-Caveat Lector- "I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904 for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto: http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 10:52:28 -0700 From: Media Research Center <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MRC Alert Special: Bozell Columns & Best of Coverage ***Media Research Center CyberAlert Special*** 2:50pm EST, Thursday January 2, 2003 As I get back in the swing of things after some holiday travel, three recent Creators syndicate columns by MRC President L. Brent Bozell. (But first, a correction: The December 30 CyberAlert referred to how "In the guise of rye observations, Franken got off some shots at President Bush..." Al Franken wasn't talking about bread, so "rye" should have read wry.) Also, National Review Online has a piece today by Kathyrn Jean Lopez about the MRC's "Best Notable Quotables of 2002: The Fifteenth Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting." Go to: http://www.nationalreview.com/lopez/lopez010203.asp And the MRC's home page now features a RealPlayer clip from the comments about the awards quotes made by Cal Thomas on his FNC show Saturday night as reported in the December 31 CyberAlert. Now to the Bozell columns: Bozell's columns are posted online at: http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/bozellnewswelcome.asp > The text of Bozell's December 18 column, "Promoting 'Peace' at the Post" In the ongoing wild goose chase for the "conservative" major media, leftists are complaining that anti-war voices are being shut out. Liberal media outlets, always more sensitive to complaints from the left than from the right, have snapped out of their post 9-11 patriotic stupor and are back to giving the "peace" movement the spotlight. Liberals complain about everything but I dare them to fault The Washington Post, which is getting more and more aggressive in promoting the "peace" movement now that the Democrats don't have to worry as much about the dangers of pacifism at the polls. It all started with a "peace" rally in Washington on October 26, claiming 100,000 protesters, which received Page One treatment in the Post. (The annual March for Life regularly attracts that kind of crowd, but has trouble making the front page of the paper's Metro section.) Leftists pounded those retrograde right-wing media outfits, like the New York Times and National Public Radio, for failing to hype this event. But something strange happened on the way to the front page. No one bothered to look at what was really said at the podium. The peace movement has become a convention of and for kooks. Former attorney general Ramsey Clark -- yes, him again -- compared the U. S. government to the Nazis: "Heinrich Himmler led the Gestapo. He said, 'Shoot first and ask questions afterward and I will protect you.' And that's what we plan to do with Iraq and other countries." If that wasn't loopy enough, kook-in-chief continued: "The government takes as much pride in destroying the Declaration of Independence as well as the Bill of Rights as in anything else it does. It wants to end the idea of individual freedom and to make people do what the government says, even if that means martial law." Isn't any of this noteworthy? And yet not a word of this appeared in the Post. This is not at all unusual. Liberal reporters routinely ignore the newsmakers at left wing rallies -- the rally's leaders - and instead select their soundbites from among the "mainstream protesters," as one ABC producer called them during the Gulf War. In this story, the Post found people like 22-year-old Larina Brown from the University of Minnesota at Morris, who was relieved by the large crowd, since "I really wanted this to be a big statement, to show it's not just radical, anti-American people who go to these things." No, they just speak at these things but you'd never know it reading the Washington Post. Since the rally, the "peace" movement has enjoyed a flurry of positive Post stories. On December 2, reporter Evelyn Nieves graced the top of Page One with a story claiming an "extraordinary array" of groups was somehow newsworthy in opposing the war. Nieves, who also sidelines for the radical magazine Mother Jones, claimed it was somehow "news" that the same old, tired left-wing assortment of unions, businessmen-pacifists, former veterans, and religious activists was actively protesting. On December 10, the front page of the Style section touted "The Peace Warriors," with reporter David Montgomery delivering the regular kook-smoothing pitch: "But let's not define the movement only by its wild frontiers." The major organizer of the October rally of "100,000," International ANSWER, was in need of a scrubbing, so Montgomery wrote: "ANSWER is not a socialist organization, but key members of its brain trust happen to be active in the Workers World Party." This is a little like saying that some old-time Southern men's group isn't racist, but its brain trust "happens to be active" in the KKK. The Workers World Party are Trotskyite