As Ruth noted Thursday, Danny Schechter and his ghost writer won an award for best blog, a James Aronson Award. And as Ruth explains, C.I.'s jaw dropped wide.
Why is that?
Because Danny Schechter is among the ones portraying the problems with the media as something new, something recent.
Get a grip, flibbertigibbet.
Good strong stuff dealing in round abuse and blackguard names, pulling off the roofs of private houses, pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; setting on, with yell and whistle, and clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and the worst birds of prey.
What is that? It's a media critique. It's actually a blistering media critique of the US press. Who authored it? Charles Dickens. In the 19th century. Not the 20th.
There will most likely be no media reform in this country, no real reform. And the failure will have a lot to do do with the desire of the left to turn a historical problem into a 'new' and 'emerging' one.
Danny Schechter is receiving a James Aronson Award.
That is laughable. All the pleas you will hear at MediaChannel were done by Aronson and company at The National Guardian, a weekly national paper that was published in NYC from 1948 through 1992. The radical paper was started by James Aronson, Cedric Belfarge and John T. McManus. The paper was created in time to promote (and endorse) Henry Wallace for president. FDR's former vice president was running against Democratic Party nominee Harry S. Truman and Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey. Norman Thomas was the Socialist Party's candidate, Claude A. Watson was the Prohibition Party candidate, Strom Thurmond was the Dixiecrat's candidate, Wallace was running on the Progressive Party ticket which was a blend of Socialists, Communists and disaffected Democrats who did not see Truman as a continuation of FDR's policies.
The National Guardian, publicly, was not a Communist Party publication. It liked to point out that it did not just offer praise to the Communist Party and just echo the Party line. The Nation does the same with the Democratic Party today and, yes, to many both would qualify as party organs. While claiming not to want to be a party organ of any party, the reality was they hoped to get the Progressive Party to fund their newspaper; however, the party's leadership was opposed. (As James Aronson noted in Something To Guard, co-written with Cedric Belfarge, the Communist Party was the leadership and they had no interest in sharing the resources: "The framers of this 'go look for funds elsewhere or drop dead' policy were, we knew, in or close to the CP.").
They published their first issue October 18, 1948. February 7, 1949 (not even four months later), the front page carried a plea for money ("A CALL TO ACTION NOW! THE PROGRESSIVE PRESS IS IN PERIL"). Readers responded. And one reader, Anita Blaine, even donated (a gift, not a loan) $78,000 that month. But instead of using that money to cover expenses or investing it or just saving it, they decided to act like $78,000 would come in every year and lower the subscription rate when the subscription rate had already failed to cover the basic expenses, hence the plea for money February 7th. By June of 1949, they were hitting up Anita Blaine for an additional $150,000. $228,000 in 1949. A huge amount. Enough that should have guaranteed solvency. But the beggar media never knows how to stay afloat or to budget. It's probably why Blaine made her gifts gifts and not loans. She always knew they'd never repay the loan.
For a little over 40 years, the newspaper managed to stay afloat through constant fundraising. It died two years after its last living founder (Cedric Belfarge) had passed away. But James Aronson and Cedric Belfarge left the paper in the spring of 1967. (It was a bitter departure, Aronon wrote of it in "Editing on the Left: Memories and Convictions," The Nation, February 5, 1968.)
Unlike most in Panhandle Media, the staff of the Guardian could actually work in the real press. They hailed from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time, The New York Post, etc. Why would they want to start their own press?
For the same reason that people do today: The stories that matter were not getting out. Too much was being ignored and hidden.
They also saw their goal as informing and educating. They did not (unlike today's Beggar Media) see their role as promoting either of the two dominant political parties (the same ones then as now). They never endorsed a Democratic Party presidential nominee. They, in fact, saw one of their long range goals as creating a new political party (originally as keeping the Progressive Party alive but that was impossible -- in 1948, you already had people running from it due to the Communist presence). If you were fortunate enough to know Aronson (Elaine and C.I. were), he could tell you all about the fakes in the Communist Party who latched onto the Democratic Party with the hopes of changing it from within. They would infiltrate it, they would take it over! That was their plan. As noted in other articles here, that is also what fueled the hardening against Communists among centrist and liberal Democrats and allowed them to take part in the witch hunts, or watch without objection as they went on.
It's why non-Democratic Party members like Laura Flanders, Grace Lee Boggs and others attempting to influence a Democratic Party matter (the selection of the presidential nominee) actually set the stage for the backlash that is mounting. Equally true is that a number of people who don't grasp what happened run from the party they don't understand. They're not coming back just like an earlier group switched parties and never came back. To them, the Democratic Party is officially crazy. They don't grasp that events were influenced by outsiders who had no business in the Democratic Party process because they are not Democrats. It is, to finish out this line of thought, why for all the talk of the GOP's funeral, the most dangerous development for Democrats and the thing that will lead to a steady bleed over the next years. Since FDR, no Democrat other than Bill Clinton has ever been elected to two terms as president. (Death allowed Truman and LBJ to finish their predecessors terms after which they were each elected to only one term. Jimmy Carter was elected to only one term. Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan were elected to two terms. Bully Boy Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court to one and elected to another.)
The National Guardian didn't succeed in establishing another political party. Aronson's opinion was that it split (further) into factions after he and Belfarge left in 1967 and its best times were behind it with the exception of continuing to run reports by contributors who had been with the paper for many years (such as Anna Louise Strong and Wilfred Burchett). Most readers would trace the end to the US pullout from Vietnam and careful readers would certainly notice that the coverage of Watergate was rather staid for the paper that, December 19, 1963, ran Mark Lane's "A Brief for Lee Harvey Oswald."
Lane's article had been turned down by every US outlet and, when it ran, was ignored with a tiny group choosing not to ignore it but to ridicule it. While ignored by US outlets, the international press was all over it. And that's a good place to go out because it underscores how nothing has really changed. Whether it's the Downing Street Memos or any other story, it's easier to find it covered outside the US than within -- especially true the more it has to do with events in the US.