[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Cockburn/StClair's media book reviewed

[Patrick Bond]

End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate

A Review of Alexander Cockburn's and Jeffrey St. Clair's End Times

By Stephen Lendman

05/17/07 "ICH" -- -- Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are both 
veteran journalists and authors doing the kind of muckraking political 
and other investigative writing only found in the US online and in 
out-of-the-mainstream publications and political newsletters like the 
one they co-publish and edit - CounterPunch with its counterpart web 
site of the same name.

Cockburn is also a regular columnist with The Nation magazine, and his 
writings appear regularly in the New York Free Press and Los Angeles 
Times. He formerly wrote extensively for numerous other publications as 
well including the Wall Street Journal's far right editorial page oddly 
in the 1980s when its late editor Bob Bartley decided to have an 
alternate point of view and certainly got an exceptional one the mirror 
opposite of the array of extremist hard right contributors he allowed 
regular space to all the time as does his successor today. Cockburn's 
also authored, co-authored and co-edited 18 books, the latest one being 
"End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate," along with co-author St. 
Clair, and subject of this review.

St. Clair has authored, co-authored and co-edited 10 books including his 
powerful and extraordinary post-9/11 2005 expose of war profiteering - 
Grand Theft Pentagon - Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War 
on Terror. He's also worked as an environmental organizer and activist, 
writes for the environmental magazine Forest Watch, the Anderson Valley 
Advertiser, and has written for Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action 
Project and his native state Hoosier Environmental Council. In addition, 
he's a contributing editor of In These Times magazine and has written 
for The Nation, The Progressive, New Left Review and other publications.

End Times - A Collection of Essays from Cockburn and St. Clair On the 
Dismal State of the Dominant Print Media

"End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate" is a collection of 50 
wide-ranging essays written in recent years under six topic headings, 
mostly by Cockburn and St. Clair with a few by other contributors, on 
the dismal state of the corporate print media today. They were dominant 
at their zenith in the mid-1970s Pentagon Papers - Watergate era but 
now, the authors say, are in an inevitable state of decline agreeing 
with media mogul (Cockburn-labeled "WORLD-SCALE MONSTER") Rupert 
Murdock's characterization of a long twilight at best.

Even more, their current state is symptomatic of our overall societal 
decay with unprecedented wealth disparities, the nation in endless wars 
of illegal aggression, predatory corporate giants ruling the world, and 
our democracy on life support heading for the crematorium to be heralded 
on arrival in front page coverage of the nation's leading purveyors of 
"news unfit to print." This review covers the authors account of their 
decline at a time noted historian Gabriel Kolko calls "the most 
dangerous period in mankind's entire history" when the kind of news and 
information we most need isn't served up by the dominant fourth estate 
suppressing it in service to power. The essence and flavor of the book 
is covered with selected examples from it in an age of media 
concentration, deregulation and "in-bed-with" journalists posing as the 
real thing.

The book came out at a time public distrust for traditional print and 
electronic news is increasing as growing numbers of people, hungry for 
real information, are turning to alternate sources including a new, 
vibrant world of them online like CounterPunch the authors say gets 
around three million daily hits, 300,000 page views, and 100,000 unique 
visitors including 15,000 regular US military readers stationed around 
the world, a sign many thousands more of them visit other sites like 
CounterPunch and pass on what they learn to others. A hopeful, but not 
certain, indication of a growing trend too powerful to stop. More on 
that at the end.

The Fourth Estate "tremble for Power," the authors state, acting instead 
as "Accomplices in the great and ongoing Cover-up of Everything that 
Really Matters" that destroys their reliability to deliver real news and 
information. Still, as End Times contributor Ken Silverstein (co-founder 
with Alex Cockburn of CounterPunch in 1993) writes, there were moments 
when broadsheet papers like the Washington Post (New York Times and 
others) did what their readers want and expect - their job reporting the 
news and enough of it in depth from investigative work unimaginable 
today in an age of lies, cover-up and "journalism" being just another 
profit center. Silverstein cites late fall 1974 as the Washington Post's 
time of "supreme triumph" post-Watergate after reporters Woodward and 
Bernstein took credit toppling Richard Nixon who did a pretty good job 
doing it to himself the way George Bush is trying to match today.