communists of the most virulent sort. Their own Web site pledges "solidarity" with "workers" from Cuba to China struggling for socialism while Washington - the center of "world imperialism" - tries to stop them "in a global class struggle." What does "peace" or "protest" mean in these ossified communist regimes other than a life in prison or a bullet in the head? In a nutshell, the Post is giving the left exactly what it wants: puffball pieces on the peaceniks with no real look at their basic ideology, no discussion of their America-hatred, no investigation into their funding sources. And is it admirable, or in the interests of peace, to rain rhetorical fire on the demonized United States while we're fighting a global war against terrorists and their state sponsors? For an exploration of those points, you'll have to buy some other newspaper. END Reprint of first of three columns > The text of Bozell's December 9 column, "The Hazards of Howelling" Politicians aren't the only public figures who feel so strongly about an issue they ultimately become the story. Peek at the imploding so-called newsroom of Howell Raines, executive editor of the New York Times. Since last July the paper's obsessive liberal crusade against all-male membership at the Augusta National Golf Club, site of the annual Masters tournament, has added up to more than 40 stories and editorials. But when sports columnists Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton dissented a bit from the Raines line, their columns were spiked, a journalistic breach that inflamed reporters inside and outside the Times. Some freedom of the press. You can have an opinion at the New York Times ? as long as it reflects the opinion of Howell Raines. After a thorough roasting by conservatives and liberals alike, Raines surrendered and published the columns. Upon reading them, you would wonder why on Earth they would be smothered. They both toed the liberal line and argued that the male-only membership policy at Augusta should and would be dissolved. Araton's piece argued that there were larger fights for female athletes, but added the high-profile of media attention made Martha Burk, the leading feminist scold of the crusade, a powerful force against any "regression" against female athletes at the Olympics or in federal intercollegiate sports policies. Anderson insisted his column was barely touched. He wrote that Augusta club chairman William "Hootie" Johnson would certainly knuckle under eventually, and then his resistance would look silly. Anderson simply took issue with the editorial page's insistence that Tiger Woods forfeit his golf career and his prize money to increase the profile of this fight. He advocated letting the golfers golf, and the activists act. That's not a conservative viewpoint, unless it's conservative to oppose the politicization of everything and everyone. Why did the Times shoot itself in the foot by making such a stink out of nothing? Perhaps when editors are involved with crusades with activist allies like Burk, they become more interested in maintaining their political alliances than in maintaining the notion of freewheeling debate. Being politically correct demands not allowing the incorrect to gain any corner of the newspaper. Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, accomplished nothing with their ham-handed "editing" except to underline how they value political impact more than their journalistic reputations. The end (cracking open a country club membership) justified the means (internal spiking). In initially refusing to apologize, Boyd told the Washington Post, "We're writing about discrimination at one of the nation's most prestigious golf clubs and involving one of the world's most prominent tournaments. It's an important story, economically, socially, politically, gender-wise, racially. I don't know what it means to write too much about it." Spoken like a true ideologue. That most political attitude -- there's never enough coverage until we win -- led to empty, agenda-pounding front-page stories like "CBS Staying Silent on Women Joining Augusta," which was almost as important as "CBS Doesn't Do What Raines Wants." There is no news in these stories. In fact, no one cares whether one golf club somewhere is still males-only. Over the years, the Times has kissed the rings of oppressors from Fidel Castro to Daniel Ortega to Leonid Brezhnev. Now they're concerned about oppression -- at a golf club? To somehow suggest that opposing Hootie Johnson's club rules is comparable to facing down the hoses of Bull Connor in the segregated South is beyond laughable. It echoes the off-kilter liberal moral sensibilities of the Clinton years, when the White House crusaded against the evils of cigarette makers and Microsoft, while Osama bin Laden plotted in the desert largely untouched. As silly as Raines and Boyd look now, no one should ignore that they are doing their own boss's doing. Times Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. has made crusades for "diversity" and the fancies and