UNDERNEWS Sam Smith July 16, 1999 The Progressive Review 1739 Conn. Ave. NW Washington DC 20009 202-232-5544 Fax: 202-234-6222 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] INDEX: http://prorev.com RECENT UNDERNEWS: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm TODAY'S HEADLINE NEWS: http://prorev.com/altnews.htm THE REVIEW FORUM: http://prorev.com/letters.com DONATIONS AND ORDER FORM: http://prorev.com/order3.htm UNSUBSCRIBE: Reply with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. For a free subscription to our e-mail updates send your postal address with zip code. Copyright 1999, The Progressive Review. Matter not independently copyrighted may be reprinted provided TPR is paid your normal reprint fees, if any, and is given proper credit. Because of its quantity, TPR's mail is not always answered, but it is always read. The editor is cheered or remorseful as appropriate and posts some of the more interesting messages at http://prorev.com/letters.htm ---------------------------------------------------------- WORD The Governor is now free to blow other candidates out of the political water well before the voters of this country even get their fair say. This may signal the end of the notion that money can't buy an election. -- Ellen Miller of Public Campaign on George Bush's rejection of federal matching funds. PUBLIC CAMPAIGN http://publicampaign.org TRENCHCOAT MEDIA A yo who shot Rudy in broad daylight for cash. I woke up this morning and heard the news flash They said it happened down at City Hall He had his wife with him Five shots from the crowd made him fall It was chaos and pandemonium Blood covered up the podium When they announced his death Wifey was stressed. -- Song by Screwball forthcoming on the Time-Warner-distributed Tommy Boy label. According to Insight, the song also mentions "blacks smiling ear to ear" and adds "the devil died and nobody cried." LOOK WHAT JAMES CARVILLE BROUGHT ME FROM ISRAEL Speaking of the pending arrival of Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak, W.J. Clinton said that he was as "eager as a kid with a new toy." Asked an Israeli reporter of the President at a news conference, "What kind of game do you want to play with Mr. Barak?" Explained the Wizard of Is: "It's a slogan, you know, in the way, in American English it means, 'I am very excited about the prospect of the rejuvenation of the peace process," and that's all it means." As in: "That's a great new car you've got, Joe" "Thanks. I am very excited about the prospect of the rejuvenation of the peace process." Barak, incidentally, was advised during the campaign by James Carville who, among other things, told him that the election would come down to a question of who won the Jewish vote. PROBABLY LEARNED IT FROM THE PACIFICA BOARD MSNBC: Don�t be surprised if you hear mostly nice things about Tom Cruise in connection with �Eyes Wide Shut.� At a recent junket promoting the movie, the star�s publicist insisted that all reporters granted access to the star had to sign contracts that gave the publicist control over what the reporters could say about Cruise and when they could say it. Most startling, perhaps, was the contract�s stipulation that �the interview and the program will not show the artist in a negative or derogatory manner.� WAR AGAINST PACIFICA What is happening to Pacifica broadcasting is unprecedented in American media history -- although not, of course, in dictatorships. Nothing gives the feel of the anti-democratic pathology of the Pacifica board than the audio of the forced removal of Dennis Bernstein. On July 13, KPFA host Bernstein was fired after broadcasting a press conference on the controversy surrounding Pacifica Radio. Guards, hired by Pacifica management, were ordered to remove Bernstein from the station. He refused to go. There is a recording of what ensued shortly afterwards in the control room while KPFA was broadcasting its evening news. KPFA news co-host/director Mark Mericle began explaining the situation to listeners -- as you will hear -- but Pacifica management pulled the plug. After a few minutes of silence the station began broadcasting archive tape. KPFA TAPE http://www.igc.org/MakingContact/ If the 50-year-old Pacifica tradition of independent broadcasting is destroyed by its board it will mean the end of America's major non-establishment radio voice. Not only will this effect Pacifica's own stations, but the three-score independent community radio stations around the country that rely on Pacifica's news and information feeds. THE MEDIA LOCK-DOWN One of the least reported -- for obvious reasons -- aspects of the Clinton regime has been in its massive subversion, seduction, and assault on the press. Media executives such as Mort Zuckerman, Rick Kaplan, and Tina Brown have been enticed or willingly signed up as press agents of the administration. Critical journalists have been subject to bad-mouthing, false accusations, and worse. At least eight journalists covering the Clinton scandals have been fired, transferred off the beat, resigned or otherwise gotten into trouble because of their work (Doug Frantz, Jim Wooten, Richard Behar, Christopher Ruddy, Michael Isikoff, David Eisenstadt, Yinh Chan, Jonathan Broder). A top Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, has served as a network anchor, and others like Deedee Myers and Lannie Davis have been regularly featured in journalistic roles. Government agitprop experts have been installed as heads of NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Public broadcasting stations have shared their mailing lists with the Democratic National Committee. And a Clinton-connected official was named chair of the Pacifica board. The black-run Washington public radio station -- one of the very few in the country -- was sold to C-SPAN following the takeover of Washington by the Clinton-appointed and anti-democratic control board. A personal note: Over the past seven years, I have learned a bit of what it feels like to be a dissident journalist working in an undemocratic country. Not long after I began writing critically of the president (including the first book to challenge the Clinton myth), my life started changing. I was no longer invited on certain shows. A local NPR station talk show host banned me from his program but refused to tell listeners why (He's gone, but after a one-show reprieve, I find myself banned again, apparently by management). I was scheduled to appear on C-SPAN, as I had done a number of times pre-Clinton, but late on a Friday the host called to say that the company had decided "to go in a different direction" for the Monday morning program -- media talk for "someone upstairs didn't want you." Later this host lost his job. When I gave what some people thought was a helluva good speech at an