Nation Topics - Media | The Nation

Several individuals have attributed to me certain statements on the issue of the situation known as the "Pacifica Crisis." As I am quite capable of speaking for myself without easy-chai

I have been asked to respond to recent Nation articles by Christopher Hitchens (website, September 24; magazine, Oct.

With the news media playing such a pivotal--and questionable--role during the current crisis, we have asked Michael Massing, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, to comment on the coverage in the coming weeks.
      --The Editors

A few minutes into ABC's World News Tonight on September 21--the night after George W. Bush's speech to Congress--Peter Jennings somberly noted that it was "time for all Americans to begin learning more about Afghanistan." I immediately perked up. Since the calamitous events of September 11, the networks had focused heavily on the human and physical toll of the attacks and on the nation's fitful efforts to come to terms with them. And they performed admirably in those initial days, consoling and comforting the public even as they were informing it. But as the days passed, and as the government prepared to strike at Osama bin Laden and his Afghan hosts, the need for some sharp political analysis became urgent, and here, on cue, was Jennings, promising a mini-tutorial.

Leaning forward, I looked expectantly at my TV screen--only to find it filled with the pale, bespectacled face of Tony Cordesman. Cordesman, of course, was a ubiquitous talking head during the Gulf War, and now he was back, holding forth in the same nasal monotone. He dutifully recited some basic facts about Afghanistan--the small size of the Taliban army, the limited number of tanks and aircraft at its disposal, the scarcity of bombing targets on the ground. "The job is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible if you set deadlines and demand instant success," Cordesman burbled. Then he was gone, and the program was back to its ongoing coverage of victims, heroes and terrorists. We learned nothing about the level of support for the Taliban, about the strength of the opposition, about America's long history of involvement in the region.

The segment was typical. As the nation prepares to go to war, the coverage on TV--the primary source of news for most Americans--has been appallingly superficial. Constantly clicking my remote in search of insight, I was stunned at the narrowness of the views offered, at the Soviet-style reliance on official and semiofficial sources. On Meet the Press, for instance, Tim Russert's guests were Colin Powell and (as he proudly announced) the "four leaders of the United States Congress"--Dennis Hastert, Richard Gephardt, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. "How did the events of September 11 change you?" the normally feisty Russert tremulously asked each. Seeking wisdom on the question of Why They Hate Us, Barbara Walters turned to former Bush communications director, now senior White House counselor, Karen Hughes. "They hate the fact that we elect our leaders," Hughes vacuously replied. On NBC, Brian Williams leaned heavily on failed-drug-czar-turned-TV-consultant Barry McCaffrey ("Americans are natural fighters," McCaffrey fatuously informed us), while on The Capital Gang Mark Shields asked former Middle East diplomat Edward Walker, "Can the antiterrorism coalition really count this time on Saudi Arabia?"

To a degree, such deference reflects TV's customary rallying around the flag in times of national crisis. Such a stance is understandable; in light of the enormity of the attack, even atheists are singing "God Bless America." But the jingoistic displays on TV over the past two weeks--the repeated references to "we" and "us," the ostentatious sprouting of lapel flags, Dan Rather's startling declaration that "George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where"--have violated every canon of good journalism. They have also snuffed out any whiff of debate and dissent; the discussion taking place within the Bush Administration is no doubt more vigorous than that presented on TV.

But there's more than simple patriotism at work here. The thinness of the coverage and the shallowness of the analysis seem a direct outgrowth of the networks' steady disengagement from the world in recent years. Since the end of the cold war, overseas bureaus have been closed, foreign correspondents recalled and the time allocated to international news sharply pared. Having thus plucked out their eyes, the networks--suddenly faced with a global crisis--are lunging about in the dark, trying desperately to find their footing.

No outlet has seemed more blinkered than CNN. The network that once emulated the BBC has instead become another MSNBC, and while it can still count on Christiane Amanpour to parachute into the world's hot zones, and on the game efforts of such on-the-ground assets as Nic Robertson in Kabul, the network has seemed thoroughly flummoxed by the complex political forces set in motion by the events of September 11. Consider, for instance, that famous brief clip showing a clutch of Palestinians celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center. Within days, word began circulating on the Internet that the footage had actually been shot during the Gulf War. The furor became so great that CNN eventually had to issue a statement describing where it got the tape (from a Reuters cameraman in East Jerusalem who insisted that he had not encouraged the celebration, as some claimed).

