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Back in the days when I was protesting the Vietnam War, I was still in high school, 17 years old, and hoped beyond hope that
no more of "our boys" would die in that place to serve--I'd been told by various agitators--"the interests of Exxon" and what
former President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex."
While it is true that "agitators" like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman--not to mention "Hanoi Jane" Fonda and like members of the so-called "radical chic" have now joined the power elites and seek to impose their own version of "peace and love" on a "sustainable" mankind, the mainstream media that often serves their purposes hasn't changed a bit. It is still obfuscating the truth in order to kowtow to corporate interests. I was at one of those anti-war "moratorium" marches on Wall Street in 1969-70. I was a senior in high school, and my friend was a sophomore. We'd cut school that day with parental permission. ("Just as long as you get back in time for your job," my mom said to me before I headed for the bus. I had a part time job at the local A & P.) While the so-called "hard hats"--construction workers, blue collar types and so on--looked rather menacing with their frowns, cat-calls of "commies", their little American flag lapelle buttons and their rather feeble attempts at shoving their way into the demonstration, not one hard-hat and not one "commie agitator" brandished any sticks, clubs or other weapon of singlular destruction, and no one was hurt that I saw or heard about while there. Yet the prestigious New York Times reported on the front page that hard-hats attacked demonstrators and that the police had to intervene. Now, I was there and so were police, but there was no confrontation that I saw or heard about. I wondered why the Times reported such a thing, thinking well maybe I missed something. But now I believe this newspaper was merely using tactics to sell papers and to paint the blue collar folks--who were and still are generally conservative and who do not read the Times--as barbarian culprits serving the militaristic "super patriot" movement. Another, more recent example: all through the misadventures in Kosovo and Serbia, "http://cnn.com" headed the list in decrying all those "ethnic Albanian mass graves" perpetrated by those Milesovic-led Serbian "monsters." Yet Ted Turner's pet media organ, dubbed by folks like "http://www.worldnetdaily.com" as the "Clinton News Network," has scarcely admitted what many mainstream organs now say, that there have been very few mass graves found in Kosovo, and that some of these graves have Serbs, not Albanians, within them. Nor has CNN had the forthrightness to admit what many other news sites have: that the NATO bombing of Serbia did almost no damage to its military and very much damage to civilians. What this amounts to is parroting the official line without investigating the facts, and then when the facts are in, not retracting their "un-facts" because nobody remembers what was reported in the first place, so why bother? Or is there a more sinister reason for continuing to cover up the truth? Go To Page: 1 2 |
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