 From its brief time of triumph forward, it's been all downhill since 
with the corporate media now concentrated and dominant and little more 
than our national thought-control police gatekeepers daily serving up a 
full plate of pap and propaganda suppressing real news "fit to print" 
but hardly ever is or at least where it's easy to find. That's the 
dismal state of the prominent print press today End Times writes about 
drawing lots of blood dissecting it, example by example, showing it's 
doing what 1920s intellectual writer and dean of journalists in his day, 
Walter Lippmann, called the "manufacture of (public) consent" in a 
nominally democratic state where it can't be done by force.

"Manufacturing Consent" was the title used by Edward Herman and Noam 
Chomsky for their landmark 1988 book explaining the dominant media's 
"propaganda model" to program the public mind to go along with whatever 
agenda best serves the power structure. It was also the subject noted 
author, academic and social critic Michael Parenti chose for his 1986 
book "Inventing Reality" explaining how they "set(ting) the agenda, 
defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or reject (by) 
defining the scope of respectable political discourse, channeling public 
attention in directions that are essentially supportive of the existing 
political-economic system." In other words, the idea is to make us 
submissive good citizens willing to go along with whatever agenda the 
supreme rulers of the universe wish even if their interests harm ours.

Today, prominent broadsheets like the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, 
Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Times (along with 
publications they own) have a virtual stranglehold on mass print 
communication along with major publishers of large-scale circulation 
magazines like Time and US News and World Report. They're able to use 
their reach and influence (even ebbing) to destroy the free marketplace 
of ideas vital to a healthy democracy now on life support at best in 
large measure from the damage these papers and magazines inflict on the 
body politic.

The Washington Post's Fall from Grace

Ken Silverstein explained "The Fall of the Washington Post" when 
Katherine Graham ran the paper and in 1974 signaled Watergate-type 
exposes and similar reporting no longer were welcome in the press she 
felt "should....be rather careful about its role." She called for a 
return to basics with journalists behaving more deferentially to the 
powerful figures they covered. And so they have with assistant managing 
editor Bob Woodward of Watergate fame now fawning over George Bush in 
books like Bush at War and Plan of Attack, former Fed chairman Alan 
Greenspan in Maestro, and others best ignored.

Cockburn and St. Clair continue the saga in Woodward at Court saying 
first off "It's been a devastating fall for what are conventionally 
regarded as the nation's two premier newspapers, the New York Times and 
the Washington Post." The Times saw its "star reporter" Judith Miller 
fall from grace, and the Post faced the challenge of dealing with its 
famed staffer's multiple conflicts of interests including his formerly 
concealed (to the public and his bosses) role in the outing of Joe 
Wilson's wife Valerie Plame when she worked at CIA.

In an embarrassing climb-down, Woodward had to testify in a two-hour 
deposition to Special Council Patrick Fitzgerald whom he denounced on TV 
the night before Lewis Libby's indictment in the case as "a junkyard dog 
of a prosecutor" in his post-Watergate role as chief flatterer of George 
Bush and other powerful Washington figures. Cockburn and St. Clair 
speculated whether Woodward's high level (unrevealed) source for the 
Plame leak was Dick Cheney ending their article referring to Woodward 
going "From Nixon's nemesis to Cheney's savior," but the same can be 
said for the kind of empire-supportive "journalism" found all through 
the dominant press, especially on issues like war and peace.

The "Dogs of War"

The authors devote a whole section to it called "The Dogs of War." In it 
we learn how easily journalists are corrupted so news can be managed to 
deliver only favorable accounts of some of the most appalling events. 
Even more stunning is the authors citing a
1977 Rolling Stone Carl Bernstein story estimating more than 400 
journalists were allied in some way with the CIA between 1956 and 1972 
leaving readers to wonder how many do it now in the age of George Bush 
when anything goes and the law of the land is just an artifact.

