Fiction of the papers
Fiction of the image
and the image makers
The words to Joni Mitchell and Larry Klein's "Fiction" (first available on her Dog Eat Dog album) kept running through our heads last week.
It wasn't just the so-called alternative media's non-stop repetition of big media's talking points on Iran, although that was certainly something. But if you could listen beneath the steady drum beat of war with Iran, you could pick up other disturbing fictions.
Though our world doesn't begin with Barack Obama, the bulk of All Things Media Big and Small appears to think it does, so let's start with him.
As Third noted last week, Barack Obama's White House exhibited very real homophobia in filing a brief. But if you depended on Democracy Now! to inform you, you were probably scratching your head throughout the week.
For example, June 17th, Amy Goodman 'informed,' "Obama is making the announcement at a time when he is facing growing anger among gay supporters over his administration's recent decision to file a legal brief supporting the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. During the presidential campaign, Obama called for repealing the Defense of Marriage Act as well as the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy." People were angry about the brief? That it was filed? The following day, Goodman was informing Democracy Now! viewers, "Several prominent gay rights activists have criticized the President in recent days for failing to live up to campaign promises. Last week, the administration filed a legal brief supporting the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. On Wednesday, however, Obama said he would work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act." Based on what Goodman had presented that day and the day prior (and nothing on Monday or Tuesday), DN! viewers might assume the problem was a brief was filed in support of DOMA and Barack had just declared he would overturn it so all was fine and dandy.
Never in her coverage did Amy Goodman inform her audience that the brief in defense of DOMA had compared same-sex relations to incest and pedophilia. Why were people outraged by that brief? Because of those comparisons. When the government compares gay and lesbian relationships to incest or pedophilia, it's usually considered news . . . unless you're working for the man. And these days it's very difficult to find any one in the media that isn't working to defend the status quo.
"President Obama's promise to work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, Wednesday came one week after his administration filed a controversial legal brief supporting DOMA, an action which greatly disappointed activists fighting for marriage equality," Goodman declared Friday and, in quoting a letter to Barack, would finally tell her audience some of what was in the brief. "In a strongly worded letter to President Obama on Monday, Joe Solmonese, the president of the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, said, quote, 'I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones'."
Having finally gotten close to the truth -- close, still not dispensing it -- Goodman didn't call her guest Cleve Jones on a false and ahistorical comparison: "Well, it feels like Clinton all over again. You know, Bill Clinton gave wonderful speeches and told of his vision of a country, a vision that he claimed included us, and what we got out of that was the Defense of Marriage Act and 'don't ask, don't tell'." Maybe she thought it would be addressed in the next segment?
That was when Nathanial Frank was asked to provide the history of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and he declared, "Well, Bill Clinton made a rather glib promise during his campaign for the presidency in 1991 and 1992, in which he said he would lift this ban by the stroke of a pen. And he had spoken to some friends and aides, including David Mixner, who continues to be a prominent gay activist, who said that this would be something that would be important to the gay community, among other issues including HIV. And Clinton underestimated the resistance that he would face among social conservatives, particularly the religious right, as well as members of the military. And so, after quite a battle with Sam Nunn in the Congress, who was very against this, and Clinton and General Colin Powell and other members of the military, the compromise was agreed to that says that you can serve if you conceal your sexual identity and remain celibate twenty-four/seven."
We dispute Frank's use of the term "glib" and think he did a very poor -- damn poor -- job speaking because those who don't know the back story may think, by Frank's badly worded jumble, that Bill Clinton and Colin Powell were on the same side. That was not the case. In fact, Powell promised/threatened Clinton that the proposal of allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military would be buried.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell was not what Bill Clinton set out to do. It was what he could do when he was confronted with not only Nunn and Powell but with a reactionary mainstream media still nervous about mentioning AIDS unless it was pediatric AIDS. It was a very different time. Don't Ask, Don't Tell deserves to be called out today and in his final interview as president with Rolling Stone, Bill Clinton listed it as one of his disappointments. In 1993, with the attacks and the homophobia across the board, pushing through Don't Ask, Don't Tell still outraged a huge number of Americans. It was a step forward for its time. It was not the final step nor was it intended to be.
