-Caveat Lector-
I don't know of this sort of thing is of any interest to
this group, but Carla Binion is a powerful, clear, and
articulate new (?) voice and I think she sums up the
situation remarkably well.
Who Are The Fringe People?:
Media and Protests 3
By Carla Binion
In Bush's inaugural speech, which he did not write,
he spoke soaringly of our nation's fate being led by
angels in whirlwinds (or was it sugarplum fairies?)
and of including all Americans. However, in an
MSNBC interview aired the night before the inaugural,
Bush dismissed the vast number of Americans
opposed to Ashcroft and other Cabinet nominations,
describing his opponents as "fringe people" (his
exact words).
Who are the fringe people? The term is vaguely
scary, invoking images of wild, hairy Neanderthals,
peering from caves with spooky intentions of
rising up and doing heaven-knows-what to the
agenda of the wealthy.
Bush became teary-eyed during the inaugural, but
where are his tears for the millions of folks he and his
media bulldogs routinely batter and malign, the so-
called fringe? His speech writers and think tanks put
shimmering words of unity and love into his mouth,
but the actual unspun Bush-brain lets slip his true
prejudices.
Fringe is dictionary-defined as "a marginal or minor
part," and "at the outer edge." Bush and his
mainstream media mouthpieces repeatedly
describe all dissenting environmentalists, African-
Americans, women's rights organizations and civil
liberties groups as "far leftwing fringe."
Most Americans know that groups such as the Sierra
Club, the NAACP, the National Organization for
Women and People for the American Way are
neither far leftwing nor fringe. Most of us also realize
that not all Americans opposed to the Bush
appointees and agenda (yours truly included,
FYI) are members of any organized political group, far
leftwing or
otherwise.
In fact, the people in favor of environmental
protection legislation, legal justice for minorities and
women, and laws protecting civil liberties are the
American mainstream. Robert W. McChesney writes
about the difference between the interests of the
majority of Americans and the interests of the small
minority of wealthy special interests represented
by the likes of the Bush team.
McChesney is a media critic and a research professor
in the Institute of Communications Research and the
Graduate School of Library and Information
Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. He says: "The needs of the minuscule
investor class can never be equated with the
needs of the citizenry or with the foundations of a
democracy."
Bush and Company would like us to believe they
represent "the American people." In fact, they
represent only about one to five percent of the
people. The remainder of us are fringe.
Robert McChesney says of the miniscule ruling class,
"some go so far as to present democracy as being
defined first and foremost by individual
freedoms to buy and sell property and the right to
invest for profit. That there is any distinction
between those liberties and the democratic
right to free speech, free press, and free assembly is
dismissed categorically."
The Bush team and the mainstream media folks who
promote their views, equate market rights with
political freedom and capitalism with democracy,
a corrolation McChesney rightly calls absurd. Many
nations, McChesney notes, have protected market
rights while "having little respect for any other civil
liberties."
How does the Republican party, which exists to
protect the financial interests of a small minority of
Americans, convince ordinary working people to
support their policies? In a word: avertising. In a less
charitable word: propaganda.
The Republican party spends millions on campaign
ads and takes advantage of free TV time to present
itself as the party of "character." As journalist Bill
Greider says ("Who Will Tell The People," 1992), the
Republican party "poses as the bullwark against
unsettling modernity."
Republicans, says Greider, advertise themselves as
defenders against "alien forces within society that
threaten to overwhelm decent folk -- libertine sexual
behavior, communists, criminals, people of color
demanding more than they deserve." In doing so, the
Republican leadership pretends to care more about
sexual behavior than they actually do, and they play
on fears and prejudices regarding race and class.
Somehow Republicans also manage to convince their
working class supporters that their tax cuts and
other economic plans benefit average working
folks. However, those cuts demonstrably shift the tax
burden from the very wealthy onto the backs of lower
and middle income Americans.
Rush Limbaugh and other media voices of rightwing
outrage give Republicans a virtually non-stop
propaganda vehicle. However, the Limbaugh types
are not the only media promoters of the economic
interests of the wealthiest Americans.
In "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine
American Democracy," journalist James Fallows
writes: "Until about the mid-1960s, journalism
was essentially a high working-class activity. In big
cities the typical reporter would make about as much
as the typical cop."
Fallows says before the mid-60s, reporters often
expressed "an instinctive pro-little guy outlook." He
quotes Washington Post correspondent Richard
Harwood, "In the early times, we were not only
describing the life of normal people, we were
participating in it....Most of the reporters came
from the lower middle class, which is where the
readers and most of the subjects came from too."
Starting in the mid-1960s, newspapers began to hire
better-educated, higher-paid reporters, and salaries
of TV journalists moved into the multi-millions.
Fallows says we can not generalize about the media,
since it "contains both Diane Sawyer, who is paid $7
million per year by ABC, and the reporter in Wichita
who earns $24,000 (which is less than Sawyer
gets per working day.)"
However, their economic climb means that many
journalists identify with, and promote the interests of,
the very wealthy. The press, says Fallows,
sympathized with NAFTA and GATT, trade treaties
which benefitted the wealthy but caused job losses
for lower-income Americans.