Joe Trento's "Secret History of the CIA," published in 2001 and cited in 
"End Times," gave us an idea of its extent earlier naming big names 
involved in a CIA operation code-named "Mockingbird," not too subtlety 
picked using a bird known to mimic the calls of other birds. Noted 
syndicated columnist through the 1970s Joseph Alsop was one of them 
along with his brother Stewart. Other notables "willing to promote the 
views of the CIA" included Ben Bradlee (Newsweek and Washington Post), 
James "Scotty" Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time 
magazine), and Walter Pincus (Washington Post), among others.

The section also includes St. Clair's article How to Sell a War. It 
makes powerful reading, and he's right observing it'll be remembered for 
how it was sold, not how it was waged. It will also be remembered for 
portraying an illegal lost cause as a noble undertaking. St. Clair 
explains it was a propaganda war, designed by PR experts, promoted by 
spin doctors, all aimed at us as the target audience ingesting it like 
mother's milk - at least most of us long enough to get the war machine 
rolling and be too far along to be recalled - until eventually and 
inevitably it is because the best-laid plans turned to mush.

In charge were people like ad maven Charlotte Beers appointed 
Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (aka 
pre-war propaganda) for her known business skills as "a grand diva of 
spin." Fortune magazine featured her among the most powerful women in 
America in 1997 for her achievements advertising the merits of Uncle 
Ben's Rice and Head and Shoulders shampoo. The Bush administration 
naturally thought she could sell America to the Muslim world in her 
Brand America campaign as well as she could peddle over-the-counter 
products to gullible consumers. She fleeced the taxpayers a whopping 
$500 million trying, stayed on from October, 2001 till just before the 
March, 2003 "shock and awe" assault began mistakenly thinking the war 
was won before the real fireworks began.

St. Clair explained tens of millions more went into prepping the public 
on Saddam's danger to the free world and why he had to be removed before 
"the smoking gun" we saw turned out "to be a mushroom-shaped cloud" 
according to National Security Advisor at the time Condoleezza Rice. 
Topping the threat-sellers was Washington heavy-hitting hired gun and 
"Beltway fixer" John Rendon, head of the Rendon Group. He's been around 
Washington for years and earlier got the Bush administration's 
assignment to sell the Afghanistan bombing, following up with a host of 
PR schemes on Saddam and Iraq, pre and post-March, 2003. He flopped 
convincing the UN and NATO pre-war but had no trouble duping the US 
public long enough to convince them blowing up Iraq was the best way to 
save it and end up being be safer at home.

St. Clair also reviews the role of other players in the scheme to sell 
war and occupation including the one played by PR firm Hill & Knowlton's 
Victoria Clark in her role at DOD as PR assistant secretary to Donald 
Rumsfeld and other assorted players in the media like writer and 
accomplished liar Laurie Mylroie, the Post's Charles Krauthammer, Max 
Boot, and the lead role played out daily on the New York Times' front 
pages mainly by now discredited and fired Judith Miller.

Cockburn devoted a chapter to her deservedly. He titled it well - Judith 
Miller: Weapon of Mass Destruction. Indeed she was and then some, and 
it's arguable that without this now disgraced former Times' reporter (or 
someone else in her shoes) there might not have been an Iraq war. Miller 
was part of the scheme from the get-go serving up a daily serving of 
propaganda in what media critic Norman Solomon calls "the most valuable 
square inches of media real estate in the USA" - the Times' front page.

Miller introduced us to Khidir Hamza, Saddam's self-proclaimed 
bomb-maker, later outed as a fraud. She kept at it daily using as her 
key source leading Iraqi exile and known fraudster/schemer Ahmed 
Chalabi. She also was little more than a Bush administration/ Pentagon 
stenographer/cheerleader transmitting their lies and deceptions to the 
public effectively enough to sell a war based on administration lies and 
hers that never should have happened with many in the Washington power 
structure now wishing it hadn't.