The real scandal, though, is that CNN repeatedly showed the clip without commentary, without attempting to place it in the broader context of reactions from the Islamic world. What were people in Gaza and the West Bank actually saying? Where were the interviews with clerics in Cairo, editorial writers in Amman, shopkeepers in Jakarta and schoolteachers in Kuala Lumpur? It was certainly not hard to obtain such views--witness Ian Fisher's sparkling dispatch from Gaza in the New York Times ("In the Gaza Strip, Anger at the U.S. Still Smolders") and Peter Waldman and Hugh Pope's excellent front-page roundup in the Wall Street Journal: "Some Muslims Fear War on Terrorism Is Really a War on Them; West Undercuts Islam, They Say, by Backing Israel, Autocratic Mideast Rule."

Not all was bland on CNN. Jeff Greenfield, for one, made some genuine efforts to probe the Islamic world's complex love-hate relationship with the United States. On September 20, for instance, he had a spirited discussion with Afghanistan hands Barnett Rubin of New York University and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, along with Farid Esack, a Muslim scholar at Auburn Theological Seminary. Far more representative,though, was "What Do We Know About Islam?" an exceedingly brief Sunday segment in which a Christian minister and a Muslim cleric offered very vague observations about relations between Christianity and Islam. It was followed by an interview with a Muslim-American who assured us that "Islam means peace." Shot in Boston and New York, the segment drove home how CNN has lost that precious journalistic ability to work the streets of the world and discover what's really taking place there. Given CNN's critical part in keeping the world informed, one can only hope that it will soon regain its bearings.

I thought I was alone in being unable to hear the words "liberalmedia"
without thinking of Antonio Gramsci. But it turns out I have a comrade
in Rush Limbaugh.

Writing in an Internet publication called Bad Subjects
(eserver.org/bs), Charlie Bertsch quotes Rush letting his readers
in on the secret of "an obscure Italian communist by the name of Antonio
Gramsci [who] theorized that it would take a 'long march through the
institutions' before socialism and relativism would be victorious." Rush
goes on to note that "Gramsci theorized that by capturing these key
institutions and using their power, cultural values would be changed,
traditional morals would be broken down, and the stage would be set for
the political and economic power of the West to fall."

Not being a chronic masochist, I don't listen to Rush enough to know if
this bit of erudition is typical. But for a man who recently theorized,
aloud and at length, that Tom Daschle is actually Satan, it is typically
insane. What Gramsci brings to the party of contemporary media analysis
is not the left's "long march through the institutions," which, pace
Todd Gitlin, applies only to a few humanities departments, but the idea
of "hegemony" as a tool of political control. Hegemony flows not from
the barrel of a gun but from moral and intellectual consensus. It is the
politics of "hearts and minds."

Limbaugh would have us believe that the pinkos have taken over our
culture and are oppressing conservatives by mocking and excluding their
views from the hegemonic liberal media. But even intelligent
conservatives do not genuinely believe this. (Paging my main man again,
Billy Kristol.) Indeed, if you think Jack Welch and Andy Lack over at
NBC, Michael Eisner and David Westin at ABC, and Sumner Redstone and
Andrew Heyward at CBS are secretly conniving to spread the gospel of
world revolution, I'm afraid there is not much that can be done for you
this side of electroshock.

Let us take the case that has been in the news lately, AOL Time Warner's
CNN, which has recently been courting Limbaugh himself, and, according
to rumor, the no-less-nutty Bill O'Reilly. The rap on CNN is that it
leans too far leftward to attract the right-wing cable news audience
that is rapidly falling into the lap of "fair and balanced" Fox News.
Tom DeLay regularly refers to CNN as the "Communist News Network" and
has suggested a Republican boycott of its programs. The network's new
head, Walter Isaacson, recently made a high-profile diplomatic démarche
to DeLay's minions, outraging Democrats and inspiring fears of future
on-air suck-ups.

