all
dissenting environmentalists, African-Americans, women's rights organizations
and civil liberties groups as "far leftwing fringe."
Most Americans know that groups such as the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the
National Organization for Women and People for the American Way are neither
far leftwing nor fringe. Most of us also realize that not all Americans
opposed to the Bush appointees and agenda (your truly included, FYI) are
members of any organized political group, far leftwing or otherwise.
In fact, the people in favor of environmental protection legislation, legal
justice for minorities and women, and laws protecting civil liberties are the
American mainstream. Robert W. McChesney writes about the difference between
the interests of the majority of Americans and the interests of the small
minority of wealthy special interests represented by the likes of the Bush
team.
McChesney is a media critic and a research professor in the Institute of
Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information
Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He says:
"The needs of the minuscule investor class can never be equated with the
needs of the citizenry or with the foundations of a democracy."
Bush and Company would like us to believe they represent "the American
people." In fact, they represent only about one to five percent of the
people. The remainder of us are fringe.
Robert McChesney says of the miniscule ruling class, "some go so far as to
present democracy as being defined first and foremost by individual freedoms
to buy and sell property and the right to invest for profit. That there is
any distinction between those liberties and the democratic right to free
speech, free press, and free assembly is dismissed categorically."
The Bush team and the mainstream media folks who promote their views, equate
market rights with political freedom and capitalism with democracy, a
corrolation McChesney rightly calls absurd. Many nations, McChesney notes,
have protected market rights while "having little respect for any other civil
liberties."
How does the Republican party, which exists to protect the financial
interests of a small minority of Americans, convince ordinary working people
to support their policies? In a word: avertising. In a less charitable
word: propaganda.
The Republican party spends millions on campaign ads and takes advantage of
free TV time to present itself as the party of "character." As journalist
Bill Greider says ("Who Will Tell The People," 1992), the Republican party
"poses as the bullwark against unsettling modernity."
Republicans, says Greider, advertise themselves as defenders against "alien
forces within society that threaten to overwhelm decent folk -- libertine
sexual behavior, communists, criminals, people of color demanding more than
they deserve." In doing so, the Republican leadership pretends to care more
about sexual behavior than they actually do, and they play on fears and
prejudices regarding race and class.
Somehow Republicans also manage to convince their working class supporters
that their tax cuts and other economic plans benefit average working folks.
However, those cuts demonstrably shift the tax burden from the very wealthy
onto the backs of lower and middle income Americans.
Rush Limbaugh and other media voices of rightwing outrage give Republicans a
virtually non-stop propaganda vehicle. However, the Limbaugh types are not
the only media promoters of the economic interests of the wealthiest
Americans.
In "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy,"
journalist James Fallows writes: "Until about the mid-1960s, journalism was
essentially a high working-class activity. In big cities the typical
reporter would make about as much as the typical cop."
Fallows says before the mid-60s, reporters often expressed "an instinctive
pro-little guy outlook." He quotes Washington Post correspondent Richard
Harwood, "In the early times, we were not only describing the life of normal
people, we were participating in it....Most of the reporters came from the
lower middle class, which is where the readers and most of the subjects came
from too."
Starting in the mid-1960s, newspapers began to hire better-educated,
higher-paid reporters, and salaries of TV journalists moved into the
multi-millions. Fallows says we can not generalize about the media, since it
"contains both Diane Sawyer, who is paid $7 million per year by ABC, and the
reporter in Wichita who earns $24,000 (which is less than Sawyer gets per
working day.)"
However, their economic climb means that many journalists identify with, and
promote the interests of, the very wealthy. The press, says Fallows,
sympathized with NAFTA and GATT, trade treaties which benefitted the wealthy
but caused job losses for lower-income Americans.
Fallows quotes Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly:
"It is a major problem that journalists have come to identify with the rich
or upper middle class rather than with the poor. It has a tremendous effect
on what they're interested in reporting. Because they are identifying up,
their first thought is how the situation would look from the top rather than
how it would look from the bottom," says Peters.
Is it any wonder we fringe people -- in reality, the vast majority of
Americans -- and our concerns are all but invisible on mainstream TV news
programs? In "Unreliable Sources," (Carol Publishing Group, 1992)
journalists Norman Solomon and Martin A. Lee say that the liberal media
watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) once did a forty
month study of Ted Koppel's Nightline program.
