| http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Pitt062501/pitt062501.html
Chomsky's proof By William Rivers Pitt The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—'indoctrination,' we might say—exercised through the mass media. —Noam Chomsky June 25, 2001—In the early morning hours of Thursday, June 22, 2001, a man named Jared T. Bozydaj took to the streets of New Paltz, New York, with an Intrac Arms 7.62 semi-automatic assault rifle. He fired pointedly at police officers, wounding one officer named Jeffery Quiepo in the arm. The shooting went on for several hours before Bozydaj was disarmed and arrested. Bozydaj was described as being highly upset by the execution of Timothy McVeigh. He apparently had decided to take revenge in McVeigh's name on the police, whom Bozydaj referred to as "control mechanisms for the government." Weapons and literature in his apartment indicated that Bozydaj had been planning this attack for some time. New Paltz is a small community near the Hudson River about an hour north of New York City. The downtown district is filled with small stores, as well as a number of bars that cater to the students of the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz, the campus of which is only a few blocks away from where this shooting occurred. The best word to describe the place is 'quaint.' My girlfriend was born and raised near this town. I have spent many drunken hours with her in the bars that now bear the bullet holes from Bozydaj's rampage. My girlfriend's parents report that much of downtown New Paltz is roped off with yellow police tape today. One can see quite clearly the damage done by Bozydaj's assault rifle, and the police believe it is a miracle that no one was killed. One SUNY student reported that eight bullets passed through her bedroom wall, and said that she would have been shot in the head if her radiator had not deflected the rounds. I discovered this story on the forums of DemocraticUnderground.com, where someone had posted it as a topic for discussion about McVeigh-oriented violence. I forwarded the link, a story from the Zwire news service, to my girlfriend, for obvious reasons. She called her parents and got the story from the ground. The local New Paltz paper, the Times-Herald Record, covered the shooting in detail, and she sent me the link to their story. The next day, my girlfriend called me. "I haven't seen this story in any of the newspapers," she said. "It wasn't on CNN or Peter Jennings last night. Why do you think they aren't reporting this? Some guy shot up my town, and shot a cop. That's news, isn't it?" I am a news junkie, and had myself noticed that this interesting and disturbing story had not appeared anywhere in the national news media. Using the words "New Paltz" and "Bozydaj," I searched The New York Times, an obvious place for this story to appear, and came up empty. I did the same at CNN.com, The Washington Post, ABCNews.com and several other news outlets, and found nothing. A man, motivated by the execution of Timothy McVeigh, had gone on an hours-long shooting rampage directed exclusively at cops in a small New York town with a sophisticated assault rifle. He blew a hole in a cop, and shot hell out of every storefront in the vicinity. He nearly put a bullet through the head of a sleeping college student. Somehow, this was not deemed newsworthy by virtually every major news outlet in America, including the Times of New York, the state where this shooting took place. Why? An immediate explanation is that the editors of these news sources were acting out of a sense of responsibility. For most Americans, the name Timothy McVeigh is synonymous with pure evil. It is likely that a decision was reached among the purveyors of our information that nothing should be published or broadcast that will give ear to those who consider McVeigh a martyred hero. The fear, I suppose, is that if enough of these kinds of stories get out, some of our militia-oriented citizenry will think the Revolution is finally at hand, and take to the streets of their own small burgs with rifles at the ready. This kind of quiet censorship, however, raises some disturbing questions. If unreported McVeigh-motivated shootings like this are happening in New Paltz, where I am lucky enough to have eyes on the ground, where else are they happening, and going unreported? I have no friends in Akron, Butte, Silver Springs, Kissimmee, El Paso, or Needles. Where else in America is violence like this breaking loose? Why are we not being told of it? What else is being withheld? Noted linguist Noam Chomsky has observed many times that the national media is not the information-disbursing entity created by our love for the First Amendment of the Constitution. Rather, the national media is the propaganda wing of the status quo. The national media tells us things in a certain way to keep our eyes on the ground, and to keep us from questioning power too closely. When no other avenue is available to control the masses, the national media simply refuses to inform us at all. We have seen this phenomenon many times in many places. How many of us truly know the level of poverty that exists in America? How many of us know the toll our sanctions in Iraq have taken on the civilian populace of that country? How many of us know the number of dead that were left at the hands of CIA-trained and armed murderers in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration? How many of us truly know the extent to which corporations run the government of this country? Were we told all the facts in unpolished newspaper prose, a howl of outrage the likes of which has never before been heard would rise from the throat of the American populace. This, more than anything, is the reason we are left in our uninformed state of bliss. Were we to be truly informed by the media outlets, so much would change so fast, and so many of those who hold the power and the purse strings would be run out of town on a rail, that the very nature of power in this country would be shattered forever. Those who sup on the teat of the status quo want nothing to do with this. Ergo, we are left in the dark. Such a condition is beyond the concepts of Left or Right. Political affiliation is mere window-dressing in the high apartments of true power in America. One need only look at the corporate connections of Gore and Bush, our last two presidential challengers, to know that party politics doesn't matter a damn at the end of the day. Everything boils down to the central question: who rules? Not us, friends. Not when we are kept safe and uninformed. It is better this way, when the tree-shakers are kept out of the loop. The fact that Mr. Bozydaj's shooting rampage went completely unreported by the national news media, an entity entrusted with informing this vast nation about the truths that happen within its borders, should shake your confidence in what we are told to its foundations. I don't care for Mr. Bozydaj's views, and I despise anyone who would attack police officers with an assault rifle. But, simply put, he happened. We deserve to know. If the news media can report on a consensual relationship between adults for two years, they can report on Mr. Bozydaj. If the news media can report on every school shooting, despite the real danger of inciting copycat outrages, they can report on Mr. Bozydaj. And if they can report the actions of Mr. Bozydaj, they can certainly report other stories, as well. We deserve to know who runs this country. We deserve to know where we are at war, and who is dying. We deserve to know where we have been at war, and whom we killed. We deserve to know who is starving in our country, and why. We deserve to know what happened in Florida. We deserve to know many things we are never told of, or are lied to about. When we are not told, we are deprived of the right and ability to determine the course of this country, as is our purpose as citizens. We all know the dangers of making uninformed decisions, having done so to our woe many times in our daily lives. How many decisions have we made in the name of this nation without all the relevant facts in hand? How many more such decisions will we make? Too often, others do our thinking for us. The story of Mr. Bozydaj is just one example of this phenomenon. If you love this country, fear in your soul what other areas in the life of our country you are not allowed to participate in, simply because someone else decided you didn't need to know. |