Perhaps CNN does see its financial salvation in becoming a kind of faux
Fox. In the meantime, if CNN were really run by liberals--to say nothing
of actual commies--we might hear a great deal more about Tom DeLay, for
instance. How about a CNN special dealing with DeLay's pre-Congressional career as an
exterminator, where he fought off three separate tax liens for failing
to properly pay payroll and income taxes, and twice paid former business
associates court-ordered settlements? Part two of the special might
focus on DeLay family values. Where are the family values, a liberal CNN
might ask, of a conservative leader who refuses to speak to his own
77-year-old mother and does not even invite her to the wedding of her
granddaughter? A network that can milk Gary Condit's affairs for a
billion consecutive hours should be able to find a few for a story this
good.

More to the point, if CNN were actually a liberal station, it would
employ genuine liberals to host its shows. (I hear that Jesse Jackson
has a show, though nobody I have asked has ever seen it.) All right,
Bill Press is a decent match for Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, albeit
from a deep-inside-the-Beltway perspective. Al Hunt and Mark Shields
also qualify as liberals by the conservative hegemonic standards of
punditocracy discourse. But historically, no CNN "liberal" has proved an
ideological match for the fire-breathing zealotry of the pro-fascist Pat
Buchanan, the pro-McCarthy Robert Novak or even the charming apparatchik
Mary Matalin. And what of the rest of the schedule--Is Larry King a
liberal? Wolf Blitzer? Jeff Greenfield? Greta van Susteren? Howard Kurtz
and Bernard Kalb? The only way to apply this honorable label to the
likes of these nonideological, nonthreatening interviewers is to define
the word "liberal" to mean "not obviously insane."

CNN counts as "liberal" only in a universe where conservative political
hegemony is so strong that critics have lost the ability to think
clearly about anything. CNN does not cover trade from the perspective of
the antiglobalization movement.

It does not cover business from the perspective of the labor or
environmental movements. It does not cover war from the perspective of
the peace movement and it does not cover dictatorships (and illegal
military occupations) from the perspective of their victims. It does not
even cover George Bush from the perspective of the people who had their
election subverted. Indeed, a recent study of the guests on Wolf
Blitzer's Inside Washington recently found that the guests were more
often Republican than Democrat, more often conservative than liberal.
True, not all those who count as "conservative" are willing to go on
record about Tom Daschle's supernatural satanic powers, but that's why
we have Rush, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the
Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, the New York Post, Matt Drudge,
etc., etc.

* * *

Obviously, most of this column was written before the attacks of
September 11. In light of those calamities, it's hard to believe that
anyone cared about Gary Condit's relationship with Chandra Levy and the
like. Still, the problems discussed above are not going anywhere. A
moment pregnant with so many unhappy possibilities as this one brings
home our need for a genuinely liberal alternative national news source
to the conservative/centrist mainstream. If only the critics were right
about CNN...

Two of the most
famous figures in the Democratic Party, Senators Joseph Lieberman and
Hillary Clinton, have introduced the Media Marketing Accountability
Act of 2001, which, among other things, would make it illegal to
market or promote adult-rated rap and rock-and-roll albums to kids
under 17 and would empower the Federal Trade Commission to decide
which R-rated films may be marketed to minors.

In April,
Senator Clinton said, "If you label something as inappropriate for
children and then go out and target it to children, you are engaging
in false and deceptive advertising." And this summer Democrats,
occasionally joined by some Republicans, have browbeaten
entertainment-industry leaders at Congressional hearings, accusing
them of evading the rating system and selling salacious material to
young people. But the R rating on films doesn't mean kids under 17
shouldn't see them; it means they shouldn't see them without an
adult. Many parents want their kids to see such R-rated films as
Billy Elliot and Erin Brockovich. As for records, the
"parental advisory" sticker informs the buyer that the record
contains profanity, but it does not have an age
recommendation.

Lieberman disingenuously says, "We're not
asking the FTC to regulate content in any way, or even to make
judgments about what products are appropriate for children." But
that's precisely what his radical bill does. It empowers the FTC to
"establish the criteria" for new ratings for records and films, and
would legally require record companies and film studios to create and
implement "an age-based rating or labeling system." Marketing would
be deemed to be targeting minors if "the Commission determines that
the advertising or marketing is otherwise directed or targeted to
minors." With the FTC defining marketing to minors on the basis of
FTC-mandated ratings criteria, backed by the crippling financial
penalties for "unfair or deceptive acts or practices," it would be
able to decide which music and movies could be mass-marketed and
thus, by and large, which ones would be released.

