The 1950s blacklist is back, and it's on steroids this time!

hvn_nbr_2

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Sun Feb-27-05 08:07 PM
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The 1950s blacklist is back, and it's on steroids this time!

Some Background

During Joe McCarthy's "red scare" witchhunt in the 1950s, there was a blacklist of people in Hollywood who were members of the Communist Party, held communist beliefs, were suspected of doing so, or who simply wouldn't name names of people who they believed were communists. Those who got on the blacklist were totally excluded from any kind of work in Hollywood. It included actors, directors, writers, and everything else in Hollywood, for both movies and TV. Careers sank overnight as talented, once-in-demand artists could find no work at all.

During the blacklist's run, the general public had no idea that the blacklist existed.

After Edward R. Murrow's March 9, 1954 TV expose of McCarthy's lies and fraud, and after McCarthy was thoroughly discredited, the blacklist went away and also became public knowledge. But by then many, many careers had been completely destroyed.

How we can know it's alive again now

Of course, they haven't announced to the public that they've reinstated the blacklist. They don't put out press releases about stuff like this. Pravda and Izvestia never announced to the Soviet people that they were biased, and GOPravda certainly won't ever announce it either.

But now that I've realized what's happening, I'm surprised I didn't realize it sooner. Maybe their different techniques, which I address later, helped to camouflage it.

Just look at the evidence. Unwanted news (unwanted by the administration) is locked down, locked out, not covered, or simply ridiculed.

One-time decent journalists, some who were even somewhat liberal, now kowtow and grovel before rightwing nuts, give total deference to radical rightwing clerics, and recite RW talking points as certain truth. They completely fail to ask the most obvious followup questions when neocons blatantly lie and deceive. They don't ask tough questions and they blithely accept blather answers. But they are just the opposite with liberals or Democrats. There's a reason, and it's not that they all personally chose to become rightwing shills, and it's certainly not because they always kowtow to whatever administration is in power.
There is intense bias and disproportion in what stories are covered and what stories are not covered. I can remember during the Monica Lewinski farce that whichever network I was watching at the time led the newscast every night for six months (except for one tornado and one hurricane) with a loud crescendo booming "Crisis in the White House." Clinton's blowjobs were story number one every night for six months, and prominent in the news for much longer than that. Bush blatantly lied about WMDs and uranium from Niger, but GOPravda refuses to talk about it. What little attention they did give it focused on his prefacing the statement with "British intelligence has learned..." It doesn't fucking matter. He knew and they all knew that it wasn't true, and he used it to deceive the nation and the Congress into supporting a war that has cost $300B so far, 1500 American lives and God-only-knows how many injuries, how many family disruptions, or how many innocent Iraqi civilian deaths. Because GOPravda won't report on any of that either. You make the newsworthiness judgment. Blowjobs: extraordinarily newsworthy? Lies to start a war: Who cares? There's a reason.
If Clinton or Carter administration officials had deliberately exposed an active CIA agent for the purpose of attacking an administration critic, I think we all know the hellstorm that would have followed. When it's the other side, it's not a story worth following. The lies about Clinton staffers removing the W keys from White House keyboards got more coverage than outing a CIA agent. You make the newsworthiness judgment. There's a reason.
A few felons voting in Washington is big news to GOPravda. A few felons secretly counting tens of millions of votes is not news at all. Numerous felons appointed to high positions of authority, running government agencies and programs is not news at all. Disallowing hundreds of thousands of voters from voting, based on false claims that they were felons, is not news at all. You make the newsworthiness judgment. There's a reason.
The Dean scream. A blatantly out-of-context and distorted video is played endlessly and analyzed negatively endlessly, even though an in-context and accurate video shows that it was all a lie. But they never correct it and they never play the honest version and they continue to play the dishonest version. There's a reason.
Where is Peter Arnett today? There's a reason.
Where is Dan Rather headed today? Even though he had the story right and got tricked into accepting phony documentation. They made a story of the false documentation and completely ignored the real, true story. There's a reason.
An obvious shill with absolutely no journalism experience or training sits with the White House press corps and recites rightwing talking points in the thin guise of questions, and no one from this "elite" press corps is onto him. No way! Look at the faces of some of those reporters as he's posing his "questions." Some are totally disgusted; they know he's a fraud, but no one speaks up. There's a reason. When bloggers discover the story, GOPravda ignores it and then tries to sweep it under the rug with a brief mention or two, hoping to drop it as unnewsworthy and not "having legs." Think of it: A tawdry media that thrives on the tawdry, loves the tawdry, exploits the tawdry to the max at every opportunity, comes upon an explosively tawdry story...and pretends it doesn't exist. There's a reason.

