Abstract

Is Koppel a Commie?

The author claims U.S. media companies owned by conservatives are supporting the government by hiding the truth about the war in Iraq. The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a Maryland-based media company whose holdings include sixty-two TV stations, did the country a favor when it refused to air the April 30 special edition of "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names and showed the faces of the 721 US soldiers who had died in Iraq to that point. By insisting that Koppel, the most respected commercial broadcaster in America, was seeking to undermine the war effort, Sinclair demonstrated the dangers to democratic discourse of allowing too much media power to be concentrated in too few hands, and it revealed as laughable the equation between reporters' alleged liberal bias and the content of the news. Sinclair is owned by and for right-wingers. Even by the debased "with us or agin' us" standards of Bush-era punditocracy discourse, Sinclair stands out as an impressively dumbed-down operation. Like Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network, it shamelessly distorts the news and mocks those who would let reality interfere with its ideologically induced ignorance. Although the Administration did not publicly support Sinclair's anti-GI position, it clearly prefers that any evidence of the costs of war be hushed up.Meanwhile, Sinclair is not the only news organization to base its coverage on what it believes to be good for Bush's war. Reactionary media giants are undermining our democracy as they cheer this Administration toward ever greater disaster abroad. How, as John Stuart Mill asked, can citizens possibly "check or encourage what they are not permitted to see?"