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Getting Real:

Media experts speak on American domestic and foreign policy at SUNY New Paltz

first published in the New Paltz Times

            Once again, Democracy Now’s broadcast journalist Amy Goodman, with the help of media critic and author Jeff Cohen, Democracy Matters founder Mathew Edge and Kim Ives, a documentary film maker and editor with Haiti Progress newspaper, packed Lecture Center 100 at SUNY-New Paltz to address the topic, “Taking Hypocrisy out of Democracy: At Home and Abroad.”

            The panelists, introduced and moderated by college journalism professor Robert Miraldi, hit on several themes, including the hypocrisy of American values versus the current foreign policy of pre-emptive wars and regime change in foreign countries, the importance of independent news media outlets in an era of media conglomerates, and the need to eliminate corporate donations and corporate influence in American political elections.

            With the November 7 elections little more than a week away, the atmosphere was charged, the public hungry for information, and the absence of mainstream media apparent at an event that takes the failures of mainstream media to task for its cheerleading of the invasion of Iraq, its cowed approach to American influence in countries like Haiti and Venezuela where, critics claim, the government attempts to oust, through various methods, overt and covert democratically elected leaders, and most of all its lack of coverage as the Federal Communications Commission continues to allow for greater media consolidation -- putting all the information Americans get into the hands of six corporations.

            “I’ve spoken at many events in the past two decades,” said Miraldi. “But it is nice to be at an event that has been completely organized by students and one that has the word ‘Democracy’ in its title.”

            Miraldi went on to say to the standing-room only crowd, “It’s nice to see so many of you here tonight but I just wanted to let you know that this is a Republican rally, just to make sure you’re in the right place!”

            On a more somber note, the professor said, “Democracy matters more now than it has in a long time. It’s time to hit the polls and hopefully turn Congress over and get rid of some of the insanity we’ve had to endure during the last couple of years. Here it is the night before Halloween and while I don’t see any masks or costumes in the crowd [except someone with a Dick Cheney mask] the darkness has descended. The ghost of Vietnam is dancing at our door. This month more American soldiers died in Iraq than in any month in the past year. The darkness of Guatanamo Bay, the spooks of the CIA and their secret prisons throughout the world, the haunting images of Abu Gharib, the innumerable death toll of innocent Vietnamese being mirrored by the mounting death toll of innocent Iraqs…”

            Miraldi recalled introducing journalist Seymour Hersh two decades earlier after the published his best-selling book “The Price of Power; Kissinger and Nixon.”

            “It was a night like this, packed with people, and Seymour was bemoaning the needless deaths of thousands of American troops and Vietnamese…Now Kissinger is again advising President Bush and the line of duplicity between the Nixon White House and the Bush White House is astonishing. So our panelists tonight will hopefully shed some light on this darkness; talking about the suffering and hopes of Haitians, Venezuela; the latest villain in the American landscape, the need for clean elections and the right of Americans for a truly free press.”

            Cohen, the founder of FAIR [Fairness Accuracy in Reporting] the first media watchdog group, a former NBC, MSNBC, and CNN progressive left pundit as well as the author of “Cable News Confidential; My Misadventures in Corporate Media,” joked with the audience about the amount of commercial ads he had seen where “men in hoods burglarize homes and threaten the homeowners but when they go to call the police no one is there…I thought it has an advertisement for a new Hollywood horror movie with a scary creature known as Zimet!” he says referring to state senator John Bonacic’s  TV ads claiming that former town supervisor and candidate for Bonacic’s position Susan Zimet cut the New Paltz police budget by 50 percent. “Imagine if we had publicly free advertising and campaigning where the candidates actually got to speak for themselves rather than suffering through these misleading and manipulative political ads,” he added. “We might actually learn something about the candidate!”

According to Cohen big money has “deformed our Democracy in two major ways -- one in terms of media policy and the second in “corporate interest in political campaigns.”

Cohen harked back to former President Bill Clinton’s days in the White House when he and Republican Newt Gingrich teamed up, with money to their respective campaigns being funneled heavily by media corporations. “The worse media concentration of power happened under Bill Clinton where he authorized the FCC to give more power to in court country to media conglomerates than ever before in 1995-1996,” he said. “They lifted the caps on media conglomerates allowing them to acquire as many radio and TV channels as they could. A consumer advocacy group who wanted to denounce the telecommunications bill was rejected by CNN to air their commercial. After the bill went through we watched the Time Warner take over CNN… Clear Channel went from owning 40 radio stations to owning 1,200 in only a few years…but we in this region have a rare opportunity. There will be a public hearing with congressman Maurice Hinchey and a representative of the FCC on November 21 at a location yet to be announced where the public can weigh in on their right to multiplicity of news information resources. Few communities have this chance, so make sure you attend.”

Cohen, an admitted cable junkie/critic, noted that one of the largest stories breaking right now is how U.S. corporations are benefiting from the Iraq War and the reconstruction effort. “Why are such powerful, blockbuster stories not aired on the nightly news? It is a given in mainstream media that U.S. intentions in regards to foreign policy are noble goals. It’s not debatable, nor is it debatable with the political elite. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with oil, or regime change or U.S. corporate gains, or military bases? The only debate allowed is on how the war might have been ill-planned, or ill-executed, or how not enough troops were deployed. Motives are never questioned!

