| ||||||||||||||
|
Local News & Opinion
Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
Films, Arts & Education
Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
06.24 Mr. Holder, You Must Hold Torturers Accountable Health & Environment
06.29 Thinking about Climate 06.26 False Health-Scare Ad on CNN 06.25 Louella Learns the Limits of Medicare 06.23 The Simple Answer to America’s Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All 06.23 Tell ABC: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate 06.23 Serving the Medical-Industrial Complex 06.22 Thinking about Recoveries 06.20 Obama's Health Care Waterloo 06.15 Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform 06.11 Two Key Health-Care Numbers 06.10 Big Breakthroughs for Single Payer Health Care 06.10 Readying Americans for Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations Media Watching
06.29 WP's Connolly Back, on Health Reform 06.17 Hypocrisy and Hope: Western Coverage, Iranian Courage 06.15 Excusing Outrages of the Right 06.11 Tying Obama to Bush's Budget Mess US Politics, Policy & Culture
06.30 Obama's Torture Hypocrisy 06.30 Court Circular: Annals of Imperial Continuity 06.29 Obama, They Want You to Fail 06.26 Who to Trust on a Truth Commission? 06.26 Tarnished Shields: The Morally Bankrupt 'Family Values' Republican Leadership 06.25 America's "Bases of Empire" 06.24 Twelve Angry White People: Jury Nullification in a Pennsylvania Coal Town 06.24 Touring Empire's Ruins 06.23 Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program 06.19 Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black 06.17 Afghanistan's Operation Phoenix 06.16 Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran? 06.13 Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program? 06.10 Waiving the Rules for Old Glory 06.10 Obama's Era of Openness Is Closed High Crimes?
07.03 Reviewing Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's "Rules of Disengagement" 07.01 Iraq: A Bitter Strategic Failure 06.25 It's All Good, Again: 'Uptick' in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq 06.22 Obama Opposes Plame-gate Release 06.21 Dexter's Legions: The "Good" Killers of the "Good" War 06.18 Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future 06.15 New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record 06.14 Fear Rules Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
07.01 Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism:" The Economic Strategy of Imperial America 06.23 Obama's Financial Reform Proposal - A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control 06.10 Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney International
07.01 Pirates of the Mediterranean 06.29 Color Revolutions, Old and New 06.25 Iran Divided & the 'October Suprise' 06.23 Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil 06.20 Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?” 06.20 Through a Glass Darkly: Sifting Myth and Fact on Iran 06.19 Iran's Election and US - Iranian Elections 06.16 The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters 06.12 Israeli War Crimes Against Children During Operation Cast Lead We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
|
MEDIA CRITICISM:Dennis Kucinich: Desapparacido!The New York Times has decided that Kucinich isn’t a candidate. He doesn’t exist.
Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has been “disappeared.”He has been disappeared. Not in the sense of victims of America’s so-called War on Terror. He hasn’t been carted off in an orange jumpsuit to some black site in Kazakhstan. But he has been “disappeared” by the reporters and editors of the New York Times. But wait. Kucinich, who in many polls does as well as, or better than Biden and Richardson (in a new straw poll of Democratic activists in California, he ranked right behind Edwards and Obama, and ahead of Clinton and the rest of the crowd), not only wants the U.S. out of Iraq; he has submitted an actual bill in Congress (HR 1234) calling for a removal of all US troops within three months’ time, and barring the expenditure of any funds on future military activity in the region except for the purpose of orderly withdrawal. So why was Kucinich left out of the Times article on Democratic candidates’ positions on the Iraq War? The answer seems clear. The Times has decided that Kucinich isn’t a candidate. He doesn’t exist. He has been disappeared. The same is true on the issue of impeachment. The Times has only twice mentioned the bill, H Res 333, for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney, which Kucinich filed on April 24. The first mention was a three-sentence "National Brief" item that ran the day Kucinich filed the measure, half of which was taken up with a Cheney spokeswoman’s mocking response, and the second and only other was phrase tucked within a parenthetical comment in a April 27 article reporting on a lackluster candidate’s debate. Americans who get their news from the Times—and that would include millions who read or watch news that itself is produced by organizations whose editors’ opinions are shaped by the Times—would not know that over the course of the last three and a half months, some 20 members of Congress, including six members of the crucial 23-member House Judiciary Committee, have signed on to Kucinich’s Cheney impeachment bill. That is roughly 10 percent of the House Democratic caucus. So what’s going on here? Apparently, given the Times’ famously inflated slogan “All the News that’s Fit to Print,” news about Rep. Kucinich (D-OH), including about his carefully laid out plan to end the Iraq War and about his bill to impeach the vice president, are somehow not “fit” to print. The self-referential nature of Times reporting would be laughable if it were not so damaging to public knowledge and discourse and to the democratic process. It would also garner an “F” in any decent journalism class. Take that April 27 article, by Zeleny and Adam Nagourney on one of the earliest Democratic candidates’ debates. The two reporters refer to Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton as “the two most closely watched candidates of the night,” though most observers, not to mention the audience, clearly most appreciated the blunt comments of Kucinich and former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. “Most closely watched” apparently refers to the two reporters, who had already decided that the race for the Democratic nomination had been winnowed down to those two candidates, with former senator John Edwards as a dark-horse possible challenger. They certainly don’t mention any other source for their conclusion that Obama and Clinton are the most “closely watched.” Kucinich, who had not yet been “disappeared” by the Times, was relegated in this piece by Zeleny and Nagourney to the role of “long-shot rival.” This, remember, is before most people in the country could even name all the candidates running for the nomination for either party. For that matter, I suspect that most people would have a hard time even today naming all the candidates running for the nomination of the two parties. And if the Times has its way, they never will, because candidates like Kucinich (and Gravel, and eventually, no doubt, most of the others except for those anointed as “serious” contenders by the Times “news fitness” gatekeepers), will be banished from all mention. It makes you wonder why we bother with this whole primary process... except that without them, how would corporate interests get a chance to pour money into campaigns and buy the eventual presidents and members of Congress. Anyhow, so long Dennis! We hardly knew ye. About the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is co-author, with
Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for ImpeachmentCopyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on August 13, 2007. |
| ||||||||||||