Commentary: Gatekeepers come crawling when the left gets motivated

As we listened to RadioNation with Laura Flanders Saturday, we heard one caller speak of how hard it was for anything to gain traction. He noted the Downing Street Memos but was also referring to a large number of scandals afflicting the Bully Boy and the current administration. He was depressed by the events.

We've all been there. Sometimes, you're just in need of someone pointing out some positives. Sometimes, you just need to get it out and just want to know that you were heard -- you're not looking for reassurances. Again, we've all been there.

The fact that no one's yellow taped off the current crime scene that is the White House can be surprising. In the 90s, Bill Clinton belched and Republicans were screaming for (and getting) an independent investigation. Bully Boy 'fixes' intel; misleads in the State of the Union address (2003); heads an administration that outed a CIA agent; announces that he can pick and choose which Congressional legislation to follow; and he circumvents the FISA courts, the law and the Constitution by spying on American citizens without warrants. That the response to all or any of that isn't Congress immediately bringing charges of impeachment is rather sad.

So if you're someone that feels like the caller and just needed to get it off your chest, stop reading here and know that we do understand where you're coming from.

But if you're someone needing some reassurance, keep reading.

In the Age of Bill Clinton, everything was a scandal. That's because the media system was rigged to lean right-ward. That rigging didn't come overnight. Nixon laid strong groundwork (and there were others before Nixon). If you want to talk about lack of traction, look at the Iran-Contra scandal which found Poppy pardoning people in his final moments in office, people who, if they testified under oath, might implicate him. Or think about how Ollie North, who circumvented the Constitution, has been propped up by many a lazy mainstream media as a "hero."

Reagan walked away from the White House without charges. And in 2004, you saw the mainstream media still unwilling to explore the darker days of Smells-a-lot. Latin America? Not going to touch it. Iran-Contra? "He's dead! Leave him be!" the coverage seemed to say.
The coverage was so idolatrous and so incessant, that we honestly wondered if they were expecting Reagan to rise on the seventh day?

Everyone gets dumbed down by the process. Take Baby Cries A Lot who had a snit fit when Greg Palast attempted to raise serious issues about the Reagan presidency. Maybe he was worried about "tone"?

The Baby Cries A Lot crowd spent most of the nineties playing patty cakes with the right (and tearing up a lot or pretending to cry). They just didn't fight back. That's why the media is slanted rightward. If a Democrat had done what Bully Boy has, Time and/or Newsweek would have already featured him on the cover, with prison bars superimposed, and a fiery headline.

But if you pick any topic, you'll see that there is cause for hope. No, not just Tom DeLay's spate of "problems." Downing Street Memos, "yellowcake," outing Valerie Plame . . . none of that's gone away. The public's aware of it. We talk about it.

That's hopeful. The mainstream media ignored DSM and then attempted to mock it. If we were where we were ten years ago, they would have gotten away with being the gatekeepers/taste makers they're so used to being.

Instead you've got websites. You've got Laura Flanders. You've got Democracy Now! and had it ten years ago but a lot less people knew of it. The Nation and The Progressive were around then as well but didn't have the reach they do now. These resources get the word out. They're very important and you should try to get the word out on them and Consortium News and all the other resources and voices that speak to you. You can look into Danny Schechter and MediaChannel.org's Tell The Truth Movement and find a way to make a difference.

Change is coming, but you may not notice it. We participate in protests in rallies. We know that they're part of raising awareness. We think they've done that.

But maybe we could start working on raising awareness about the things that hurt the left's messages?

Like, in the 80s, the gasbags from The New Republican (some had moved on to the right-wing Weekly Standard, some were soon to move on) presenting themselves as left and taking up the slots that, as Kat noted, should have gone to people on the left, not people pretending to be.
(Hello, Fred Barnes!) Is New Rag Petey really concerned about labor from the labor perspective? No. Katrina vanden Heuvel should be given the seat for the left on any chat show over Petey.

Do we need to raise awareness? We think so.

Take the abortion issue. The mainstream media tries to play it as a left v. right issue. If you're left, you support abortion, if you're right, you don't. Well, if that's the case, the country is left. The country supports abortion rights. But when the system tilts rightward, left isn't measured by a left position, but by whether it's to the left of the right. The right becomes the anchor and everything else just floats around it. Which is how right-leaners and centrists end up on TV and radio posing as left and taking up the seats that belong to Matthew Rothschilds and Naomi Klein's.

We're seeing the growing awareness that's making people, who stopped speaking out, start back up again and people, who would never take part in a protest, feel compelled by events to do so.

Part of this growing awareness is noting how the right wing echo chamber and their tyranny of the few dominate the information flow. We've seen a lazy (and worse) mainstream media adopt the terms handed down by the right and the right-leaning. The fact that Dave Zirin and others stood up to The New Rag and their attacks on Arundhati Roy is impressive. Many people never did. Quite a few still don't. Go around the net to various left sites (genuninely left) and you'll see links to The New Rag.

We assume that's due to a lack of awareness about the rag. Although it might also be done out of hope of mutual link-off, we don't know. We do know it's disgusting and one of the things that the left should be thinking through in 2006.

