Jeff Koopersmith

Think Hard
It is time to take a careful and critical look at mass media -- and fight back
by Jeff Koopersmith

Nov. 6, 2002 -- BOSTON (APJP) -- If you yet doubt that Roger Ailes is a political genius, think again.

Roger Ailes

Like Goebbels before him, the chief of FOX News has succeeded this day in not only changing the way an entire nation -- in this case America, not Germany -- looks at elective politics, but the way other networks treat the political and policy news about the most powerful economic and military nation in history.

Think about it -- and think hard.

A near-moronic "President", handled by the nation's worst and almost criminal minds, has led members of his party to victory against at least more fair-minded, far smarter, highly educated opponents.

How? By lying to the American people -- and nearly bankrupting them by allowing and continuing to allow rampant corporate thievery. By teasing them with meaningless tax cuts that wouldn't even pay a cable television bill. By attempting to undo 200 years of jurisprudence and constitutional scholarship.

Why? In the name of some misguided concept of nationalism.

Result? The American people just did what the German's did in the 1930s -- they lauded and awarded not a party but a man, one who is about the most unaccomplished person of formidable power one could imagine, one who never earned anything in his life but was nonetheless made a gift of the most powerful position on earth -- the American Presidency.

It's enough to make one weep.

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This morning, November 6th 2002, had better be a wake up call to all moderate and liberal thinkers in the United States in the wake of the rout of the Democratic Party for the tout of the neo-Fascist Republican National Committee -- a political party whose near-entire thrust rests on greed, lack of compassion, and lack of attention to the real problems facing America. And those problems are truly small when one takes a moment to glace around the globe at less fortunate peoples still grappling with providing babies with enough milk to grow.

Despite what you hear today and the following weeks from television and radio pundits keep one fact in mind: Democrat leaders are stunned silent by what occurred in these midterm elections, although at this writing the full breadth of the defeat at a time when Democrats should have made enormous gains still remains to be seen.

Democrats will be quick to blame Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic National Committee.

But the truth is that neither McAuliffe, nor any Democrat party chief, had a chance against the New American Media -- controlled by a handful of men, the mandarins of mass media -- all conservative, all corporate thinkers, and all committed (either willingly or kicking and screaming) to news that is in reality "unfair and unbalanced," as is the case with Fox News prescript. They broadcast not actual news but unrelenting propaganda calculated to expand the power of ultra-right-wing policy leaders, laissez-faire capitalism of a breed not seen in America since the age of the Robber Barons, and a mean-spirited war-mongering national consciencelessness that is breathtaking in scope.

The day before Election Day, the United States -- for the first time in public memory -- paraded pictures of the assassination of an Al Queda leader by our CIA. It is not so much the fact that we assassinated the sonofabitch that helped cause so much grief to our people, but the fact that we uncharacteristically 'flashed' the advertisement in a rather un-American manner sends the message that we are now in the business of murder for hire -- openly and against hundreds of years of stated principle, principle of law.

Don't get me wrong. The fellow we killed and his underlings deserved to die -- perhaps in a far more hideous manner that they did than merely being blown into oblivion by one of America's high-tech weapons of death. So you right wing propagandists need not take out after me as a supporter of Bin Laden and his deluded flock of lemmings.

However, it is the packaging and promotion of this killing that strikes me as odd -- even startling.

Is this what we've become? Is this the harkening of the dawning of a new age of unreason in the United States?

Yes.

And this new age is brought to you by FOX News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and their affiliates -- who can't wait a even a second to fill our and our children's unschooled heads with the worst kind of nationalistic newspeak -- dictated by the likes of Bush puppeteer Karl Rove, quite a larger force of intellect and cunning than I imagined.

This new age is brought to you by "Christian" fundamentalist churches who steal from the poor and the down-and-out, the weak and the sick using televangelism, nationalism and Christian gobbledygook to fool feeble thinkers among us into marching in an unforgiving parade of vainglorious morality with a capital "M".

Rush Limbaugh

This new age is brought to you by Rush Limbaugh, a sloppy thinker but a loudmouth neo-Nazi nonetheless, a celebrity who appeals to the lowest, dumbest, do-nothingest elements of our society -- men and women who can spend three hours hanging on a telephone in some God-forsaken trailer park just to share their hatred of anything non-white, non-Christian and non-American with old Limbaugh, a man who has made tens of millions preying on the worst of our penchants.

This new age is brought to by AOL Time Warner -- which instead of fighting Roger Ailes and FOX's use of Hitlerian propaganda tactics, has instead embraced them, complete with imprecise analysis, screaming graphics aimed at the most addled American minds, and commentators who would sell their souls to the devil for nothing more than a fatter paycheck.

Where are Dan Rather and Peter Jennings - and, of all people, Tom Brokaw, when we need them to stand up and tell us the truth?

Well, let me tell you.

Rather is in Texas hobnobbing with the very same people who loathe him.

Jennings lays around on his hammock in the Hamptons feted by the men who pay him.

Brokaw seems to spend much of his time celebrating war by honoring our fathers who died in a war we did have to fight against men very much like those we are rewarding today in our own country: Nationalists who will stop at nothing and pay any price -- including your son's and daughter's lives -- to embark on some new brand of imperialism, capitalist imperialism which does not seek to help others to pull themselves out of the ditch of poverty and ignorance but instead feeds off of it.

Let me warn my Democrat, moderate Republican and liberal friends -- you had better take stock of what's happening in this nation, and in particular what is happening in mass media, particularly the dissemination of the "news" upon which people rely to make what is now mockingly called "free choice" among the right -- the new right. There has over time been less and less free choice in this nation for lack of true news sources. Voters have no idea who they are voting for. It would not surprise me to see a Martian elected governor of a major state, serve out two terms, and retire to Venus without so much as a comment from our "trusted" anchors and news editors -- as long, of course, as he was "with the program" and supporting unbridled capitalism as the national anthem.

Democrats, you have better spend the next two years working as hard as you can to mount your own propaganda geniuses, your own talking heads that will rival Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the dozens of other syndicated radio and newspaper commentators who have infected our information sources so profusely that no other opinion is heard. Period.

Democrats, you had better begin to listen to Barbra Streisand and not simply take her money to push yourselves into office by the skin of your teeth.

You had better listen to Sidney Blumenthal, and Leon Fuerth, and Gene Gaudette, and others who are pressing for a new kind of think tank aimed at combating this stranglehold the right now has on every wide source of information imaginable.

You had better begin to listen -- and to read the opinions of the great liberal thinkers and start to realize that liberal thought grew from need, from dire necessity in a world gone mad with avarice and self indulgence.

Democrats and people who actually think -- wake up.

Please.