July 5, 2014 note: You will recall my having
recommended Robert Parry's book,
America's
Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and
the Bushes to Obama (2012)
--------sent December 8, 2010----------------
Subject: Robert Parry:
The Right’s Power of Media Money
Speaking of having donated something just today to
Democracy
Now!, working on getting a Constitutional Amendment passed
to overcome the January 2010
Citizens United decision may
NOT be the most important thing to be doing.
On September 17, 2010 I sent an article by
Robert Parry [Wikipedia link] that I
felt was so important that I strongly suggested memorizing the
facts it contains. You may recall that Robert Parry broke many of
the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and
Newsweek. That first article was: "America's Decoupling from
Reality."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/091510.html
Then on November 1, 2010 I sent another one, quite different:
"Does Sanity Matter?"
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/102910.html
In this new article Robert Parry article argues powerfully that
working on getting a Constitutional Amendment passed to overcome
Citizens
United is NOT the most important thing to be doing, despite
the fact that 80 percent of Americans polled disagree with the
holding of the Supreme Court in
Citizens United this past
January. That's the one that opened the floodgates for anonymous
private donations to politicians in
unlimited amounts.
Overcoming that decision would be good, but Robert Parry might be
right that we should put our focus on strengthening honest media
that is not controlled by those ultra-rich who seek to distract us
with unimportant things and bend the world situation for their
personal benefit. I have named names in the past. Right now
those names are not essential, not the point.
I am once again including here the entire text, because of this
article's significance.
"The Right's Power of Media Money"
by Robert Parry, December 2, 2010,
consortiumnews.com
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/120210.html
In assessing what went wrong with the U.S. political process over
the past few decades, it’s easy to see the broad outlines of the
right-wing Republican ascendancy and the liberal-left Democratic
decline, an imbalance that has now left the nation incapable of
doing much besides waging endless wars, bailing out
too-big-to-fail banks, slashing taxes for the rich, and running
massive deficits.
But how this systemic failure
occurred is more complicated – and the blame must be shared by
all the players, including the mainstream news media, which
adapted to the flood of right-wing propaganda by avoiding
pitched battles for the truth, and the progressive community,
which adopted misguided strategies that failed to counter the
Right’s surging media power.
Without doubt, the Right and the
Republicans were the chief protagonists in this historical
chapter. In the 1970s, they reacted with a fierce determination
to the threats they saw in the massive anti-Vietnam War protests
and in a more independent news media, revealed by the Pentagon
Papers and Watergate.
Wealthy right-wingers began
investing heavily in a media infrastructure to promote their
views and to attack their adversaries, including going after
mainstream journalists who dug up information that undermined
the favored propaganda of rightists from Ronald Reagan to George
W. Bush.
Mainstream journalists were
routinely denounced for “liberal bias.” And reporters, as well
as progressive activists, who gave voice to criticism of U.S.
foreign policy were deemed near-traitors, people who would
“blame America first” in the words of President Reagan’s UN
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
The Right also appealed to white
blue-collar workers by portraying liberals as effete and by
stoking animosities against blacks and other minorities.
The key battlefield of these
propaganda wars was the media, both old-line right-wing
publications like the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and a
host of new outlets, from magazines – like the American
Spectator and the Weekly Standard – to right-wing talk radio and
eventually electronic media, such as Fox News, the Drudge Report
and an endless array of Internet sites.
The Right’s massive investment in
media towered over what was spent on biennial or quadrennial
political campaigns. It also was more influential because
right-wing messages – day-in-day-out, year-in-year-out – could
be tailored to the diverse interests of the American public,
from religious conservatives to secular libertarians. Plus, by
sheer repetition, the propaganda took on a ring of truth.
To make matters worse, the American
Left chose the same time frame to retreat from what had been its
advantage in media (called the “underground press” during the
Vietnam era) and to shift its resources toward “grassroots
organizing” in the countryside. The hot slogan on the Left
became, “think globally, act locally.”
Liberal-left donors redirected their
funding support to some of these grassroots efforts as well as
toward charities that sought to fill the widening holes in the
social safety net. The donors also put large sums into efforts
to regulate “money in politics,” i.e. campaign reforms such as
the McCain-Feingold bill which tried to restrict so-called “soft
money” from outside groups.
A Dangerous Distortion
After I left Newsweek in 1990, I
approached a number of left-of-center foundations about what I
had seen from my perch inside the mainstream press, what I
viewed as a dangerous distortion that the Right’s spending on
media was creating among professional reporters who increasingly
shied away from tough stories out of career self-preservation.
