Bev Conover
Corporate media lies, distortions, spin and omissions
Fri Dec 12 02:21:36 2003
64.140.158.8

Corporate media lies, distortions, spin and omissions all serve Bush

By Bev Conover
Online Journal Editor & Publisher
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/121103Conover/121103conover.html

December 11, 2003—The word anger is too weak to express what we are feeling as we approach another stolen presidential election that will benefit George W. Bush, unless the US corporate media come to their senses and realize that four more years of Bush is no more in their interests than it is in the interests of the American people or the world and start doing their job.

At the moment, from what is being written, said and shown, it appears that the corporate media have no such intention. But hope springs eternal.

It has taken nearly three years to get the corporate print media to even acknowledge there is something amiss in e-voting—those dastardly touch screens that provide no auditable paper trail—but it is yet a story to be broadcast on the nightly news. What is more important in a nation that claims to operate on democratic principles than a citizen's right to vote and to have that vote counted as cast? Absent that right, all our other rights as a free people are moot. Not that we have that many rights left since Bush & Co. stole the 2000 election and were installed in the White House by the Felonious Five on the US Supreme Court—another fact that the corporate media prefer to ignore (how else can they speak of George W's "reelection" when he wasn't elected in the first place?).

In more than two years, the only interest the corporate media have shown in September 11, 2001, is the official line—or as Chaim Kupferberg has called it, the Official Legend of 9/11. It has bothered them not that the Legend doesn't add up. It has bothered them not that the joint congressional inquiry and the so-called independent Kean investigating commission both started their investigations from the premise that Osama bin Laden did it and the US intelligence agencies failed to see it coming. Where is the corporate media's outrage over investigations that begin from preconceived notions? Where are their own honest investigations? Or can we expect no better from a media that bought into the Warren Commission, whose job it was to pin John F. Kennedy's assassination on the pathetic Lee Harvey Oswald, who could offer no evidence to the contrary because Jack Ruby had conveniently killed him?

This very same corporate media that wallowed for eight years in the Clinton "scandals" and went positively bonkers over Kenneth Starr's probe into Bill Clinton's sex life and that now finds the accusations against Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson worthy of endless speculation, have turned a totally blind eye to the RICO suit filed last month by Ellen Mariana, the widow of 9/11 victim Louis Neil Mariana, against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet, with the exception of the Philadelphia Inquirer that gave it a brief mention, buried in a Dec. 3 article about the 9/11 victims' fund.

Mrs. Mariana, represented by former Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Philip J. Berg, is charging Bush and his administration with foreknowledge and abetment of murder in the death of her husband. Such a charge is worthy of 120-point headlines, right? Wrong. So far, her suit is getting less attention (no attention would be more accurate) from the corporate media than did the administration's criminal outing of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Victoria Plame, as a CIA operative. And we all know that the investigation into who outed Plame has fallen off the corporate media's radar screens. Nary an eyebrow was raised when Cheney said it was time to put 9/11 behind us.

As the Bushies' mountain of lies grows ever higher—and it would take volumes to list them all, from the lies Bush and his handlers told in campaign 2000, the lies about 9/11, the lies about the reasons for illegally invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the lies about tax cuts and the economy, the lies about how the awful Medicare prescription drug horror will benefit senior citizens, to the lies now being conjured up against those running for the Democrats' presidential nomination—the corporate media play along with a wink-wink here and a nudge-nudge there, while aiding Bush in playing the fear card that is stripping Americans of their freedom and turning the world against us.

In corporate medialand, it's 2000 all over again with one difference: there are currently nine Democratic hopefuls to mock, trash and slander instead of just former Vice President Al Gore. It's nonsense over substance. One example is the fuss being made over former Vermont Governor Howard Dean having sealed his papers, while ignoring that Bush not only did likewise—in contravention of Texas law—with his own gubernatorial papers, but sealed the papers of all presidents from Reagan to Clinton. Another example is the corporate media intimating that Dean was a draft dodger, while still disregarding that Bush was AWOL for nearly two years. A third example is painting Rep. Dennis Kucinich as a funny looking little guy—who was the failed boy mayor of Cleveland (they can't leave that out)—who is the darling of the daffy liberal fringe, while glossing over Bush's lifelong failures and his penchant for fascism.

Whatever game the media's corporate masters believe they are playing, their thinking is shortsighted. By acting as the propaganda arm of the Bush or any other administration, they are making themselves irrelevant. By championing empire, war, military and police violence against innocent people at home and abroad, the exploitation of people and the planet for profits for the few, they become despised and hated. At some point, they may awaken to the reality that being a superpower is not all that it is cracked up to be; that empire is a curse, not a blessing, but by then it may be too late.
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