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Today's
Stories
March 22, 2005
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Democracy--or is it the US Military--on the March
Greg Moses
A Palm Sunday Chat with Sis Levin
John Farley
Bush's Culture of Life: Let the
Insurance Companies Pull the Plug When the Sick Cost Too Much
Ron Jacobs
Halt
the Anniversary Rallies and Stop the Damn War
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
An
Immoral and Illegal War: Destroying Iraq Isn't Enough for Them
Dave Lindorff
"Saving" Schiavo; Killing the News
James Petras
Fateful
Quadrangle: Cuba and Venezuela Face Off Against the US and Colombia
March 21, 2005
John Walsh
In
the Bars on the Road to Fayettevile: War Support Paper Thin
Werther
The
Legacy of George Kennan, Chief Architect of the Cold War
Mike Stark
Where is the "Culture of Life" in Maryland? Time is
Running Out for Vernon Evans
David Swanson
Feeding
Tubes for the Third World: Put the Hungry into Comas, Then Feed
Them!
James T. Phillips
Happy Meals: Behind the Grill at a Baltimore Diner
Mike Ferner
Serving,
Refusing, Impeaching
Robert Jensen
The World Waits for an Answer
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Threat Greater Than Terrorism
Stew Albert
Vegetable Nation
Website of
the Day
American Press Blotter: Jacko, Terry and Steroids vs. the World
March 19, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Three-Card
Monte and the One-Party State
Tom Reeves
Exposing the Coming Draft: a Draft by Any Other Name is Still
Wrong
Saul Landau
The Grandchildren of Roy Cohn: the Politics of the Repressed
Alan Maass
Making Bankruptcy a Life Sentence
Ron Jacobs
Submit or Else: the Nuclear Demon that Won't Go Awayy
David Green
The Holocaust Industry Comes to the University of Illinois
John Blair
Hey, Dick! I'm Still Free: a Blow for Freedom of Speech in Indiana
Steve Greenfield
The Decline of the Green Party: the Numbers are In
Ben Tripp
Nature isn't Real
Mike Roselle
A History of White People in the Conservation Movement
Joshua Frank
Hope in Red State America: Lessons from the Big Sky Country
Mark Weisbrot
The World Bank: a Bigger Problem Than Wolfowitz
Dave Lindorff
Congress on Steroids
Sarah Schaffer
Lula's Nukes: Bush Bullies Iran, Ignores Brazil's Nuclear Ambitions
Warren Hastings
Why the Queen Should Chop Off Tony Blair's Head for Treason
Poets' Basement
Lodge, Albert. Landau, Engel, Davies, Capaccio
March 18, 2005
Dave Zirin
The
Congressional Urine Testers: Baseball's Theater of the Absurd
Richard Thieme
The
Church Committee Candidate: I was a Victim of the KGB
John Walsh
Misdirecting the Anti-War Movement
David Swanson
Hunger
Striking for a Living Wage at Georgetown
Ben Terrall
In
the Spirit of Rachel Corrie: Confronting Caterpillar in San Leandro
David Boyle
Just Say "No" to Harvard
Dorreen Yellow Bird
Coping with Teen Suicide on the Standing Rock Reservation
Mokhiber /
Weissman
Global Bully Goes to Guatemala
Greg Moses
They
Don't Shoot Donkeys...Do They?
Website of
the Day
800
Protests: Find One Near You
March 17, 2005
Christopher
Brauchli
Rendered
Unto Caesar: the Etymology of Torture
Bill Quigley
The St. Patrick's Four and the Resistance to the War in Iraq
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Herds: Willing to Kick Anyone in the Face
Gary Bass / Adam Hughes
Inside the Bush Budget: Rhetoric vs. Reality
Dave Lindorff
The Incredible Shrinking Coalition
Jude Wanniski
Wolfowitz at the World Bank: a Perfect Fit
Alexander Billet
Irish Republicanism at the Crossroads
John Ross
Wal-Mart
Invades Mexico
Website of the Day
Campus Resistance
March 16, 2005
Ralph Nader
Filling
the Congressional Cop-Out Gap: an Idea for Local Peace Activists
William Cook
Resurrecting the Neo-Con Failures
Kevin Zeese
Two
Years of Occupation: Both US and Iraq are Worse Off
Jackie Corr
Why is Dick Cheney Laughing? The New Tax Cut Patriotism
Alan Maass
Bush's Class War Budget
David R. Kolker
Jailed Without Charges in Haiti
Cindy Ellen
Hill
Speculative Policing in Northern Ireland
Paul Craig
Roberts
America's
Has-Been Economy
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March 22, 2005
Protests, You Say? What Protests?