FAIR viewed 865 programs with 2,498 guests. A full 80 percent of Nightline's
guests were professionals, government officials or corporate representatives.
Only five percent were public interest spokespeople, meaning, for example,
environmental, peace or consumer advocates. Fewer than two percent were
labor leaders or members of racial/ethnic organizations.
When programs did address economic issues, "corporate representatives
outnumbered labor spokespeople seven-to-one." The FAIR study said that based
on the 2,498 guests and the subject matter of the 865 programs:
"Nightline serves as an electronic soapbox from which white, male, elite
representatives of the status quo can present their case. Minorities, women,
and those with challenging views are generally excluded." Nightline is
typical of TV news talk shows, including those on Fox, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN.
Robert McChesney lists subjects TV news talk shows fail to explore:
(1) Military spending. The U. S. spends billions on the military "for no
publicly debated or accepted reason," says McChesney. However, military
spending serves the wealthiest Americans by providing lucrative corporate
welfare.
(2) The fact that "by 1998, discounting home ownership, the top 10 percent
of the population claimied 76 percent of the nation's net worth, and more
than half of that is accounted for by the richest 1 percent."
(3) The fact that the rate of incarceration in the U. S. "has more than
doubled since the late 1980s, and the United States now has five times more
prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times more than Western
Europe....Nearly 90 percent of prisoners are jailed for nonviolent offenses,
often casualties of the so-called drug war."
This third media-neglected category merits a little extra attention.
Corporate-owned prisons often force prisoners to work for little or no pay
thus turning prisoners into virtual slave labor. Around 50 percent of U. S.
prisoners are African-American.
McChesney refers to attorney Barry Scheck's "Actual Innocence" (Doubleday,
2000.) According the Scheck, DNA testing has overturned scores of
convictions and has proved that significant numbers of prisoners are
innocent.
Amnesty International "United States of America -- Rights for All," October
1998, reports that a significant number of wrongly convicted people have been
released from prison over the past thirty years. (David McGowan, "Derailing
Democracy: The America The Media Don't Want You To See," Common Courage
Press, 2000.)
According to Robert McChesney, the U. S. is "rapidly approaching rates of
incarceration associated with the likes of Hitler and Stalin." The fact
should concern civil liberties advocates, because our justice system is
demonstrably stacked against the poor and is blind to corporate crime.
In 2000, says McChesney, a man received sixteen years in prison for stealing
a Snickers candy bar. However, four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. were
found guilty of trying to suppress and eliminate business competition in
"what the Justice Department called perhaps the largest criminal antitrust
conspiracy in history." They received easily affordable fines and prison
terms from three to four months.
Why does it matter to average working Americans that the military squanders
our national fortune only to funnel billions toward corporate welfare? Why
is it important to fringe people that the George W. Bush team wants to divert
the wealthy's tax burden onto average Americans in the name of a "tax cut?"
Why should ordinary citizens care that, according to the Atlantic Monthly
("The Prison-Industrial Complex," December 1998), "The United States now
imprisons more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a
million more than Communist China," and that the U. S. incarceration rate
remained stable for the first three quarters of the last century until it
began "doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s."
We should care because, for example, the billions of our own tax dollars
wasted on questionable military spending or funneled to the rich could
instead be used to cure cancer or AIDS, provide the over 44 millions of
uninsured Americans with health insurance, and otherwise improve the quality
of life for average folks.
We should care because, as Robert McChesney points out, the rapidly growing
corporate owned prison-industrial complex indicates human and civil liberties
abuses of dimensions that "should be highly disturbing and the source of
public debate."
George W's dad once accused his political opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being
"a card carrying member of the ACLU," implying that Bush, Sr., saw the ACLU's
defense of civil liberties as a marginal "commie" threat. Evidently, George
W. sees fringe people in much the same way.
When G. W. Bush speaks of angels and unity in one breath, and dismisses the
actual American mainstream as fringe people in another, we should notice the
forked tongue. We wild, hairy Neanderthals, we scary fringe folk, should
leap from our caves, shake our rattles toward the skies by creating our own
news media, and give the miniscule investor class something to really be
afraid of -- namely the simple raw truth.
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