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Fraggin'

By Bill Shunas

Back in 1973, eight members of VVAW went on trial in Gainesville, Florida, charged with conspiracy to disrupt the Republican Convention in Miami in 1972. They became known as the Gainesville Eight. This was one of a series of trials the government pursued in a weak attempt to disrupt the Vietnam anti-war movement.

I went to Gainesville to work with what we called the Gainesville Eight News Bureau. Our purpose was to put out the VVAW position on the events before, during and after the trial - a trial which lasted about a month. Each day that court was in session we would attend court and then hurry back to our office to prepare a press release about the testimony we had heard that day in court. After about a half an hour, the dozen or more reporters covering the trial would drift over to our office. We'd pass out the press release and answer their questions. Everything was cool, and we were all friendly.

This was a period of time when the Watergate scandal was growing bigger and bigger on the national scene. There was evidence (suppressed by the judge) that the same people involved in the Watergate break-in were also involved in framing the VVAW members in Gainesville. This made us allies with much of the press who were in sympathy with pursuing the Watergate story and hounding Nixon. They were amiable toward us to the point where on more than one occasion I saw a couple of paragraphs I had written for our Gainesville Eight press release appear in the New York Times the next day. I was amused by the whole thing, considering how the press so often misses things we think of as important.

So, if the right wingers were bashing the media about their pursuit of Watergate and their persecution of Nixon back in 1973, they would have been correct. Which is not to say that the media was wrong for doing so. Of course, we on the left know that is not the normal situation. The American media normally has its problems either in ignoring stories of importance or propagandizing for actions harmful to the American people. There are numerous examples of the former. One thinks of the Iran-Contra scandal, a story which was broken by a Lebanese newspaper. Or, remember how the killer disease AIDS was ignored until ACT UP started holding sit-ins in TV newsrooms. On international events like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you can expect a higher quality of news from foreign sources.

As far as the use of media for propaganda, the whole build-up for this Iraq War is an example. With the New York Times in the lead in print media and FOX and CNN in the broadcast sector, they took the word of the Bush administration and Iraqi wannabe leaders and led the chorus to bring us to war for such dubious reasons as WMDs and a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. War is devastation, and when it is unnecessary - to go there is criminal, and this one was aided and abetted by our media. Now that public opinion has turned against the war as well as many in the business class who know how bad the war is for business, the New York Times and all the rest have easily turned against the war.

So now the right-wingers can bash the media as being too liberal (which means that they are now slanting the news against the war). And we on the left will continue to find many faults with both American print media and TV news. This results in defenders of the media haughtily declaring, "See. The right is blasting us, and the left is blasting us. Therefore we're doing good because that means we're in the middle which means we're objective." The logic in this reasoning is absent, but it is a good cover.

I would suggest to you that the problem with this country's media is not that they have bias one way or the other, although they do which is a problem. It is a problem because Watergate times are the exception, and usually their bias is towards the interests of the wealthy people who own them and who pay their bills in the form of advertising revenue. No. Their worst sin is that they don't do their job. Inept. Fickle. Limited. Bought off. These are some of the words you might use to describe their current state.

As a result of this servility and ineptitude, often there is a kind of non-specific, yet general consensus on the part of all mainstream media pertaining to various issues. It's like nobody wants to question the given assumptions. Call it mainstream thought. This is promoted by editorial boards and publishers and no doubt rewarded and encouraged by what we used to call "The Establishment." This so-called democracy is in need of media which brings attention to problems and issues. Instead we get wimpy.

We've gotten ourselves into a war in Iraq with the help of the media. Now a war looms in Iran. Is there mainstream political opposition? There are presidential hopefuls tripping over themselves trying to explain what their position on Iraq really was. And they think it necessary to be tough on the Iran question which they'll have to explain five years from now just like they're trying to explain Iraq today.

My guess is that there are many planners in the military and maybe even some people in the Bush Administration who see a disaster if we get involved in Iran. It would be nice to get those ideas out into the realm of public opinion. Our leading Democratic politicians don't do it. Theoretically our media should do it. Absent that we may muddle down the slippery slope to another unnecessary war. This time in Iran, or if not there, somewhere else. Good media isn't the only answer to preventing an Iran war. It isn't the answer to everything, but too often the nation has to look back and say, "If only we had known."