"Saving"
Schiavo; Killing the News
By
DAVE LINDORFF
The weekend second anniversary of the
start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was marked by demonstrations
large and small around the globe, but here in the U.S. you could
be forgiven for not knowing anything was happening. In the corporate
media, the front pages and TV news programs were dominated by
a demonstration of 30 religious fundamentalists opposed to the
removal of a feeding tube from the brain-dead Terri Schiavo.
Who had time for tens of thousands
of noisome protesters in New York, London, Ankara or Tokyo? Who
had time to pause and reflect on two years of a war that never
should have happened in the first place, that has taken over
100,000 civilian lives, and that has killed over 1500 American
soldiers?
The New York Times, which promotes
itself as the nation's newspaper of record, limited its coverage
of the global and national anti-war protests to two inside photos
and a short caption on Sunday, which focused more on a small
demonstration by two dozen people in Times Square than on a large
march and demonstration that began in Harlem, continued to Central
Park, and ended up at the mayor's house. (The Times Square demo,
a block from the paper's offices, was a cheaper assignment, I
guess, and had the advantage of touting the paper's name for
free.) The paper's "Week in Review" shamelessly ignored
the protests completely.
CNN ignored the anti-war protests
completely too, likewise preferring to blow its daily news budget
Saturday and Sunday on the Shiavo flap and the sad tale of the
rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl, allegedly by a paroled
 sex offender.
Most outrageously, no major
media covered the remarkable 4500-person protest in Fayetteville,
North Carolina outside Ft. Bragg, which featured large numbers
of former military personnel marching against the war, including
Camilo Mejia, recently released from 9 months in a military brig
for desertion from his army unit (he refused to return to Iraq
after doing one tour there, saying it was an illegal, immoral
war of aggression).
Apparently, like Congress,
where Democrats and Republicans alike have spent more time fulminating
over and interfering in the issue of when to let poor Schiavo
die than on the matter of providing another $82 billion in funding
for the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Iraq, the corporate
media feel that the sad plight of one lone woman on a feeding
tube is more important than the lives of 150,000 U.S. servicemen
and 30 million Arabs and Kurds.
In Philadelphia, where several
hundred demonstrators from a variety of organizations marched
in a cold rain on Sunday from a historic Quaker meeting house
to the city's Federal Courthouse opposite Independence Hall,
the city's main media outlet, the Philadelphia Inquirer, following
the Times' lead, limited coverage of the event in its Monday
edition to an inside page of the Local News section. Ironically,
the biggest headline on page one was "March On"-about
the weekend NCAA playoff victories of the Villanova men's and
Temple University women's basketball teams. The other banner
headline in the Inquirer's Monday edition was about Congress
approving the Schiavo bill, while below the fold was an article-belied
by the reality of the ignored protests-headlined "Iraq war
fades from student activists' focus."
Yeah, right.
It should more appropriately
have said, "Coverage of Iraq war protests fade from editors'
focus," but then that would have implied that editors at
the Inquirer, CNN and the Times and other mainstream media organizations
had paid attention to anti-war protests before, which was certainly
not the case.
Even the massive rallies and
marches by hundreds of thousands of people on the eve of the
war and during its early days received scant and grudging coverage
in the mainstream media.
Still, the deliberate burying
of news about mounting opposition to the war--as evidenced by
demonstrations across the country and around the globe this past
weekend-represents a new low in the supine complicity of the
mass media in supporting Washington's and Wall Streets' imperial
agenda.
Faced with a government that
has ignored public protests, seemingly with impun ity, and with
a media that simply blacks out information that it deems to be
outside the narrow confines of legitimate political discourse,
it is easy to give in to discouragement and frustration, as many
have. But perhaps things are not as bad as they seem. The decentralized
protests of the weekend, while they didn't make the evening news
or the morning papers, were visible and had impact in the hundreds
of cities and communities in which they took place. The alternative
media continues to have a growing presence and influence. And
somehow, pools show that a majority of Americans now agree that
the war was a mistake and that the U.S. should leave Iraq now.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new
book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage
Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
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