My suggestion that the Left needed
to address this imbalance by making its own major investments in
a media infrastructure drew hostility and at times derision. To
many of the liberal foundation executives, “media” was a dirty
word, since they were wedded to their trust in “organizing” as
the silver bullet that would stop the political system’s
rightward march.
When I did find some agreement on
the need for media, the foundation executives still rejected the
notion of independent investigative journalism in favor of
“good-government” advocacy that would push a favored position,
especially the goal of “money in politics” reform.
That was often the case with Bill
Moyers as he directed much of the Schumann Foundation’s money to
outlets such as Tom Paine.com and the Center for Public
Integrity that pushed for restrictions on campaign spending and
hit both Republicans and Democrats for their reliance on
special-interest cash.
I felt that this approach was a
mistake for two basic reasons: one, it ignored that the biggest
“money in politics” influence was centered in the billions of
dollars that the Right was investing in its permanent media
infrastructure. Indeed, by curtailing money a candidate could
raise and spend, “campaign finance reform” actually exaggerated
the value of right-wing media money.
For example, in 2004, when
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was buffeted by
right-wing media attacks on his Vietnam War service (accusations
echoed at CNN and other timid mainstream outlets), he was
limited in his ability to respond because he faced legal
constraints on campaign spending.
In other words, Kerry felt he
couldn’t afford ads to mount a counterattack against the smears,
even as President George W. Bush had the luxury of sitting back
and letting the right-wing news media (and the intimidated
mainstream press) inflict serious damage on his opponent. That,
in turn, made Bush’s reelection prospects all the brighter.
Which brings me to my second reason
for thinking the Left’s “money in politics” emphasis was a
mistake: I was confident that campaign reform would never
survive long-term right-wing Republican dominance of the federal
government.
Since the Constitution is – at the
crassest level – whatever a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court
says it is, eventually there would be enough right-wing justices
to overturn any “reform” and give the wealthy even a freer hand
to buy and sell the American political process. The Republican
partisans who were getting appointed to the court would make
sure of it.
That ugly reality came into harsh
focus when five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court handed
Election 2000 to George W. Bush by first stopping a recount in
Florida and then twisting legal logic into an excuse to prevent
its resumption. [For details, see
Neck Deep.]
With Bush in the White House and
Republicans in control of Congress, the tipping point on
campaign finance reform came during Bush’s second term when he
put Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito on the
court with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony
Kennedy.
Once that group got an opening, with
the Citizens United case in 2010, it threw out many of the
reforms that had been painstakingly put in place over the
preceding decades.
Media Beats Organizing
Similarly, the Right’s media showed
that it could trump the Left’s “organizing.” Even a
long-standing grassroots group like ACORN was vulnerable when
right-wing activists took aim with a video camera and the skill
to selectively edit scenes of a phony prostitute seeking advice
from ACORN employees. The media/political firestorm that
followed destroyed ACORN.
So, by focusing on “organizing” and
“campaign finance reform” – rather than building a media
infrastructure that could expose real abuses of power that the
Republicans have made a central part of their modern modus
operandi – the liberals and the Left created an opening for the
Right to claim near total control of the U.S. political process.
That was demonstrated dramatically
this fall when secretive corporate money exploited the Citizens
United ruling and overwhelmed Campaign 2010. In collaboration
with the relentless pounding from the right-wing media, the
ubiquitous attack ads helped give the Republicans control of the
House of Representatives and a powerful hand in the Senate.
This past week, after Republican
leaders finally consented to a White House meeting, Barack Obama
apologized for not having done more to reach out to them and
promised to collaborate with them on what look more and more
like cave-ins, even as Obama looks more and more like a one-term
president.
The real question now is whether the
Left has learned its lesson and will get serious about building
an honest media infrastructure or will simply continue down the
same-old path. Some prominent reformers are already making the
case that the highest priority must be a constitutional
amendment to reverse the court’s Citizens United ruling. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s
“Flush
Republicans Play Hardball.”]
But the idea of getting
super-majorities in the Republican-dominated Congress and
Republican-controlled statehouses to approve a constitutional
amendment inhibiting corporate funding for politics is
fantastical, certainly nothing that could even remotely happen
without a national political movement that would require a very
different news media than the one that now exists.
And even if an amendment somehow
were to magically appear, it would only restore the prior status
quo, which was already skewed to benefit the Right with its
massive investments in media.
The only answer, though surely a
difficult one, would be for the American people (including
wealthy progressives) to support a tough-minded and truly
independent media that is not afraid to challenge the propaganda
that emanates primarily (though not exclusively) from the Right.
------end sent December 8, 2010-------