So in 2006, one thing we can focus on is getting real. That means realizing that there's nothing to be gained from promoting The New Rag. That means realizing that though CJR Daily (now The Audit!) loves Uncle Marty, the reality is that Uncle Marty was active in promoting the current invasion. As the rag continues to struggle for readers, there's really no point in propping it up. Murray Waas and others witnessed the decay of that magazine.

Playing nice with The New Rag is akin to inviting someone to mug you. That's what they do. They clobber you over the head and stab you in the back before running off with your purse or wallet. Take the DLC, who could be dubbed Dean Haters after their treatment of Howard Dean, but who would dub them Bush Haters? They reserved their hatred and their clucking for Dean. Just as The New Rag wouldn't have dared suggested the violence they recommended for Arundhati Roy be done to the Bully Boy.

As "friends," they're the first to tell you that you've gained weight and then stiff you with the tab for lunch. That's not friendship. And when the anti-Arab, pro-war, pro-Bully Boy (Marty endorsed Bully Boy in 2004) New Rag is struggling, you don't invite them out to lunch. You avert your eyes and walk on by.

Here's something else you don't do. You don't spend countless time pointing out the problems of The New Rag and how they enabled Bully Boy in 2000 only to turn around and prop them up. But you saw Bob Somerby do that last week. And to endorse the "tone" talk The New Rag always pushes. It's the same "tone" talk, if Somerby's forgotten, that led to people shying away from calling Bully Boy (or the press) onto the carpet in 2000. It's the same "tone" talk that people once used against Bob Somerby -- they just didn't like his tone. As a once powerful writer enters his The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone period, he repeatedly embarrasses himself. By taking on the "tone" argument, he appears determined to bury his own past work.

Somerby may have been feeling a little long in the tooth or maybe it's the not uncommon tendency on the part of some males to become more conservative as middle age is receeding faster than their hairlines. (Rebecca and C.I. claim credit for that line.) As C.I. noted in a still unposted entry at The Common Ills, Somerby can claim some credit in birthing a movement. Now he wants to kill the offspring?

We don't take Somerby's writing seriously anymore. For reasons that are well known. But it's still shocking that he, of all people, would get behind a "tone" argument having been clobbered over the head with the "tone" argument in his glory days.

Hopefully, Somerby's so ripped apart his own writing (and glory) that no one will take his endorsement of "tone" anymore seriously than they would another attack by him on Joseph Wilson.

But the "tone" argument is a problem. People don't like what you said or the way you said it. It's called gatekeeping. The New Rag and George Packer have been full of insults about The Nation's "tone." They've derided the magazine for being opposed to the war. "That's not the right 'tone.'" It's not tone, it's gatekeeping.

They want to shush the voices that kept the stories alive, the ones the mainstream media didn't want to cover. It's an elitist way of thinking that there's one way to speak and only one way; that there's one way to reach people and only one way; that everyone responds to the same message, worded the same way, in the same manner. It's nothing but gatekeeping. They can call it "tone" but it's an attempt to silence people who've grown weary of press like The New York Timid which could tar Al Gore as a liar but not use the term towards the Bully Boy.

So here's where we are. The country is awake. There are so many possibilities springing up. There are people reconnecting to their own lives and wanting to have their say. Along come the gatekeepers to say, "We will only speak in this manner." It's a fear based approach because the rigged system could be effected. We're not naive enough to believe it could come tumbling down.

We do know that gatekeepers in the past have allowed reality to be muddied. You can see it with the factual interpretation of the Civil War. It's nothing new. You can see it with the way a struggling paper became the nation's paper with a little fine tuning and funding from Wall Street.
2006 is a moment.

Once in awhile
In a big blue moon
There comes a night like
Like some surrealist
Invented this
4th of July
Night ride home
-- "Night Ride Home" words & music Joni Mitchell

We can take the wheel in 2006 or we can listen to the clucking from the clutch-the-pearls set and once again abdicate our power. We hope the left wants to steer. If we give it up to the "tone" argument, we're betraying all the work that's been done.

When things get really hot, the gatekeepers like to trot out "for the good of the nation." For the good of the nation, Reagan shouldn't be impeached. For the good of the nation, we should say Gerald Ford exhibited statesmanship by pardoning Nixon. For the good of the nation, we shouldn't discuss Vietnam.

Too often, the left has fallen for that trap. That's why you've got generations since Vietnam who've grown up believing right-wing fantasies about that war. (Including, but not limited to, that the press did the war in, that we could have "won" . . .) The right doesn't worry about tone. They go on churning out their Clinton Chronicles and other nonsense that far exceeds anything the left could get behind if they wanted to. People like Bob Somerby once rightly raged against the various kooks and freaks claiming the Clintons were murderers (and worse) on national TV. Now they want to worry about Atrios' "tone"?

There's work to be done and fretting over "tone" should be left to the DLC and others not of the left. A movement's being created and a bad author with weak sales working for The New Rag (and frequently freelancing for The New York Times, as C.I.'s pointed out before) wants to push a "tone" argument. That's nothing more than an attempt to silence voices. He'll probably be well rewarded for that nonsense by the mainstream media. But the left shouldn't fall into that. With all that's going on in this country and the world, this isn't a time to be genteel or stop discussing the issues, in your own voices, that matter.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
-- MLK, Riverside Church in NYC on April 4, 1967