Cockburn writes about her: "With Miller we sink to the level of straight 
press handout. Lay all Judith Miller....stories end to end, from late 
2001 to June, 2003, and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an 
agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government 
officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of 
scam-artists." And he added most of what she wrote was "garbage, garbage 
that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive toward 
invasion....She knew what she was doing." One thing she didn't or left 
out was Ben Franklin's take on wars that "There's no such thing as a 
good war and there is no such thing as a bad peace." Case close, and 
well said about a woman who disgracefully won a Pulizer Prize for her 
reporting Cockburn and others demand be thunderously withdrawn to 
complete a full defrocking.

The killing fields for unembedded independent journalists in Iraq was 
covered as well. It's been notorious (the worst in the world by far) 
with over 130 "wrongful deaths" reported since March, 2003 including 
those deliberately targeted for elimination by US or other forces to 
silence them. In times of war, the first casualty is always truth with 
corporate media "embeds" obliging to keep it that way, and the Pentagon 
ready to target anyone reporting what Washington wants suppressed. It 
was covered in Christopher Reed's contribution titled Have Journalists 
Been Deliberately Murdered by the US Military along with examples by 
Cockburn and St. Clair in their essays. Reed mentions Britain's 
Independent Television News (ITN) senior unembedded war correspondent 
Terry Lloyd killed near Basra on the third day of the war. A court of 
law ruled on his case calling it "Unlawful homicide" at the hands of US 
Marines, but his deliberate targeting is only one among many others.

Al-Jazeera was first targeted in November, 2001 when a US missile 
destroyed its Kabul offices in Afghanistan. It was no accident. The 
Pentagon repeatedly harasses the Arab news channel in Iraq as well, 
occasionally closed it down, and in 2003 attacked its Baghdad offices by 
air killing one of its correspondents and injuring another. One other 
example of willful murder was veteran camerman Mazen Dana targeted by a 
US tank in broad daylight while he filmed outside Abu Ghraib prison in 
Baghdad. Still another time, a US tank, with no provocation, fired point 
blank at the Palestine Hotel housing most unembedded international 
journalists killing reporters from Reuters and the Spanish network Telecino.

Thankfully, in spite of clear dangers to their safety, independent 
unembedded journalists (like Alex's brother Patrick Cockburn) are 
getting out real news on the war so others like Reed, A. Cockburn and 
St. Clair can help spread it to many others here at home and around the 
world. None of it shows up though in the "newspaper of record" the 
authors devote a whole section to with examples below.

The Long Ugly Record of the New York Times

The New York Times calls itself the "newspaper of record" reporting "All 
the News That's fit to Print." A more accurate label would be the 
closest thing in the commercial media to an official ministry of 
information and propaganda. Former longtime NYT journalist John Hess 
said it this way: "(I) never saw a foreign intervention that the Times 
did not support, never saw a fare...rent...or utility increase that it 
did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or 
lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't get me 
started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people 
think the Times is liberal?"

Cockburn had plenty to say about the Times as well, and reflected in his 
Rosenthal's Times essay on AM Rosenthal's passing in May, 2006 saying he 
"saved" the Times as Executive Editor in the 1970s enhancing its 
coverage at the same time "sow(ing) the seeds for the Times' present 
difficulties" fostering the likes of Judith Miller and the rest of the 
paper's staff who knew what the boss wanted and dared not deliver under 
Rosenthal through the mid-1980s and for his successors thereafter.

The Times wanted war in Iraq and served up generous helpings of lies to 
get it with Michael Gordon helping Miller report phony stories like the 
aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment one that was pure baloney and lots 
of others in a daily drumbeat of scare-talk misinformation. When 
everything began unravelling, the best the Times could do was offer "a 
few strangled croaks" in an 1100 word editorial climb-down never even 
mentioning the lead role Miller played making the case for war that 
disgraced the Times and got her fired.

The Times is also notorious for rewriting history when their fraudulent 
"first draft" of it unravels. They did it last September claiming "the 
'possibility' that Saddam Hussein 'might' develop 'weapons of mass 
destruction' and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush 
gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq." Miller's reports of 
clear evidence he had them pre-war is now only a "possibility" according 
to Times-speak. This kind of revisionism is standard practice at the NYT 
and one more example of its shameless deference to power.

