-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
