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02.02 By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women

02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid

01.31 Eleanor Smeal dissects Obama vs. Catholic Church controversy over birth control coverage - video

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01.28 Universal health care proposal stalls in California Senate

01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills

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01.24 Why Don’t We Have Abundant Solar Power? Blame Financing, and Industry, not Science

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02.07 Did Obama make the economy worse? Not according to most statistics

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02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics

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01.31 How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress

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01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide

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01.24 Buffett On Why Romney Should Pay Higher Taxes: He’s Just ‘Shoving Around Money,’ Not ‘Straining His Back’

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01.21 Why Is There So Much God in Our Politics? The Religious Right's Theocratic Plan for the 2012 Election

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02.03 PRIVATE INEQUITY

02.02 The New American Divide

02.02 American Airlines proposes to end all four pension plans

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01.30 New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget

01.30 Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph

01.29 The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing

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01.28 How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’

01.27 Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9%

01.27 Chinese Company Continues Plan To Replace Workforce With 500,000 Robots

01.27 Details Emerge of New Financial Fraud Unit

01.27 Not all jobs are equal

01.27 The Shift from Manufacturing to Service Economy - Graphic

01.25 Billionaires Occupy Davos as 0.01% Bemoan Inequality

01.24 Germany has the economic strengths America once boasted

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01.22 How U.S. lost out on Apple's iPhone work

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02.02 US plans to halt Afghan combat role early surprise Kabul

01.31 TABLE TALK

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01.24 Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide

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  Dennis Kucinich: Desapparacido!
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MEDIA CRITICISM:

Dennis Kucinich: Desapparacido!

by Dave Lindorff
The New York Times has decided that Kucinich isn’t a candidate. He doesn’t exist.

He has been disappeared.
Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich 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.

In an article by Jeff Zeleny and Mark Santora on Sunday headlined “Democrats Say Leaving Iraq May Take Years,” the Times reports that Democratic candidates, with only candidate Bill Richardson “standing apart,” are saying that troops will have to stay in Iraq and the area around Iraq for a long time.

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.
Lindorff speakingAbout the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.


Copyright © 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.
 


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