Lieberman and Clinton apparently believe that federal
bureaucrats are the ideal arbiters of the appropriateness of
entertainment for teenagers. Lieberman told Inside.com, "We
know the difference between Schindler's List and Saving
Private Ryan and some of the slasher flicks that are aimed at
teenage boys. That's a decision best left to the administrative
agency."

Two days before the legislation was introduced,
the FTC issued a surreal report that criticized record companies for
advertising stickered albums on the World Wrestling Federation TV
show SmackDown! because 36 percent of its audience is under
18. So according to the FTC it's OK for younger teens to watch guys
knocking the living daylights out of each other, but it's not OK to
sell rap music to those same kids! Not surprisingly, more than 70
percent of the albums the FTC monitored were by African-American
artists. (The FTC also included the rock band Rage Against the
Machine, whose lyrics are frequently political, on the list.) At the
Hip-Hop Summit in June, attended by African-American leaders
including Cornel West, Martin Luther King III, Louis Farrakhan and
several black members of Congress, even those who criticized the
content of certain albums agreed that this legislation is dangerous
and unfair.

While the FTC investigation was conducted in
response to the Columbine murders, Lieberman is a one-man slippery
slope who makes no bones about his desire to regulate nonviolent
dirty words, complaining that "the leading music companies...have
been doing little if anything to respond to the FTC report and curb
the marketing of obscenity-laced records to kids."

Although
the Washington elite focuses its rhetoric on corporations, young
people view these outbursts as attacks on youth culture. Just as baby
boomers didn't view Bob Dylan and the Beatles as "products" of CBS
and EMI, today's young people view rap and rock music as their own
culture, which appears to be precisely what middle-aged pundits hate
about it. George Will, for example, castigated rap lyrics last
September on ABC's This Week. Six months later, Will lavished
praise on Sopranos executive producer David Chase for his
creation. Both Eminem's Slim Shady and Chase's Tony Soprano are
violent, bigoted characters whose humanity and contradictions are
nonetheless illuminated by their creators. The primary difference is
that rap is the cultural language of young people.

Obviously, people of good will disagree about culture, and
there is nothing wrong with fierce criticism of any genre. But
Lieberman et al. want to go far beyond criticism. They want
government to have veto power over the marketing, and thus the
economic viability, of entertainment.

By supporting this
legislation Democrats may pick up a few "swing voters" who like the
symbolism of entertainment-bashing, but in doing so they risk
alienating young voters, fans of pop culture of all ages and civil
libertarians. It is hard to imagine the young people who still turn
out in the thousands to hear Ralph Nader speak at campuses being
attracted by Lieberman's approach. Voter turnout among young people
is at an all-time low, around 28 percent; and according to Voter News
Service, while Clinton had a 12-percentage-point margin over Bush
among 18-29 year olds in 1992 and a 19-percentage-point margin in
1996, Gore-Lieberman won this demographic by a mere 2 percent in
2000. None of the published postelection analyses by Democrats have
focused on restoring turnout or Democratic margins among young
voters.

Condescending to, alienating and demeaning young
people is bad morally and bad politically. No progressive movement
has ever succeeded without young people. Continued culture-bashing by
Democrats opens the door for more erosion of their natural base to
culture-savvy libertarians like Jesse Ventura.

Modesto, California

"Condit Country" is a bad enough slogan for
this agribusiness burg, yet, not satisfied with it, the city boosters
have also erected an arch across the main street. MODESTO, reads the
self-regarding inscription. WATER. WEALTH. CONTENTMENT. HEALTH. The
local Congressman is an embodiment of this narcissistic style, and of
the sort of Babbittry that accompanies it. Condit is always there,
when it comes to being photographed for a peach parade. He's always
there, on the House Agriculture Committee, when it comes to bills on
land and water rights. He's an irrigation ditch for the local
interests. His blond family--Carolyn, Cadee and Chad--is off a
cornflakes box. In common with his sometime friend and patron
Governor Gray Davis, Condit will make any political sellout his own
idea. Death penalty--yes. School prayer, public display of the Ten
Commandments, down with flag-burners and (now that you mention it)
let's reveal the names of people with AIDS.

