ABC Is Now Exposed for What They Are - Democratic Underground

Time for change

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Fri Sep-08-06 07:40 AM
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ABC Is Now Exposed for What They Are

Edited on Fri Sep-08-06 07:42 AM by Time for change

The veil is now gone. The pretense that ABC is a news organization is gone. The myth of the “liberal news media” is dead.

Our national corporate news media have been screwing the Democrats and our country for years. They receive free licenses from the federal government and in return they have the responsibility to provide news in “the public interest”. Yet they don’t care at all about that sacred responsibility. Instead, they use their privilege to provide slanted news that ensures that pro-corporate Republicans will stay in power and in return will enact legislation that ensures ever more accumulation of wealth and power to themselves. It now should be evident to all: ABC “News” is not a news organization. Rather, they are a propaganda machine that exists for the benefit of their parent corporation.

ABC’s so-called “docudrama” of the 9-11 attacks, which they intend to air this Sunday, should prove all of this once and for all. They are about to air a film that pretends to be informative and based on facts. Yet it should be abundantly clear by now that ABC’s only purpose in airing “The path to 9-11” is to influence this November’s elections in favor of the Republican Party. Over the past several years they have perpetrated one outrage after another (along with much of the rest of the corporate news media). This time they have hopefully gone too far and unmasked themselves. This should be the end of the great myth of the “liberal media”.

The film’s chief script writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is an ultra-conservative political hack and friend of Rush Limbaugh. The film was shown only to a conservative audience. The executive producer of the film is a member of the Bush administration’s PR team. ABC provided right wing bloggers with an advanced copy of the film, while excluding progressive bloggers from participating in a conference call about the film. And when faced with mounting criticism of the file, they yanked the official film blog in an effort to cut off further discussion. The film has been criticized by Richard Clarke, the man in charge of counter-terrorism during the time in question, as being inaccurate and biased. It has been disavowed by Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9-11 Commission. It has been criticized as inaccurate by members of the Clinton administration with first hand knowledge of the matter, and ex-President Clinton’s lawyer has written a letter to ABC that explains in detail how the film deviates from the truth as contained in the 9-11 Commission Report – and yet ABC continues to refuse to let anyone from the Clinton administration view the film. An FBI agent who consulted on the film resigned as a consultant because ABC refused to remove the inaccuracies. And the families of the 9-11 victims have criticized ABC for impairing the ability to compose an historically accurate accounting of the facts surrounding the 9-11 attacks because of their insistence on mixing revisionist history with entertainment.

Yet after all of this ABC remains obstinate. Their lame excuse for continuing to plan to air the film is that it is not a documentary, but a “dramatization”. Yet they still claim that it is based on the 9-11 Commission Report, which clearly is a lie, and they even bill it as a “public service.”

This is just the latest in a long line of abuses of their public trust

Consider how ABC’s daily political briefing, The Note, has handled a series of issues, as described by Eric Boehlert in “Lapdogs”:

They made a great big deal out of the trial of Senator Hillary Clinton’s former campaign finance director, David Rosen, for his handling of a fundraiser during Clinton’s 2000 campaign for the Senate, writing about it for 14 days in one month, including this entry: “The Justice Department case against David Rosen, national finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, is getting stronger … which could be disastrous for the Senator’s ambitions.” Yet when Rosen was acquitted they didn’t find that news important enough to mention.

When the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” (SBVFT) came out with their transparently phony allegations against John Kerry, right before the 2004 Presidential election, The Note posted nearly a hundred links to the story during one 17 day stretch. And when the New York Times published the results of an investigation which identified the Republican operatives behind the story, as well as many of the contradictions in the stories of SBVFT, The Note mocked the Times story as irrelevant.

But any news unfavorable to Republicans is either ignored or criticized by The Note. With regard to the Iraq war, they lost interest after things began turning sour, and they mocked the Downing Street Memo (“The left is unappeasable on the issue of the Downing Street Memo”) and Cindy Sheehan. They dismissed stories of Ken Starr’s conflict of interest during his investigation of Bill Clinton. They ignored the Jeff Gannon story and the news of Karl Rove’s role in the CIA leak investigation. They put positive spin on Bush’s handling of the Katrina disaster. And as the story of Tom DeLay’s corrupt activities began to emerge, The Note had this to say:

There is an iron triangle of liberal interest groups, Democratic congressional staffers, and media jackals… who have never identified with or liked Tom DeLay (and what he stands for) and are enjoying every minute of their conspiring to bring him down. Almost every accusation swirling around DeLay involves actions by him that have exact analogues among other members of Congress of both parties.

The list goes on and on. The main difference between ABC and FOX News would appear to be that ABC does a better job of pretending to be a real news organization, rather than a propaganda machine for the Republican Party.

What now?

I am so happy to see the Democrats responding aggressively to the outrage that ABC intends to start propagating on Monday. After years of being subjected to all means of abuse by the corporate news media, this may be the closest thing to open warfare between them and the Democratic Party that has yet occurred.

I believe that that is a good thing. The Democrats have undergone the torture of a thousand cuts by the corporate media over the last several years. They are in a terrible dilemma because, given the great power of our corporate news media, attacking them poses great risks.

Yet, Democrats may have no reasonable alternative choice other than to come out swinging against the corporate media. If not for consistently biased news coverage the Democrats would now control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, and be represented by a much more progressive U.S. Supreme Court (by at least two seats) than we now have. The Democrats are the Party of the people, and the Republicans are the Party of the corporations, the wealthy and the powerful. A great deal of their power rests with the slanted news of the corporate news media, without which they would either have to begin to adopt a pro-people agenda or they could not win another election.

It may be that Democrats now have an opportunity to go over the heads of those who provide biased news to our country, directly to the people, to expose our corporate media for what they are. I pray that they can do that.