Dancing With Dictators

[Algorem]

http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/3669

By Elliot D. Cohen

Americans who think dictatorship begins on the day they wake to find a gun pointed at them on the TV screen will never see it coming. Under dictatorship, Americans will still have choices between which toothpaste to buy and what shows to watch on TV. But inaccessible to public view will be virtually anything which disagrees with government policies and values. The system of checks and balances of American democracy which places constraints on executive power is gradually eroded and dismantled in the transition to dictatorship. This includes not only the more obvious dismantling of judicial constraints on executive power and the nominalization of legislative authority; but also, and more fundamentally, the subtle dismantling of the fourth estate’s infrastructure.

On Friday, March 9, 2006, on Countdown, aired on MSNBC, host Keith Olbermann began his show by highlighting Sandra Day O’Connor’s warning of dictatorship in America. “The beginnings of a dictatorship?” asked Olbermann. “Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O‘Connor actually talked about the beginnings of a dictatorship here in America? A dictatorship, D-I-C-T-A-T-O-R-ship? A dictatorship, did you say?” While the speech O’Connor delivered at Georgetown University was not recorded, NPR’s Washington correspondent Nina Totenberg was there. According to Totenberg, O’Connor, responding to recent conservative attacks and threats made on federal judges, said “we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”

Olbermann stated, "It's one thing for us to throw around references to what seemed to be details from George Orwell's novel 1984 springing to life, thanks to post-9/11 thinking. It's quite another when the same kind of comments come from a just-retired justice of the U.S. Supreme Court..." He also aligned Republicans with those in communist countries that had "allowed dictatorships to flourish." Time Magazine’s Mike Allen joined Olbermann in the hope that Olbermann's coverage of O’Connor’s remarks would "launch a thousand op-eds."

Three chairs for Olbermann! Unlike other TV mainstreamers, he had the courage to utter the dreaded D-word. But so far the rest of the mainstream has been mum. Given the history of shoddy mainstream coverage of the Bush Administration in the past six years, that should come as no surprise. Absent is the adversarial role of the fourth estate in protecting Americans against government abuse of power. In its stead is self-censorship including failure to adequately cover the rising tide of American opposition to a war waged under false pretenses, warrant-less wire taping of American citizens, and a host of other violations of civil liberties. Here it makes more sense to speak of an advancing dictatorship rather than of its more modest “beginnings.”...

[bumblebee1]

1. That sounds like the name of a new show for ABC. n/t