It's simply inconceivable that all these "news" organizations would freely and independently make all these same extraordinarily incompetent, dishonest, and biased assessments of what is news and what is not news.

Folks, no stories "have legs" or "don't have legs." Stories acquire legs if news executives give them legs. Stories don't get legs if news executives refuse to cover them, refuse to assign (or even allow) reporters to follow them, and actively suppress them. If Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham had said no to Woodward and Bernstein and Deep Throat, the Watergate story would not have had legs.

Likewise, there are no "teflon presidents" to whom nothing sticks. There are only protected presidents, protected by news executives who refuse to stick anything to them. Ronald Reagan was not a teflon president; he was a protected president. Bush I was not a teflon president; he was a protected president. Shrubler is not a teflon president; he is a protected president.

They have been gradually putting the blacklist into effect for more than twenty years now, but it has gone into full force during the Shrubler reign and has been clamped down much tighter since either Rathergate or election day 2004, I'm not sure which date to put on the total clampdown.

How it's different this time, their tactics, techniques, and goals

Compared to today's blacklist, the McCarthy era blacklist appears blunt and unsophisticated. In the 1950s, they aimed to eliminate all communists and their sympathizers from all aspects of television and movies. Today's McCarthyites have realized that there's no reason to eliminate all liberals from media. After all, they can still make a lot of money from liberals' talents in comedy, acting, drama, writing, music, and the behind-the-camera positions, and there's no need to suppress their talents. It's only necessary to extinguish liberal views from "news," at least at first.

The focus today is not on eliminating people; it's on eliminating ideas, viewpoints, and questioning. After all, they have a lot invested in establishing name and face recognition of stars, in advertising them and manufacturing "credibility," in botox treatments. They don't want to throw away those investments, if they can turn the asset. Witness Chris Matthews, Judy Woodruff, and so on. They only throw away an asset if they can't turn it to their side. Witness Dan Rather. Of course, throwing away one or two in a very public and humiliating way serves to put all the others on notice pretty effectively too. You can't quickly corrupt a large number of people, but you can quickly scare them all. "Kill one, warn a hundred."

But now that they have nearly total control of "news," the scope expands. The radical rightwing clerics demand total control of children's cartoons so that nothing that they imagine disagrees with them may be shown. They censor Robin Williams on the Oscars so that he may not make fun of the stupidity of the radical rightwing clerics. Watch for far more to happen, and soon.

The goals today are different too, and significantly more ambitious. Old Joe actually wanted primarily to eliminate communists (and those that he imagined were communists). Communists were successfully excluded, but news media still reported both sides of stories and even reported stories unfavorable to Republicans. For example, they reported on Nixon's slush fund, which resulted in the famous "Checkers" speech.

Joe probably never even imagined the possibility of establishing permanent one-party control of every branch of government and every outlet for news. What is allowed to be reported now is much more restricted than it ever was in the McCarthy era. Today, if it's not good for Republicans, it's not news and must be suppressed, ignored, or ridiculed. If they can't completely suppress a story they don't want, they report it quietly and pretend it went away on its own because there was really nothing to it (WMDs, Niger, Gannon, vote suppression, Valerie Plame, the Iraqnam quagmire) or they ridicule it (exit poll discrepancies and conspiracy theorists). Similarly they make up or trumpet blatant dishonesty (the "Dean scream," Swift Boat Liars for Bush).

A couple things have changed significantly since the 1950s, societally and technologically, that affect the workings of the blacklist and its goals.

TV has changed dramatically. Then it was like an offshoot of the stage and theatre with broadcast technology. It had not yet become the primary source of news for most people and it had not yet become the primary non-work activity of people. Today TV has become the opiate of the masses. Since 9/11 the neocons and GOPravda have made fear the methamphetamine of the masses. And TV news combines them into the "opiamphetamine" of the masses, keeping them hyped up, zombied out, dumbed down, and trembling in fear. (For a large portion of the population, fear-based fundamentalist religion adds a second helping of opiamphetamine for the masses.) TV has become a much more effective and all-pervasive tool for control of the masses.

