FLAILING AT THE MEDIA

Jeez, readers: I had to get up early in the morning to get these two gripes off my shoulders, but, then, I went to bed early, about 9:30 pm, so to get up at 4:30 am maybe isn’t so early after all. Anyhow, I think my letters to the editor which follow are self explanatory. If not, you can always comment:

Dear Editors,

I noted a hint of apologetics for the Bush administration (and your "US News and World Report" news staff) in one of your “The Week” briefs entitled “Terrorism’s Latest Report Card”. (p. 16) Your editors, in an afterward to the brief, call the growth of Iraq into an Afghanistan-like “melting pot” for jihadists around the world “Another unforeseen result of the war’s messy aftermath”. Italics mine.

Your people must have been focusing on Bush, Wolfowitz, Perle and Cheney because I was certainly hearing and reading in other sources about the possibility that Iraq would become a center for terrorism after our invasion destabilized it long before our illegal invasion of that country made us the world’s newest bad guy. Of course I was out there on the streets doing protest marches with the rest of the nation’s voices of reason at the time too. On the streets one would be likely to hear reason and caution rather than the din of media distortion.

As I now hear it—those most in support of the war and least well informed were listeners to TV and radio, not readers. What happened over there with you guys?

Sincerely from the State of Washington,

Geo


To the powers that be at CPB (Corp. For Public Broadcasting),

Recently I watched your excellent docudrama about the events which occurred in the nation of Rwanda not too many years ago. A touching picture of what can happen when the forces of the right or left stimulate the ignorant mainstream into acts of political violence. The French Revolution comes to mind and the Nazi regime in Germany and communist revolution under Stalin in Russian. And, of course, the current American administration which stampeded the American masses and religious fools into war in Iraqi.

Imagine my surprise, then, to hear that Paul Wolfowitz was to be commenting after the show about Rwanda. Wolfowitz is a neocon who lied to Congress and the American people about various things (including the made up stories of an Iraqi front woman about Saddam’s atrocities) in order to push America into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq. Mr. Wolfowitz, of course, should be tried by international courts for war crimes, but since he comes from one of the currently most powerful nations of the world, he’ll be spared that. As we know, those who win wars are the ones who write its history.

Of course I didn’t listen to Wolfowitz’s lies after your show. I’ve heard enough of them, but public television has been tainted by letting such a discredited person comment on one of its shows as if he were an impartial observer or a scholar or an objective authority on the world scene. I kind of think of him as a Hutu-type sympathizer for worldly aggression by powerful people upon weaker people.

I do understand that your predicament is yet another act of mind control and falsification by the Bush neocons. As I hear it, there is now an information czar in charge there at CPB who will force on public television a sort of equal opportunity for the liars to have their say. I thought we discredited that sort of deal in commercial TV some time back. Isn’t it the same conservative forces who eliminated that practice on commercial TV the ones who are trying to force it onto public TV? What is the reason for their public hypocrisy?

I will not abandon public TV just because of this current political Hutuite aberration. I hope a time will come when the current liars will be out of power and scholarly and objective people will be back in the driver’s seat. Then America will be the “good guy” once more in the world and honest investigation the norm at CPB. Is there anything I can do to alter this propagandistic trend?

Thank you for all the good years, and we’ll survive the present bad ones,

Geo
___________________________________________

“Birth, ancestry and that which you yourself have not achieved can hardly be called your own.” —Greek proverb [A solid argument for boosting the estate tax to 100 percent rather than cutting it.]