Creeps like
Condit are, however, a dime a dozen in the Democratic Party, and I
was in a state of general agreement with Dan Rather when I first set
foot in the district. The disappearance of Chandra Levy had no
importance beyond itself; it was a tragedy only for her family.
Condit may have flirted with obstruction of justice by wasting the
time of the DC police, and with suborning perjury in asking Anne
Marie Smith to sign a false affidavit, but this was not on the
Clinton scale of abuse of power. Condit hadn't used the forces of the
state or mobilized large sums of public money in his battle to
insulate himself from unwelcome inquiries. What he has done has at
least been done on his own dime.

Thus I reasoned, idly,
until I got to the corner of 16th and H streets downtown, where
Condit has his headquarters. There wasn't much in the window, except
a banal poster enjoining one and all to say no to hate crimes and two
other exhibits. The first of these was a missing poster for Levy,
who, as is now notorious, disappeared a whole continent away in
Washington and is unlikely to be lurking in the greater Modesto area.
The second was a missing poster for a local girl named Dena Raley,
who has vanished in what the authorities call "suspicious
circumstances." I asked an experienced local if Congressman Condit
has always kindly displayed the posters for missing females in his
district office window. "Oh no," came the reply. "That's a new
thing."

I was at once seized with a powerful feeling of
disgust. Condit and his team of lawyers and publicists have been
saying unctuously for some time that they so much hope Chandra Levy
hasn't gone the way of all those other girls who go missing. "I pray
that she has not met the same fate," as Condit himself piously
phrased it in a letter to his constituents. The not-so-subtle message
is that life is unfair, whaddaya gonna do and don't look at me. But
to use the posters of the missing as an accessory in this fashion is
to take cynicism a stage further. I actually live in a place more or
less equidistant between Levy's old apartment in Dupont Circle and
Condit's oddly located pad in Adams Morgan, and I can tell you that
the disappearance of single females is not as everyday an occurrence
as some would have you think. I can also tell you that the Washington
Police Department is a laughingstock, as much among criminals as
among the law-abiding. It never called Dr. Levy back after he rang to
report his daughter missing in the first place, and when it says it
has no suspect in the case it really, really means it. It's a police
department that doesn't suspect anybody, and has for these many years
employed rather more crooks than it has managed to
apprehend.

The following night I watched Condit himself on
TV. Considering that our craven mass media had actually allowed him
to choose a lenient and unqualified interviewer, I thought that his
performance was not so much disastrous from a PR point of view (the
Dick Gephardt "take" on the matter) as calamitous from a moral one.
How incredible that he could say, not once but several times, that in
refusing to clarify the real nature of their relationship he was
honoring "a specific request from the Levy family," who had done no
more than tell another TV station that they were more concerned with
recovering their daughter than with discovering the details. How
contemptible! A man who will do this, and plainly rehearse to do it
with the assistance of the degraded professions of attorney and media
adviser, can be held to be capable of pretty much anything. The
squalor and shadiness of his other responses--alluding to Ms. Levy
repeatedly in the past tense, making out her family to be liars,
answering questions he wasn't asked, resorting to the word "we" when
he meant "I" ("we've taken a polygraph test," for Christ's sake) and
blaming his lawyers for a draft falsification submitted to Anne Marie
Smith--paled when set next to this one.

So I have changed
my mind, for what it's worth. By acting in this depraved way, by
managing to evoke only mild reproof from his party and by employing
the techniques of spin and "privacy" and procrastination when a
girl's life is in question, Condit has demonstrated something of
importance about our political class. Of course I don't know if poor
Chandra Levy went for an ill-advised ride on his motorbike, or
somebody else's. But after I had digested the Congressman's window
display, I walked over to the former Mel's drive-in, which is
featured in George Lucas's Modesto classic, American
Graffiti.