Earlier, Cockburn and St. Clair reported an egregious example in what 
they called "one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in 
the history of journalism." It was about the Times' key role framing Wen 
Ho Lee beginning March 6, 1999 in the James Risen/Jeff Gerth Breach at 
Los Alamos story claiming an unnamed lab scientist gave the Chinese 
People's Republic stolen nuclear secrets. It got Lee arrested, fired and 
held without bail in solitary confinement for 278 days ending when he 
pleaded guilty to the watered-down charge of improperly downloading 
Restricted Data with Judge James A. Parker apologizing for the 
government's "abuse of power" the Times could never admit responsibility 
for.

Then there's the Cockburn - St. Clair piece on NYT Kid Glove Journalism 
on the NSA's Illegal Spying without warrants violating the 1978 Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requiring them. The Times held off 
reporting the story for a year staying mute in deference to the Bush 
administration's request, then leaving out a full account of it when it 
finally did.

Endless examples could be given of the Times' betrayal of the public 
trust in service to power. A striking one goes back to the 1945 writing 
of science reporter William Laurence on the Manhattan Project, who along 
with his Times assignment was also on the War Department payroll as a PR 
consultant/cheerleader-propagandist writing press releases on the atomic 
weapons program. His job was to mislead the public initially covering-up 
what actually happened at the first atomic bomb Alamogordo, NM test. 
 From there, it was to sell the program, lie about the 
Hiroshima/Nagasaki horror on the ground, and then deny what 
historian-attorney Jonathan M. Weisgall later called the "silent nuclear 
terror of radioactivity and radiation" and that radiation sickness 
killed people. He was such a good liar, he won a Pulitzer Prize for it 
and got to fly on the plane that bombed Nagasaki, later describing it in 
the Times with religious awe. But the Times duplicity didn't end there.

Beverly Ann Deepe Keever, in her 2004 book "News Zero," documented the 
central role the Times played for years thereafter creating false and 
misleading perceptions about the nature and dangers of nuclear power in 
any form and the deadly effects of radiation. More than any other 
source, the Times willfully and deceitfully misled the public, opinion 
leaders, production workers, uranium miners, US servicemen exposed to 
radiation, Pacific islanders exposed to tests, and everyone living near 
nuclear test sites or where nuclear materials are produced, processed or 
used. To this day, little has changed at the Times in how it reports on 
this vital issue it's complicit in keeping its readers in the dark about.

More examples of Times duplicity involve the paper's one-sided support 
for all things business because it's a major player itself in the 
corporate giant community. So it showed strong support for NAFTA even 
though it was clear before it passed it would cause hundreds of 
thousands of job losses in its three signatory countries including many 
high-paying US ones.

Earlier it was late on major stories like the 1980s Savings and Loan 
scandal and then tepid reporting how excess banking deregulation and 
concessions to Wall Street caused it. It was the same covering the 1991 
Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI) $20 billion + heist scandal, and 
since March, 2003 it failed to report on the misuse of multi-billions of 
taxpayer dollars by the likes of Halliburton, Bechtel, the entire 
defense establishment, and other war profiteers benefitting hugely from 
the scheme in Afghanistan and Iraq. But readers of this review can get 
the whole ugly story told stunningly in St. Clair's 2005 book "Grand 
Theft Pentagon" that shows how profitable wars are and why we fight so 
many of them.

Such is the state of the leading newspaper on the planet today saying a 
lot about how bad the rest of the dominant media are. Cockburn explained 
part of the problem in his essay on the Post's Katherine Graham titled 
She Needed Fewer (political) Friends. They dined at her Georgetown home 
and turned out in force for her July, 2001 funeral because she was one 
of them. Long before it corrupted Graham's Post, it was how business was 
done at the Times best remembered during James "Scotty" Reston's prime 
years, the most influential, widely-read journalist of his time. He 
walked easily in the halls of power, befriended its denizens, and 
tainted his objectivity by giving them free reign to do almost anything 
without fear they'd be held to account for it by him.