            “The Bolivian president, fulfilling one of his top campaign promises, just nationalized Bolivian energy resources. The title in the New York Times today? ‘Energy Firms Bow to Demands Set by Bolivia.’” 

            Cohen spoke at length about various American-inspired coups of Latin American countries over the past decades ending with the current situation in Venezuela, one, where, he says, a very popular president, Hugo Chavez, is being demonized by the Bush administration. According to Cohen, Chavez has survived two elections, a military kidnapping backed by the U.S., a U.S.-supported recall vote and, he adds, he’s “way out in front of the opposition for the upcoming elections. I have a modest proposal. One that the mainstream media might find dangerously subversive. Let’s let the people of Venezuela decide who governs Venezuela!”

            Both Ives and Cohen talked about the money the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. sponsored organization, pumps into Latin American countries to destabilize their elected leaders if the White House is opposed to those leaders. “Maybe that National Endowment for Democracy could take that money and funnel it to Ohio or Florida so that we make sure African Americans can vote!”

            Edge, a SUNY student, admitted that when he first became an activist he was “fighting 20 battles at once. Trying to stop the war, get universal health care, ensure affordable education, save the environment….and it suddenly dawned on me that the one common thread through all of these battles was the amount of corporate money in politics!”

            He listed several ways where large corporate donations to political campaigns seem to influence various bills, votes and government contracts in their favor. “Reconstruction contractors are making millions off of the destroyed infrastructure in Iraq,” said Edge. “Bechtel, the largest reconstruction contractor, spent $1.3 million in campaign contributions and then was awarded $700 million in reconstruction contracts. War is profitable for our military industrial complex, it’s profitable for our oil companies our reconstruction contractors…the 27 Democrats who voted in favor of the war in Iraq received on average seven times more in political contributions from the oil companies than the 21 Democrats who voted against it!”

            So he, along with other students, formed “Democracy Matters: Clean Money, Clean Election” which has grown into the N.Y. Democracy Project -- one that helps register voters and asks them to pledge to vote only for candidates that support publicly funded elections.

            “Spitzer [the Democratic candidate for New York State governor] has just come out in support of the bill, Susan Zimet is for Clean Elections, so these are candidates we should be supporting!” Maine, Arizona and most recently Connecticut have passed CMCE bills.

The final speaker was Amy Goodman, award-winning investigative journalist, who is now on an 80-city tour for her latest book “Static; Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back,” which just surpassed rightwing pundit Ann Coulter’s book on the New York Times Political Best Seller list at #8.

            “We’re witnessing counter-Coulter in America,” joked the independent news host.

Visibly tired from her tour and shaken by the death of her colleague Bill Will, of NY Indymedia, who was gunned down in Oaxaca, Mexico while filming and interviewing the struggle their by teachers demanding a higher wage, Goodman focused on the stories that she has witnessed past and present that make it on Democracy Now but aren’t touched by the mainstream media.

            “I was traveling through Canada where we witnessed a mass protest in that country demanding that their troops be brought home from Afghanistan,” said Goodman. “But you didn’t hear about that did you?” She also mentioned a man whose oldest son died in Iraq, who drags a coffin with him all over the country to tell people his story. “People always come up and talk to him and he says, ‘the war never goes on vacation, neither can I.’”

            She talked about how long it took the Washington press corps to take Cindy Sheehan seriously and finally ask President Bush to talk with the grieving mother camped outside his Texas vacation ranch. “They asked her why she hadn’t spoken up before, that she was so eloquent and she said ‘I have been speaking, you just haven’t been listening.’” Goodman had interviewed Sheehan several times, as well as other mourning mothers who were turned away from the Pentagon by armed soldiers when they wanted to ask the question ‘for what noble reason did our sons die?’”

            She mentioned the U.S. general, who interviewed thousands of soldiers in Iraq, the majority of which were opposed to the war, and when he returned, unsure of what to do with this information and the debacle he had seen overseas, decided to walk across Utah, the reddest, pro-war, pro-Bush state in America. “That is a blockbuster story? But you didn’t hear that did you?” asked Goodman.

            In closing, she recalled how Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice, were nowhere to be found when New Orleans was drowning during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “The mainstream media in this case did the right thing, they flew down there, there was no military or government to be embedded with because this administration left New Orleans for dead. And an amazing thing happened. These journalists, with bodies floating past them, were able to show the real images to the American people, to hear the story from the victims, and to be passionately moved by the horror they saw. Whether you were Republican, Democrat, Green, Independent…it didn’t matter. People watching New Orleans drowning were moved. It was humanity responding to humanity. Imagine if we saw the real images in Iraq for just one week? There are now 655,000 Iraqis dead. What if we saw the soldiers being blown up, the dead babies, the legless grandmothers, the destruction of infrastructure in the poorest of places for just one week? Imagine?”