fetishes of "identity politics" part of the Times job description. He hand-picked Raines from the editorial page with liberal activism in mind. His reign has been celebrated for promoting Boyd, an African American, to the upper reaches of the Times, and Gail Collins, the paper's first female editorial-page editor. So it's easy to see that any writer standing in the way of extending the demands for "affirmative action" to every corner of America could find his article in the garbage can. You could call it "all the news that's fit for Pinch." END Reprint of second of three columns > The text of Bozell's December 3 column, "Al Gore's Awful Media Gaffes" Al Gore has promised if he runs again for the presidency, he's not going to hold back his opinions. He's going to "let ?er rip." If what he's been saying recently is any indication of the reinvented Gore, the campaign should be loads of fun to watch. Exhibit A: In an interview with the New York Observer, the man who would be leader of the free world declared the political press includes "major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party." He cited Fox News, The Washington Times, and Rush Limbaugh, sneering that some of these are "financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media." So far, Gore sounds like a 1998-vintage Clinton White House argument, Xeroxed from a Sidney Blumenthal memo. But he got nastier. "Most of the media [have] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective as stated by the news media as a whole." Imagine what would have been the media's reaction were Richard Nixon to talk about the conspiracy of media forces slanted against him? At the very least, it would have been seen as bad manners (the rantings of a sore loser who never accepts blame for his own flaws) and bad politics (antagonizing major media outlets is never seen as smart, and is often portrayed in menacing undertones as thinly disguised hatred of a free press). More likely, the press would declare him a paranoid nutcase. But days after Gore's artless (and mindless) rant, in the very demonized studios of Fox News, there were Mara Liasson and Juan Williams attempting to explain how there's "some truth" in the future candidate's talking points. Is there "some truth" in Gore's "fifth column" accusation? Webster's Dictionary defines the term as "a group of secret sympathizers or supporters of an enemy that engage in espionage or sabotage within defense lines or national borders." Calling your enemies a "fifth column" is saying they are not merely misguided, but a very unpatriotic guerrilla army arrayed against the United States. I'd like to hear Liasson or Williams try to identify the "truth" hidden inside that bizarre insinuation. Sadly, Gore is serious, and the more he tries to explain his position, the weirder he gets. As our possible future president sees it, first a talking point begins inside RNC headquarters. Then Fox and the Washington Times and Rush "create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist." What is this man talking about? Let's insert here any too-painfully-accurate portrayal of Gore in the last election cycle, and see how it works. Al Gore told Wolf Blitzer on CNN, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." The television networks ignored this bold-faced lie for weeks. (Blitzer sat through it nodding.) Then, when the RNC hammered on it, the allegedly "less objective" press failed to turn down the volume. Gore didn't want his truth-bending arrogance "woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist." He wanted the entire media to nod along with Wolf. But perhaps the most embarrassing Gore mangling of reality is his grand theory of recent journalistic history. The arrival of talk-radio and the Internet, he told the New York Observer, has lowered the media's standard of objectivity. "They're selling a hybrid product now that's news plus news-helper. Whether it's entertainment, or attitude, or news that's marbled with opinion, it's different." Only on Planet Gore could you find a news media more objective in the Nixon era or the Reagan era than during the Clinton years. This statement is simply a ridiculous joke instead of serious media history. It should be greeted with the same credibility as the notion that newspapers are made out of sugar plums and fairy dust. But perhaps former Columbia journalism professor Gore isn't really attempting to observe reality here. That was never the point in the Clinton White House. The Vast Right-Wing Media Conspiracy theory was deliberately designed to nudge naturally liberal reporters into more partisan liberal reporting. Gore knows he isn't going anywhere in 2004 if the supposed caricatures of the 2000 zeitgeist aren't ripped from the minds of the electorate. Thus the man who reinvented government now reinvents himself. END Reprint of third of three columns > If you were off during the past week and a half and didn't read your CyberAlerts, I did several new ones with fresh content. 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