Today, fourth estate elites' values are the same as the figures they 
cover because they'd paid so well for their work. It stands to reason 
they want to protect their high salaries and prominent positions by 
never biting the powerful hands feeding them. They, and their younger 
up-and-coming aspirants, have what Cockburn calls a built-in "compass in 
their heads" to know what to do and how to please the boss. Any 
divergence could mean "swift and disastrous retribution" with 
reassignment to the Siberia of obit writing or an invitation to find 
another line of work in an age when it's hard telling the difference 
between prostitution and so-called journalism corporate media-style.

More Examples of the Fourth Estate's Fall from Grace

The authors' book is wide-ranging and full of examples of fourth estate 
betraying the public trust precipitating its fall from grace. Rare 
exceptions aside, the dominant media never report what the authors 
published in their stunning 1998 book "Whiteout" about the CIA's long 
history of involvement in and profiting hugely from drugs trafficking. 
In his essay What You Can't Say, Cockburn explained the book "protrayed 
Uncle Sam's true face (that CIA was) Not a rogue agency but one always 
following the dictates of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, 
drugging its own subjects, approving acts of monstrous cruelty" 
developed by Nazis recruited to America post-war.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb said it too 
and got mainstream space in Knight Ridder's flagship San Jose Mercury 
News doing it for his 1996 Dark Alliance 20,000 word three-part series 
later expanded into his 550 page 1999 book with the same title. It 
involved CIA, the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, and the distribution 
of crack cocaine in Los Angeles at the time. It got him national 
attention, and what the authors call "one of the most venomous and 
factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence in 
living memory" by his colleagues at the New York Times, Washington Post, 
Washington Times, LA Times, American Journalism Review with even the 
"progressive" Nation magazine piling on (dis)courtesy of its contributor 
David Corn who poses as a liberal but often doesn't act like one. It 
cost Webb his career and marriage and finally his life in an apparent 
suicide in December, 2004 the result of his depression because his 
career was ruined.

The authors also wrote about The History of "Black Paranoia" that's 
easily justified from the long history of white on black abuse. One 
example was the 600 poor black men recruited in 1932 in Macon County, 
Alabama for a US Public Health Service study for which they used as 
guinea pigs. Four hundred were infected with syphillis, were lied to and 
told they were being treated for bad blood, and only got an aspirin-iron 
supplement so researchers could monitor the natural progression of the 
disease. After penicillin was available as a cure in 1943, the study 
subjects never got it and 100 of them died from neglect with an overdose 
of racism. The authors quote Dr. Vanessa Gamble, associate professor of 
history of medicine at University of Wisconsin, Madison, saying these 
kinds of experiments go back over 100 years usually "done by whites on 
slaves and free blacks" than on poor whites.

Then there's the ugly history of snooping on blacks most notoriously 
done by the FBI against Martin Luther King and the infamous COINTELPRO 
program begun in 1956. J. Edgar Hoover said it was to "expose, disrupt, 
misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize
(meaning assassinate)" black organizations like the Black Panthers the 
FBI wanted to destroy and pretty much did.

The Nixon foray on drugs and later Reagan-Bush-Clinton one and now GW 
Bush all out war on them is really a war on blacks mainly. It led to the 
US having the largest prison population in the world at over 2.2 million 
with over 1000 new prisoners put in cages each week in a burgeoning 
prison-industrial complex that's now big business exceeding $40 billion 
annually and rising with blacks being the main source of revenue for it. 
Blacks account for half the prison population, over half of them are 
there for non-violent offenses, and half of those are drug-related. 
While inside, these and other prisoners are exploited by private 
contractors as de facto chattel making them the cheapest, easiest source 
of near-free labor this side of slavery and one more reason why "black 
paranoia" is real.

Other examples show it, too, with contributor Ishmael Reed writing on 
How the (white-controlled) Media Use Blacks to Chastise Blacks letting 
them say and write the kinds of things they can more easily get away 
with without being called racists. A lot of it is blaming the victim the 
way Reagan administration officials did it to impoverished single black 
mothers demonizing them as "welfare queens" to help justify Reagan's 
assault on essential social services he saw no need for.