An ancient Chevy stood next to a battered
Packard in the parking lot, Elvis was on the jukebox, girls served
from rollerblades and the slogan ("Where the food is as good as the
root beer") was roughly accurate. A leathered biker pushed past me as
I emerged from the "Poppa Bear" restroom. On the back of his jacket
he had inscribed the words: IF YOU CAN READ THIS--THE BITCH FELL OFF.
It wasn't the most callous remark I heard in Modesto: I had to sit
through Connie Chung to hear it surpassed.

The best thing about my summer in the country was
that I didn't have a TV and usually got to the market after the tiny
clutch of papers had already been snatched up by the local
information junkies. So I missed a lot of Really Important News. Gary
Condit, who? Most of my friends believe he had "something to do" with
Chandra Levy's disappearance, despite the lack of any evidence or
motive or even credible scenario for same. This shows how desperately
we long for life to be more interesting than it really is, but will
somebody please tell me why the people at Buzzflash.com and other
hardcore Democratic propagandists want progressives, liberals,
Dems--whatever Nation readers are calling themselves these
days--to rally to the defense of this slimeball? He doesn't even have
a good voting record! (During the Contract With America years he
voted with Newt Gingrich 77 percent of the time, and he has been
pressed often to switch parties.) Count me out--I used up all my
humor and worldliness on Bill and Monica, not to mention their
numerous real-life equivalents. My position on sexually predatory
politicians, with their interns (and aides and flight attendants), is
the same as for the ever-popular aging male professor/bushy-tailed
young grad student combo: These people, both the men and the women,
are on their own. If half of Congress had to go home in
disgrace to Modesto, and half the intern pool learned the hard way
that there's more to getting ahead than giving head, why would that
be bad?

In sports news, we had the story of Danny Almonte,
the 14-year-old 12-year-old who pitched a perfect game for his Bronx
Little League team, leading them to a third-place finish in the
international championship. Bring on President Bush and Mayor
Giuliani, the television cameras and the ticker-tape parade! The
unearthing of Danny's true birth certificate, showing he was born in
1987, not 1989, was spun out in the press for days on end, with vast
quantities of shocked fake-solicitous moralizing ladled on by every
sports commentator in America and then some. Said sports agent Drew
Rosenhaus on CNN's TalkBack Live, "If you start cheating and
start making excuses for that, you're destroying the American dream
here." In quest of baseball glory, Danny's parents lied and exploited
him, messed with his head and, it was believed at one point, hadn't
even enrolled him in school--all very bad. But what do you expect in
our sports-and-entertainment-addled country? As Joyce Purnick pointed
out in an acid column in the New York Times, no one makes a
fuss about New York City public school kids who, against great odds,
win writing competitions or debating championships or excel
academically (not even the Board of Education, which had trouble
coming up with a list of relevant names)--and then we wonder why so
many inner-city kids blow off their education in favor of a "dream"
about being a rapper, a movie star, a model, a sports hero. The Bronx
is full of teenage Dominican immigrants like Danny, who've dropped
out of their awful schools, where they learned nothing, to face bleak
futures in the subproletariat, without even a chance at getting their
pictures in the paper unless they happen to be run over by a drunken
policeman. Where's the outrage about that?

Perhaps it's
being expended on superpublicist-to-the-stars Lizzie Grubman's
automotive rampage in the parking lot of the Hamptons' Conscience
Point Inn. Or perhaps it's been kidnapped by the Rev. Al Sharpton,
who's taking a break from black-Hispanic bridge-building over target
practice on Vieques to feud with right-wing New York Post
columnist Rod Dreher, who questioned the good taste of 22-year-old
singer Aaliyah's funeral procession down Fifth Avenue: "A
traffic-snarling, horse-drawn cortege in honor of a pop singer most
people have never heard of? Give us a break!" Dreher went on to
cruelly contrast Aaliyah's song lyrics with the poetry of Byron,
deserving recipient of lavish obsequies from a grateful nation. In
response Sharpton called for a boycott of the Post and its
advertisers: "It was ugly and divisive. She was degraded," he said.
"What would make her not worthy of this type of
funeral?"

