Thursday, May 13, 1999 -- St. Paul, Minnesota -- Gentle reader: want to be in on the ground floor of an important story that Big Media won't cover for at least a month -- that is, if they cover it at all?

Here's the scoop: The Consortium, a fine magazine run by Robert Parry, a former Newsweek employee, recently ran astory concerning President Clinton's decision to declassify and release long-secret information concerning the strong ties between Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and ex-Chilean dictator and convicted mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.

Considering Paul Weyrich and his Free Congress Foundation's involvement in Pinochet's Chile, keep an eye out for Scaife-funded legal groups (such as Pacific Legal Foundation, Landmark Legal Foundation and Judicial Watch, for instance) to move to block this.

Also, keep in mind that the articles Steve Kangas was working on and uploading to his Liberalism Resurgent site shortly before his death in Scaife's office bathroom were concerning the CIA and Pinochet. If Scaife-funded legal groups move to block the release of the documents, it will be, indeed, a very interesting coincidence.

The Consortium also ran Mollie Dickenson's "Wag the Dog in Reverse", which shows how the media's obsession with Monicagate -- and its determination to bring down Bill Clinton no matter what -- led to both Clinton and the media not paying attention to Kosovo until it was too late to find a peaceful way to stop the decade-long "ethnic cleansing."

My own term for this is "Dog the Wag", which I also use to describe how the media is now using both Kosovo and the manufactured Chinagate hoo-ha to keep Ken Starr's reverses -- and news of the Reagan-Bush connections to both China and Pinochet -- off the front pages, if not out of the papers entirely.

Oh, yes: speaking of the Bushes, the Republican National Committee, and China, here's a URL for you: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N25/ahongkong.25w.html -- here's where you can find out about the RNC's China money, and how it makes what the Dems got from China look like the insignificant amount it really is.

As was revealed last week, the DNC got only about $20,000 out of the nearly $300,000 Johnny "The Grifter" Chung was allegedly authorized by China to give to the Dems -- and they gave it all back once they found out its ultimate source. The rest of the money disappeared into Johnny Chung's back pocket -- which is why he decided he'd rather cozy up to the GOP Congress rather than face a firing squad back home on treason and embezzlement charges.

Why, you ask, do we not hear about these things very much, if at all, from the New York Times? Why isn't Jeff Gerth running all of these stories to ground? Why do publications like Salon and The Consortium have to clean up after Gerth and Company on everything from Whitewater to Chinagate?

Here's the short answer: Jeff Gerth is buddies with Sheffield Nelson, Bill Clinton's oldest and most rabid foe outside of the racist "Justice Jim" Johnson. (See Gene Lyons' excellent book Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater for confimation of this fact.)

And since the New York Times isn't about to admit that it wasted nearly eight years and a couple of thousand stories running down a politically-motivated non-story, they keep pretending that Jeff Gerth has no biases or friendships that would get in the way of his reporting on the Clintons -- much like the Washington Post tries to pretend that Ken Starr's saving their butts over a 1988 libel lawsuit hasn't affected how they cover Starr, or that Sally "Homewrecker" Quinn's fury at Hillary's refusal to prostrate herself before the current Mrs. Ben Bradlee at her parties doesn't affect how they cover the Clintons.

So what can you do about it?

You can start by writing to every single news outlet you can think of, to ask them why they aren't covering - or admitting - certain newsworthy items, such as those mentioned above.

Here are a few addresses, for starters:
letters@nytimes.com
editor@usatoday.com
letters@newsweek.com
letters@time.com

Don't forget to get hold of your local paper and TV stations, too!

Speaking of the truth: It turns out that it's in somewhat short supply in China these days.

Part of the reason for the vehemence of the protests being staged in the wake of NATO's accidental hit of the Chinese embassy (besides the Chinese government's encouragement of the protests as a distraction from the expected riots on the looming tenth anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre) is that the government-controlled Chinese media has yet to tell the Chinese people anything at all about the decade-long series of ethnic cleansing campaigns by Slobodan Milosevic against the ethnic Albanian Kosovars. In fact, as of this writing, they had finally got around, a few hours ago, to telling the Chinese people that both NATO and the U.S. had apologized for the embassy hit.

We need to get the truth out to the Chinese people.

And the easiest way to do this, that I can think of, is this:

1) Gather up URLs for news sources who can be trusted on Kosovo, such as MSNBC's article concerning assaulted Kosovar women, the Kosova press page, and We the People's Kosovo links.



2) Hunt up Chinese presences on the Web.

Your search can be anywhere: chat rooms, message boards, businesses operating in China. Remember, Chinese import-export businesses, with their fax machines, were the primary uncensored Chinese link to the outside world during the brutal Tienanmen Square massacres; nowadays, we also can add e-mail to the mix.

Here's a good one -- a site frequented by Chinese students living and studying in America: http://www.cstudent.com. It has a message board and lets you add links of your own to the site.

You know what to do by know. Get cracking!