Fallows quotes Charles Peters, editor of the
Washington Monthly: "It is a major problem that
journalists have come to identify with the
rich or upper middle class rather than with the poor.
It has a tremendous effect on what they're interested
in reporting. Because they are identifying up, their
first thought is how the situation would look from
the top rather than how it would look from the
bottom," says Peters.
Is it any wonder we fringe people -- in reality, the vast
majority of Americans -- and our concerns are all but
invisible on mainstream TV news programs? In
"Unreliable Sources," (Carol Publishing Group, 1992)
journalists Norman Solomon and Martin A. Lee say
that the liberal media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting) once did a forty
month study of Ted Koppel's Nightline program.
FAIR viewed 865 programs with 2,498 guests. A full
80 percent of Nightline's guests were professionals,
government officials or corporate representatives.
Only five percent were public interest spokespeople,
meaning, for example, environmental, peace or
consumer advocates. Fewer than two percent were
labor leaders or members of racial/ethnic
organizations.
When programs did address economic issues,
"corporate representatives outnumbered labor
spokespeople seven-to-one." The FAIR study said
that based on the 2,498 guests and the subject
matter of the 865 programs: "Nightline serves as an
electronic soapbox from which white, male, elite
representatives of the status quo can present their
case. Minorities, women, and those with challenging
views are generally excluded." Nightline is typical of
TV news talk shows, including those on Fox, MSNBC,
CNBC and CNN.
Robert McChesney lists subjects TV news talk shows
fail to explore:
(1) Military spending. The U. S. spends billions on the
military "for no publicly debated or accepted reason,"
says McChesney. However, military spending serves
the wealthiest Americans by providing lucrative
corporate welfare.
(2) The fact that "by 1998, discounting home
ownership, the top 10 percent of the population
claimied 76 percent of the nation's net worth,
and more than half of that is accounted for by the
richest 1 percent."
(3) The fact that the rate of incarceration in the U. S.
"has more than doubled since the late 1980s, and the
United States now has five times more prisoners per
capita than Canada and seven times more than
Western Europe....Nearly 90 percent of prisoners are
jailed for nonviolent offenses, often casualties of the
so-called drug war."
This third media-neglected category merits a little
extra attention. Corporate-owned prisons often force
prisoners to work for little or no pay thus turning
prisoners into virtual slave labor. Around 50 percent
of U. S. prisoners are African-American.
McChesney refers to attorney Barry Scheck's "Actual
Innocence" (Doubleday, 2000.) According the
Scheck, DNA testing has overturned scores of
convictions and has proved that significant numbers
of prisoners are innocent.
Amnesty International "United States of America --
Rights for All," October 1998, reports that a
significant number of wrongly convicted people have
been released from prison over the past thirty years.
(David McGowan, "Derailing Democracy: The America
The Media Don't Want You To See," Common Courage
Press, 2000.)
According to Robert McChesney, the U. S. is "rapidly
approaching rates of incarceration associated with
the likes of Hitler and Stalin." The fact should
concern civil liberties advocates, because our justice
system is demonstrably stacked against the poor and
is blind to corporate crime.
In 2000, says McChesney, a man received sixteen
years in prison for stealing a Snickers candy bar.
However, four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd.
were found guilty of trying to suppress and eliminate
business competition in "what the Justice
epartment called perhaps the largest criminal
antitrust conspiracy in history." They received easily
affordable fines and prison terms from three to four
months.
Why does it matter to average working Americans
that the military squanders our national fortune only
to funnel billions toward corporate welfare? Why is it
important to fringe people that the George W. Bush
team wants to divert the wealthy's tax burden onto
average Americans in the name of a "tax cut?"
Why should ordinary citizens care that, according to
the Atlantic Monthly ("The Prison-Industrial
Complex," December 1998), "The United States now
imprisons more people than any other country in the
world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist
China," and that the U. S. incarceration rate
remained stable for the first three quarters of the last
century until it began "doubling in the 1980s and
then again in the 1990s."
We should care because, for example, the billions of
our own tax dollars wasted on questionable military
spending or funneled to the rich could
instead be used to cure cancer or AIDS, provide the
over 44 millions of uninsured Americans with health
insurance, and otherwise improve the quality of life
for average folks.
We should care because, as Robert McChesney
points out, the rapidly growing corporate owned
prison-industrial complex indicates human and
civil liberties abuses of dimensions that "should be
highly disturbing and the source of public debate."
George W's dad once accused his political opponent,
Michael Dukakis, of being "a card carrying member of
the ACLU," implying that Bush, Sr., saw the ACLU's
defense of civil liberties as a marginal "commie"
threat. Evidently, George W. sees fringe people in
much the same way.
When G. W. Bush speaks of angels and unity in one
breath, and dismisses the actual American
mainstream as fringe people in another, we should
notice the forked tongue. We wild, hairy
Neanderthals, we scary fringe folk, should leap from
our caves, shake our rattles toward the skies by
creating our own news media, and give the miniscule
investor class something to really be afraid of --
namely the simple raw truth.
sno0wl
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