Add to it the way elections are now held with voter roles cleansed of 
blacks along with their being intimidated the way they were in Florida 
with many prevented from getting to the polls, others turned away after 
arriving, and still more legitimate black voters obstructed with long 
lines, too few voting machines and precincts closing early to keep black 
people from voting "the wrong way." The fourth estate turned a blind 
eye, but St. Clair wrote about it in his essay What You Didn't Read 
About the Black Vote in Florida. He used the characterization Edward 
Herman chose for his 1984 book "Demonstration Elections" saying the 
process "demonstrated how rotten the whole system is" throughout the 
country.

Then there's torture the authors say is As American as Apple Pie that 
goes on routinely in the home-based US Gulag Prison System this reviewer 
wrote about in an early 2006 essay by that name calling it a crime 
against humanity and shame of the nation. The fourth estate never 
reports it and was embarrassed when they had to after the Guantanamo and 
Abu Ghraib scandals broke, but quickly backed off once the heat died down.

CounterPunch's Side of the Story

The final part of the book includes some of its most interesting parts 
that only can be touched on here. One is Cockburn's essay on The Great 
Communicator who needs no identifying except to point out what a 
dreadful job of it he did except for hard core true believers hanging on 
every word the way they do for GW Bush like it's gospel. In Reagan's 
case, Cockburn wrote some classic lines saying "Truth for him, was what 
he happened to be saying at the time. He went one better than George 
Washington in that he couldn't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the 
truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two."

Mark Hertsgaard wrote how deferentially the press treated Reagan in his 
1989 book "On Bended Knee" explaining they never tried laying a glove on 
him till the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986 and then did its best to 
go easy. All this was for "an awful president, never as popular as the 
press pretended, presiding over a carnival of corruption and greed" only 
the Bush administration has exceeded, so far. But when he died in June, 
2004, the media practically defied him for endless days of turgid 
eulogies suppressing his callous indifference for the needy and scorched 
earth legacy he left behind in Central America, the Middle East, Africa 
and other parts of the world where he won't be easily forgiven if ever.

Gore, Clinton and Kerry are then deservedly taken to the wood shed in a 
trio of essays. Gore is portrayed as an erstwhile opium-laced marijuana 
and coke user selling himself otherwise in 2000 when the authors wrote 
about him as a tough-on-crime law and order hard-liner supporting the 
death penalty that's far from the image he's now covets as a friend of 
the earth. Clinton, on the other hand, back then wanted an office in 
Harlem to shed his image as a moral reprobate and war criminal but keep 
the false part of it as a man of the people "feeling our pain."

Then there's John Kerry the authors give twice the space to as the 
former president and vice-president combined. It's to tell the story of 
a 1966 Skull and Bones elite secret society Yale grad who joined the 
Navy and shot up the world from his Swift boat patrol in Vietnam. In the 
process, he earned Silver and Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts, and 
former CNO
(chief naval officer, Vietnam) Admiral Elmo (Bud) Zumwalt's opprobrium 
for being a loose cannon killing too many civilian non-combatants and 
assaulting other non-military targets. He was so zealous and 
out-of-control the admiral "virtually (had) to straightjacket him" to 
hold him back saying Kerry even then had large ambitions his Vietnam 
service would haunt him pursuing if he tried doing it on a national stage.

The book ranges over much more from Billy Graham the anti-semite and 
supporter of mass-killing in Vietnam if the Paris peace talks failed, to 
the press' endorsing and covering up the Delta Force slaughter at Waco, 
to all the pro-war news fit to buy from willing fourth estate players 
and PR pros like the Lincoln Group hired to plant phony stories in Iraqi 
newspapers and at US-controlled al-Arabiya TV about Pentagon military 
successes in the country the public there could plainly see was pure 
baloney. Lincoln also had a near open-ended $100 million PsyOps contract 
to improve its creativity and foreign public opinion about the US, 
especially the military needing all the burnishing it can get.