Too right. I can't think of a more important
issue than celebrity funerals for a self-described national black
leader to be addressing right now! Unless, of course, it is the
absence of black faces on television, the pet cause of Kweisi Mfume,
president of the NAACP. Syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker and
others have charged that Mfume was pushing this issue in order to
promote himself as a talk-show host, although media imagery and
representation is a standard issue for identity-based organizations
from NOW to the Anti-Defamation League. In any case, Mfume, a
national figure and former Congressman who appeared on cable for
years, would make at least as worthy a regular commentator as, oh I
don't know, the racially humorous Don Imus, or Rush Limbaugh, or
Chris Matthews. I'd watch.

The real issue, though, is that
television is the least of black America's problems. Sure, it's
absurd that all the young nudnicks on Friends, Will &
Grace, Dawson's Creek and other top-ranked shows my
daughter loves are white, but life is short and time's a-wasting. How
much energy does the nation's largest black organization want to
spend shoehorning an African-American best friend into Dharma
& Greg or getting Clarence Page more face time on CNN? It was
left to one Emory Curtis, whose essay "Blacks on TV or Educate Our
Kids?" was posted on the Black Radical Congress e-mail list in
August, to make the obvious point. For three years the NAACP has been
making a major issue out of the prime-time lineup. Where is its
crusade against the terrible state of education for black children?
Curtis notes that black kids trail by almost every measure: On last
year's National Assessment of Educational Progress, one in three
white fourth graders performed at grade level, which is itself pretty
shocking--but only one in twenty black fourth graders did. In
California, three out of four black fourth and eighth graders were at
the lowest level, "below basic"--about the same as eight years
ago.

Well, summer's over. Time to turn off the set?

Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left tendency to "rationalize" the aggression of September 11, or my use of the term "fascism with an Islamic face," and I'll select a representat

Last night I had the
strangest dream...

All of America's wealthy,
conservative and safely belligerent pundits had been delivered by a
just and beneficent Almighty Power to a Palestinian refugee camp,
following the bulldozing of their homes--including vacation
homes--and the expropriation of all their possessions. Instead of
pontificating between beach walks and vodka tonics in Vineyard Haven,
these armchair bombardiers were treated to rivers of open sewage and
hopeless lives of beggary. Those who resisted were arrested, tortured
and selectively assassinated. Meanwhile, editorial pages across
America cheered the "restraint" of their tormentors.

In
extremely lengthy articles, the New York Times and The New
York Review of Books recently demonstrated beyond any doubt that
the Israelis (and the Americans) shared in the blame for the
breakdown of peace negotiations and ensuing cycle of violence that
now tragically appears to be engulfing the region. To the
punditocracy, however, these dispassionately argued, extensively
reported stories amounted to an existential insult of near biblical
proportions. Marty Peretz's New Republic published a vicious
attack on the articles by Robert Satloff, executive director of a
pro-Israel think tank. William Safire got so excited, he denounced
his own newspaper in a hysterical fit of ad hominemism: "Do not
swallow this speculative rewriting of recent events," he warned
readers. "The overriding reason for the war against Israel today is
that Yasir Arafat decided that war was the way to carry out the
often-avowed Palestinian plan. Its first stage is to create a West
Bank state from the Jordan River to the sea with Jerusalem as its
capital. Then, by flooding Israel with 'returning' Palestinians, the
plan in its promised final phase would drive the hated Jews from the
Middle East."

Mortimer Zuckerman, in his capacity as
chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American
Organizations, insisted, "This is just revisionist history.... There
is one truth, period: The Palestinians caused the breakdown at Camp
David and then rejected Clinton's plan in January." The baldest
comment came from the Zionist Organization of America's president,
Morton Klein: "Whether their account is accurate or not is
irrelevant.... I reject any discussion of what
happened."

In the wake of the suicide bombings, three
different Washington Post pundits demanded war three days in a
row. Michael Kelly, recently seen complaining about too many fatsoes
at the beach, advised the Israelis to unleash "an overwhelming
force...to destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian
forces." The more moderate George Will called only for a "short war."
(Charles Krauthammer did not specify a length.) To read these
would-be warriors, you would think the Palestinians were summering in
Edgartown. A reader would never guess that a regional superpower is
carrying out a brutal military occupation, coupled with a settlement
policy that directly contravenes Article 49 of the Geneva Convention.