There is a much darker side of how things have changed since then too. In the 1950s the CIA was new, and Eisenhower was just beginning to discover the joys of subverting elections, overthrowing democracies, and assassinating objectionable foreigners. Since then a whole cadre of CIA, ex-CIA, and similar operatives have formed Nixon's plumbers, Negroponte's death squads, North's coke traffickers, and an apparently on-call network of "fixers" of various sorts. The rash of major domestic assassinations in the 1960s caused so much uproar that they have apparently changed tactics from lone gunmen to small plane crashes and "suicides." For the most part, they can silence journalists by "turning" them or firing them, but there are certainly more journalist deaths in this war than in previous wars. If MSNBC won't silence Keith or fire him or turn him into a freak show, then it wouldn't surprise me at all if he has an accident or suddenly turns suicidal. (Not directly related to the blacklist, but on a similar note: If the Democrats stop Bush's extremist court re-nominees, look for Barbara Boxer to become accident-prone or suicidal, especially since Steroid Arnie will appoint her replacement. If I were a life insurance underwriter, I wouldn't approve any amount of any kind of life insurance for Barbara Boxer. Maybe talking about it in advance will give them pause.)

How to break the blacklist

Frankly I'm not optimistic and don't have a lot of what I consider to be good and effective strategies to break it. It's quite possible that Iraq is this generation's Sudetenland, and that the rest of the world is going to have to come up with a Manhattan Project for some new kind of warfare (likely economic) to stop the neocons. Actually today China alone could probably bring the U.S. economy to a standstill if it chose to, but it would suffer significantly from doing so. Eventually the neocons' deliberate destruction of public education (through No Rich Child Left Behind and others) and offshoring of industry will undermine American industry and technology enough that we're no threat to the rest of the world, but that won't make Americans free again.

Nevertheless and FWIW, here are some of my starting ideas on how to undo the blacklist and try to restore real journalism to America:

Make a fuss about and to the so-called mainstream media, or downstream media, or lamestream media, or GOPravda (my recent favorite name for them), or whatever you prefer to call them. Point out every instance of bias. Pester them relentlessly. Let them know that someone knows and is watching. And let them know that it's hurting their bottom line. Tell everyone. Make them pay with dollars.
Alternative network. We need an alternative news network which isn't owned and controlled by neocons, that isn't part of the GOPravda syndicate. AAR is good but is not the answer. We need news, not just talk, and we need radio and TV news. We need liberal talk, but we really really need unbiased news. (Although I'd settle for a liberal news source as a counterweight initially.) Obviously this is a very tough nut to crack, unless someone has a few billion dollars lying around doing nothing. But maybe we could get BBC to stream news shows to the internet. Maybe something will come of the bloggers news consortium that I recently read about. Maybe someone can create an entirely web-based streaming news network. I don't know. We need something.
Give up American-made fake news on GOPravda. Stop watching and listening to censored blacklisted crap from botoxed whores. Get international news from the web or from satellite. Watch only enough to be able to tell them what crap they are and why and how they're crap. Let them (and their sponsors) know that you're not watching any more.
Internet. The internet is to America today what Radio Free Europe was to the Soviet empire, the only source of real news about what's happening. Let foreign news sources know that we're getting our news from them and that we depend on them for the truth. Ask them to stream news on the net and put it on satellite. And, very importantly, warn foreigners that sooner or later they're going to have to come to grips with our neocons. Iraq is not an aberration; it is quite likely our generation's Sudetenland. And Shrubler is not an aberration; he is the founder of permanent one-party rule in America, if the neocons succeed.
Change your habits. Listen to less of the bullshit, and talk back more. Read less bullshit, and write letters to editors and media more. On the rare occasions when someone does something honest and courageous, tell them you appreciate it.
Keep making a fuss. Bring down the media whore conglomerate.

As I said, I don't think that I have great solutions, but perhaps just recognizing what the problem is, that the blacklist is clearly back, can help.

(Dear Agent Mike: The secret message hidden in this post does not advocate, suggest, or otherwise refer to harming in any way any person or property, nor to violating any law. If you figure out the secret message, you'll just laugh at me and kick yourself for having wasted your time. Whoever has ears to hear and eyes to see, let them hear and see. DUers: If you figure out the secret message, please don't post it publicly.)