The final section also covered The Row Over the (powerful) Israeli Lobby 
the press can't admit exists with Cockburn saying it's been a fixed part 
of the scene for over six decades and questioning its existence is like 
doubting there's a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor or White House 
on Pennsylvania Avenue. Part of the Lobby's job is suppressing real news 
about Palestine Cockburn says he first wrote about in 1973 and continued 
thereafter exposing wanton Israeli acts of daily killings including 
targeted assassinations, land confiscations, home demolitions, torture, 
illegal settlement building on occupied lands and a host of other 
endless human degradations to ethnically cleanse all parts of Palestine 
Israelis want for themselves. Try finding news on that in "The Newspaper 
of Record" that's only possible if a publication named the Times 
operates on another planet and does there what journalists should be 
paid here to do - their job.

There's lots more this review can't include, so it will end will a final 
well-deserved jab at a worthy recipient before some final personal 
comments. It's Cockburn's article called Murdoch's Game about the 
venomous king of media moguls the author calls (as mentioned above) a 
"WORLD-SCALE MONSTER." He writes what distinguished Australian-raised 
journalist Bruce Page did about him in his chronicle called "The Murdock 
Archigelago." It has material in it Murdock supporters wouldn't want 
repeated in polite company about "one of the world's leading villains 
(and) global pirate" they support no doubt because of his rampages in 
the mediasphere putting world leaders on notice what he expects from 
them and what he's prepared to offer in return.

The essence of Page's book is that Murdock's core thesis is wanting to 
privatize "a state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and 
with no regard for truth" in return for "vast government favors such as 
tax breaks, regulatory relief, and monopoly" market control as free as 
possible from competitors having too much of what Rupert wants for 
himself. The problem is he usually gets his way mostly in places that 
matter most with the biggest markets and greatest profit potential in a 
business where reporting accurate news is off the table and partnering 
with governments assuring a growing revenue stream is all that counts. 
Cockburn sums up Murdock's Game in the essay's lead-in quote from 
Othello: "I have done the state some service, and they know 't."

Some Final Thoughts of Hope for What's Ahead

At the top of this review, this writer noted the public's hunger for 
real news and information turning for it to progressive publications and 
online web sites providing it to growing audiences disillusioned with 
what they're not getting in the mainstream. Do you blame them? The above 
material offers plenty of examples making the case.

But as alternative news sources gain prominence and influence, the 
battle lines are forming to preserve and keep them free from state or 
corporate control. It's the battle for Net Neutrality pitting us, the 
public, against telecom, broadcast and cable giants, and what's at stake 
is the last media frontier of a free and open internet that's the best 
hope to revive a flagging democracy now on life support at best. The 
demise of HR 5252 in the Senate (the so-called "Anti-Net Neutrality 
Bill) in the 109th Congress means it's up to the current 110th Congress 
to settle the issue by either keeping the internet free and open or 
allowing it to be exploited by corporate predators for commercial gain 
and allow them to control its content to suppress material like this review.

Those concerned enough better do more than just hope for a favorable 
outcome from a corrupted Congress unpredictable on which way it'll go on 
an issue that can turn either way but is picking up positive tailwind 
with Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards voicing support for 
Net Neutrality in a recent Howard University speech. He now joins others 
in the field like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson plus 
Al Gore who may jump in later as well.

This is what's needed and more as freedoms don't protect themselves and 
the power lined up against them is formidable. The commercial giants are 
outspending public interest advocates 500 - 1, but concerned citizens 
fought back flooding the 109th Congress with over one million letters 
(and did it again to the 110th with over 1.6 million) and took to the 
streets in 25 cities delivering "Save the Internet" petitions to their 
senators last summer demanding they oppose the corporate attempt to gut 
Net Neutrality and instead enact a free and open internet information 
commons. This issue can be won, but only by lots more letters, emails, 
phone calls and innovative action from an aroused and mobilized public 
unwilling to let business or government take away what already belongs 
to us and that we can't afford to lose. Stay closely tuned.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at 
lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen each 
Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The 
MicroEffect.com at noon US central time.