No one with any sense would argue that Arafat and his
corrupt cronies do not bear considerable responsibility for the
collapse of any hope of peace in the Middle East in the near future.
And suicide bombers against civilian targets in Israel are as
counterproductive as they are immoral (though those who settle in
occupied territory are knowingly putting themselves in harm's way and
hence share some responsibility when their families are forced to pay
for this fanaticism with their lives). Nevertheless, a conflict where
"our team" engages in terrorism, assassination and the apparently
routine torture of teenagers to defend a cruel and illegal occupation
is one in which neither side holds a monopoly on virtue.

Since a majority of Israelis supports a freeze in the
provocative practice of settlement-building, the mindless hysteria of
the American punditocracy must have other sources than mere logic.
It's dangerous to draw firm conclusions without any special knowledge
about the psyches of those involved, but much of the materially
comfortable American Jewish community has had an unhappy history of
defending the principle of Jewish sovereignty over captured
Palestinian lands right down to the death of the last Israeli.
Because of the sacrifices they demand of others, many American Jews
feel they must be holier than the Pope when defending Israeli human
rights abuses. The New Republic's Peretz is a particularly
interesting specimen. He reflexively defends everything Israel does
and routinely slanders its critics. Peretz, who owes his prominence
to money, in this case his (non-Jewish) wife's fortune--which allowed
him to purchase his magazine--has never published a single book or
written a significant piece of scholarship, reportage or criticism.
It's not hard to imagine that his self-appointed role as Israel's
American Torquemada--seen in his obsession with smearing the
world-renowned Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said--is
inspired as much by guilt and envy as by more rational motivations.
(I say this as a supporter of the peace process who has respectfully
disagreed with almost all Said has said about the conflict in recent
years.)

Whatever the reason, the net result is the same.
For a brief moment in recent history, when Israel had a government
that was dedicated to finding a way to make peace, the warrior
pundits were placed on the defensive and the Palestinians received a
reasonably fair shake from the nation's elite media. More recently, a
review of leading editorial pages by the ADL found that "the major
newspapers across the country are viewing the situation in the Middle
East in a realistic and objective manner." The authors of the study
helpfully defined their terms. To the ADL "realistic and objective"
means "critical of and hostile to Arafat...directly blaming him for
the continuing violence and creating a climate of hatred" along with
the dismissal of all Palestinian peace overtures as "calculated tools
for his goal of gaining further concessions from
Israel."

In a rational world, the ADL report would at least
complicate efforts by Safire, TNR and others to charge the
media with "pro-Arab" and "anti-Israel" bias. Alas, I'm betting
bubkes...

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Pacifica Radio
executive director Bessie Wash said that the Pacifica management's
goal "is to increase listenership." In the name of that worthy
ambition, however, Wash has continued to further alienate many
longtime supporters and staff and to weaken the core programming that
should be the foundation on which that listenership is built. In the
latest development, Pacifica is no longer originating and
distributing its most popular (and much-honored) news program,
Democracy Now!, following disputes with host Amy Goodman. (The
program is being produced elsewhere and aired on some stations, while
Pacifica sends out reruns of earlier shows.) Meanwhile, in order to
fight lawsuits brought by former employees and listeners, and the
accompanying bad publicity, Pacifica is using scarce listener-donated
dollars to hire a white-shoe law firm and a high-priced PR outfit.
And dissidents are pushing an economic boycott that will reduce those
dollars even further.

At the rate things are going, there will soon be no Pacifica worth
fighting over (apart from its valuable real estate on the dial). It
is time for both sides to pull back from the brink. We continue to
believe that Democracy Now! and Goodman exemplify Pacifica's
fifty-year tradition of tough, radical reporting and that they
represent an asset of immense worth. We also believe that the only
way out of the current downward spiral at Pacifica is for dissidents
as well as management to focus on positive steps to move the
enterprise forward. For the dissidents, it means an end to the
boycott, which is incompatible with a devotion to the spirit of
community radio, and a willingness to be open to change. For the
Pacifica management and board, set to hold a key meeting on September
12, it means a commitment to respecting its employees and a
restructuring of the organization to grant more legal power to the
staff and listeners, who have made Pacifica what it is today.

As we've said before, Pacifica is one of the bastions of the precept,
enshrined in the Federal Communications Act, that the airwaves are a
public trust. It deserves the care and concern of all who believe in
that precept.