Bill Clinton, not noted on the program last week, expended a huge amount of political capital on this issue. He didn't run from it, he didn't hide it, he didn't act as though gays and lesbians were something to be ashamed of.
By contrast, as the pressure mounted and mounted all last week, Barack was forced to hold a for-show signing of a memo which did what Hillary's already done as Secretary of State -- extended some rights and benefits (only a small amount) to same-sex partners of federal employees. During that signing, Barack never used the word "gay" or "lesbian." That signing took place during Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. And who bothered to hold him accountable? Not one damn media outlet.
He wanted applause for issuing a minor policy change (which expires whenever he leaves office) that supposedly affirmed his support for gay and lesbian issues but he could never say the words "gay" or "lesbian."
It would have been nice if Amy Goodman could have pointed that out; however, give her credit for addressing the subject when the bulk of Pacifica Radio acted as if it hadn't happened. That was especially disgusting when the silence took place on KPFA which serves the San Francisco Bay Area.
Goodman can get credit for something else: Thursday's broadcast where her audience was informed that I.F. Stone was a Socialist. From the transcript:
D.D. GUTTENPLAN: The day of June 18th, which is--so it's almost twenty years, June 18th, 1989. I think the reason is because it's easy for the right, if everyone on the left is either under the influence of a foreign power or a slave to some kind of ideology that they can discredit. And the thing about Stone is that it's not that he didn't have an ideology. He had an ideology. He was a socialist all his life, it was very clear. But he was independent. He was an independent radical. He always said he was a Jeffersonian Marxist, and he believed that Jefferson and the free press was just as important as Marx.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain, a Jeffersonian Marxist.
D.D. GUTTENPLAN: Well, Jefferson said, "If I had the choice between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I'd much rather have newspapers without a government," that he believed that you needed to have independent scrutiny of power and that the press -- in those days, there wasn't media; it was just the press -- but the press was the only thing that could supply that. And Stone believed that all his life, so that whenever he would go to eastern European countries, he would always report on the presence or absence of a free press, usually the absence of a free press, and he would always say that no matter what you might hear in radical circles in the US, this country is not free until it has a free press, these countries won’t be free until they have a free press. But he was also a Marxist in his view of, you know, economic relations, how power works, how economic power influenced politics.
That I.F. Stone was a Socialist is neither a state secret nor surprising. Yet despite CounterSpin dropping their two guest segments to stick with D.D. Guttenplan for the half-hour, they never got around to informing their audience of that.
Quota Queen Janine Jackson informed, doing an intro (Quota Queens sit passively by while the men handle the interviews, don't you know), that Stone was "a man of the left," "leftist" and a "progressive." Steve Rendall went with "progressive" as well. You could form a pretty solid drinking game if you took a sip every time Stone was called a "progressive."
But never did "Socialist" come up.
It was all very laughable.
CounterSpin provided D.D. Guttenplan stating Stone "did say that you needed to be -- you needed to be honest about what your engagements were, what your political commitments were" but no one on the program can utter the word "Socialist"?
Rendall and Guttenplan were doing their best to act surprised that the right-wing might distort I.F. Stone (accuse him falsely of being a Kremlin spy) but they're the ones acting guilty and as if they have something to hide when "radical" (Guttenplan's word of choice) and "liberal" and "progressive" are used to describe a Socialist.
Guttenplan blathered on about how "there's a tradition that goes back" in the US and that people like I.F. Stone "form this country's history" and, while we don't disagree, we find it rather sad that Socialist is treated as a dirty word by CounterSpin. Who's hiding the history? Talk about "fiction of the image and the image makers."
As if to prove that point, Quota Queen Janine Jackson was on the defensive Friday, insisting, "One of the reasons some people think media sexism is largely a thing of the past is that they only look for certain kinds like demeaning treatment of women politicians." Now we could present you with a list of the number of times in the last 18 months that CounterSpin has found media racism aimed at politicians -- at a male politician, Barack Obama -- so we laughed as Janine tried to lie her way out of her own silence over the sexism aimed at Hillary, at Cynthia and, yes, as Sarah. We laughed and we thought about providing you with that list but Janine senses it. And, yeah, it's coming.
So instead, right now, we'll just note that Democracy Now! and FAIR's CounterSpin both engaged in misinformation last week because, to each, narrative outweighed actual facts and information.