anti-war rally during the NATO summit, the talk was removed by C-SPAN from its taped coverage. When I mentioned to a Washington Post reporter that I thought I had been blacklisted there, she replied off-handedly, "I suppose you have." Those inclined to write all this off to paranoia should consider this: I'm a native Washington who covered my first story here as a conventional reporter in 1957 and have been an alternative hell-raising journalist for the past 27 years. Only in the last seven years has anything remotely like this happened. And only in the last seven years have at least a score of people asked me whether I was worried about my personal safety. Something has definitely changed and it ain't me. THE REVIEW LIST Riskometer ratings [The Guardian reports that Frank Duckworth, in a presentation to the Royal Statistical Society annual conference at Warwick University, unveiled his paper, A Simple Scale of Risk to the Public. Duckworth is already famous in the stat frat for having invented an International Nuclear Event Scale in which every nuclear site incident is given a rating. His riskometer works on the same logarithmic basis as the Richter scale. All numbers are relative to the risk of simply living on planet earth for a year, which is set at zero.] 0.3 100-mile train journey 2.0 100 fairground rides 4.6 Murder (for a new born male) 5.5 Death by vacuum cleaning or washing up 6.4 Deep sea fishing 8.0 Imminence of death by suicide JUST POLITICS -- Health insurance industry media spending so far this year: nearly $20 million -- Labor-physician media spending on health-care issues so far this year: $750,000 -- Spending by a coalition of employers and insurance companies for a two-week campaign against the Democratic healthcare bill: $1 million. -- Spending by Aetna for two 2-page ads in the Washington Post during the Senate debate: $200,000 [New York Times] PACIFICA FACTS Ken McCarthy Brasscheck 1. The Pacifica Board does not own KPFA. The Pacifica Foundations does. The board are mere custodians who are supposed to be serving the interests of the foundation which includes the pursuit of its highest ideals. 2. The Pacifica Foundation was founded by Lewis Hill in 1949. Hill, a pacifist who registered as a conscientious objector at the outbreak of World War II, worked as a Washington DC correspondent before moving to California where he founded KPFA. He served as Pacifica's head until his death in 1957. He stated his intentions for the form Pacifica stations should take very clearly. 3. Pacifica is the oldest listener supported radio system in the US and was a pioneer of the "talk radio" format which invited live listener call ins. 4. For the last 50 years, Pacifica radio has been one of the very few broadcast outlets that accurately reports on the war-based economy of the United States and its effects both at home and abroad. In exchange for providing this unique reporting, listeners have funded the operation of Pacifica stations with donations as well as substantial amounts of volunteer labor - for 50 unbroken years. Pacifica stations have also widely reported on the details of government corruption including but not limited to the sponsor of terror in the Third World and the tolerance of drug trafficking by US allies and in some cases government employees. The rampant criminality of the Clinton administration has been covered at length and in depth as well. 5. The current Board of Trustees - headed by Clinton's appointee to the US Civil Rights Commission - has decided that the system that has produced this uninterrupted stream of information for the past 50 years is theirs to be manipulated in any way they see fit without answering to anybody: the staff, the volunteers, or the listener-supporters. 6. When people talk about Pacifica being "corporatized" or refer to the current conflict as a "labor dispute" they are greatly understating what is taking place. The correct term is "censorship." Programs, reporters, producers, and an entire culture of ethical, listener sponsored journalism, is, at the hands of the current board, in the process of being gutted station by station. 7. Hill knew that giving individuals, not program directors and sponsors, and certainly not board members, real authority over programming was the *only* way to generate worthwhile content. Here's what he said on the matter: "...to get any real art or any significant communication, one must rely entirely on individuals, and must resign himself to accept not only their uniqueness but the possibility that the individual may at any time fail. By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry reduces the risk of failure (abnormality) and assures itself a standard product for mass consumption." - Lewis Hill 8. Hill intended not only that individual hosts and commentators be free to speak their mind, but that the very structure of the stations be designed to insure that they are free to do so. BRASSCHECK http://brasscheck.com HISTORY OF PACIFICA'S FOUNDING http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Communications/KPFA/about/about.pacifica SAVE PACIFICA http://www.savepacifica.net DRUG BUSTS A Molalla OR police department program that encourages parents to bring in their children for free drug testing will likely expand statewide this year. The two-year-old program, believed to be the first of its kind in the country, screens participants at police headquarters for various drugs, and reports its findings within 15 minutes. NORML's Allen St. Pierre remarked, "Parents intent on evaluating their children's excrement for evidence of past drug use can go to any major drug chain store and purchase a private drug test, rather than expose their children to the criminal justice system and its structural infirmities." THE ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE AND WONDERFUL AL GORE (CONT'D) "I certainly learned a great deal from 3,000 town hall meetings across my home state of Tennessee over a 16-year period." -- Al Gore in NPR interview. Number of days between town hall meetings if above is accurate: 1.95 THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW 1739 Connecticut Ave NW Washington DC 20009 202-232-5544 202-234-6222 Fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] Editor: Sam Smith INDEX : http://prorev.com RECENT UNDERNEWS : http://prorev.com/indexa.htm TODAY'S HEADLINES: http://prorev.com/altnews.htm THE REVIEW FORUM: http://prorev.com/letters.htm For a free trial subscription to both our bi-monthly hard copy edition and our regular e-mail updates send e-mail and terrestrial address to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To order "Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual" (WW Norton) direct from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393316270/progressiverevieA/
