Sen. John Kerry says a key reason that the Democratic political message seems so muddled to many Americans is that Democrats have a smaller “megaphone” than the one wielded by the Republicans and their conservative allies.

“Our megaphone is just not as large as their megaphone, and we have a harder time getting that message out, even when people are on the same page,” the Massachusetts Democrat explained to the New York Times for a story about the party’s missed opportunities heading toward Election 2006. [NYT, Feb. 8, 2006]

While Kerry’s observation is undeniably correct - when one considers Fox News, right-wing talk radio, well-paid columnists and magazine racks weighted down by conservative publications - the overarching question remains why Democrats and progressives haven’t invested more in getting a competitive megaphone, writes Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews.Com.

Wealthy progressives and liberal foundations can match up almost dollar for dollar with conservative funders. But the American Left has adopted largely a laissez-faire attitude toward media infrastructure, while the Right has applied almost socialistic values to sustain even unprofitable media ventures.

Indeed, the Right’s subsidizing of media may be the most under-reported money-in-politics story in modern American history. Many good-government organizations track the millions of dollars contributed to candidates, but much less attention is paid to the billions of unregulated dollars poured into media.

This imbalanced attention continues even though the conservative media is arguably the most important weapon in the Republican arsenal.

Political “propaganda themes” - often coordinated with GOP leaders - are distributed instantaneously across the country, reaching into both rural and urban America with a repetition that gives these messages a corroborative ring of truth.

The messages echo from talk radio to cable news to conservative columnists who appear in the mostly pro-Republican local newspapers. The themes then are reinforced in magazine articles and in books that dominate the shelves of many American bookstores.

Over the past two decades, Republicans have exploited this media capability with great deftness in consolidating power across large swaths of the country, especially where there is little media diversity (i.e. the Red States).

Read the whole story here

As galling as it may be for some readers to see how major mainstream media outlets are framing the Alito confirmation, the broader problem has been the failure of well-to-do liberals and progressive foundations to finance a media infrastructure that can act as a counterweight to the right-wing media machine, according to Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.Com.

Needless to say again, here at The Locust Fork we agree…

Mother of Slain Soldier Keeps Vigil in Crawford, Texas

by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
Locust Fork Publishing
LocustFork.Net

SOMEWHERE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE - Cindy Sheehan, the mother from Vacaville, Calif., who co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace after her son Casey was killed in Iraq, said in a blog conference call today that the U.S. Secret Service had been harassing her to leave Crawford, Texas, saying she was at risk of being run over by a car in the middle of the night.

She praised the Internet and the blogosphere for helping her cause and for keeping her safe.

“I attribute everything to the Internet and the blogosphere. When we put it out Saturday night that the Secret Service was trying to intimidate us into leaving, it went all over the blogosphere and the Internet,” she said. “I just wanted everybody to know that if something happened to us it was probably the Secret Service. They know that. They watch the blogs too.”

But she said she would not be intimidated into leaving or giving up.

“This is something that can’t be ignored and they can’t shut us down,” she said. “It’s truly amazing and thank God for the Internet or we wouldn’t know anything. We would already be a fascist state. Our government is run by one party, every level, and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government. If we didn’t have the Internet, none of us would know what was truly going on.”

She said she never got involved in activism before her son Casey was killed in Iraq, “because I didn’t think one person could make a difference. But one person with millions of people behind you can make a difference. . . . I have said since my son died and the ‘elections’ in November that it is ‘we the people’ that has to cause the change.”

In response to a question from a blogger, Ms. Sheehan went into more detail about the treatment she received from the Secret Service.

“The first day we were here, they kept on coming and telling us, ‘you know you really don’t want to stay here because chances are you’re going to get hit by a car during the night,’ ” she said. “Finally, one of the people here with me asked, ‘Does that mean if we get run over it’s going to be one of you?’ And the guy goes, ‘That’s not what I’m trying to say.’ ”

When asked if she got the impression that the Secret Service was trying to intimidate her, she said, “Yes, definitely. They wanted us to leave. Of course they wanted us to leave. But they really don’t know who they are dealing with here. They know now, but they didn’t know then.”

When she was asked if she has had daily contact with the Secret Service, she said yes, and that the so-called “Camp Casey concierge” was asked about the number of people expected to show up.

“But we can’t tell,” she said. “People are just spontaneously coming. It’s been a really amazing thing.”

From another blogger, she was asked about the smear campaign from the White House and the right-wing bloggers, including Matt Drudge, saying she changed her story on what President George W. Bush told her in an earlier meeting with parents of troops killed in Iraq.

She said the comments Drudge used were taken out of context and she insisted she is telling the truth about how Bush treated her by calling her “mom” and making bad jokes.

When asked about the controversy over whether she would appear on Bill O’Reilly’s show “The Factor” on Fox News, she said she had decided not to go on the show after being attacked by the conservative talk show host who is not a journalist.

“I don’t like it when people lie about me and attack me for exercising my freedom of speech,” she said. “It’s one thing for Bill O’Reilly to disagree with my politics and my view on the war, but it’s absolutely another thing that he attacked me personally. I’m not going to dignify his show with my presence because I believe his show is an obscenity to the truth and to humanity.”

She also said she was not going to allow anyone to distract her from the true mission of her cause.

“The true mission is bringing attention to this occupation of Iraq and ending the war, bringing our troops home,” she said. “I don’t think they have the support of a majority of America. I think we do.”

She said there were only three things that would make her leave Crawford: A good meeting with the president, the end of August or if she is arrested.

She said if they try to force her to leave, “I am just going to sit my butt down on the ground. This is America. Every inch of America is a freedom of speech and freedom to peaceably assemble zone. If you want me gone you’ll have to carry me out of here.”

When asked specifically what she would ask the president if she were granted a meeting, she said she would ask what the noble cause is that her son Casey died for.

“I don’t believe a war of aggression against a country that was no threat to the United States of America is a noble cause,” she said.

She indicated she would ask about his statement that we have to honor the troops by completing the mission, since the mission is unclear and keeps changing.

“The only way they can honor my son’s sacrifice is by bringing the troops home,” she said.

She was asked how she felt about the media’s minimal coverage of her compared to crime news such as the ongoing story about the Alabama teen missing in Aruba.

“They don’t want this to be the story,” she said. “A lot of people have a lot at stake by keeping this occupation going. They are making lots of money. We all know who owns NBC. If they were truly reporting the news objectively, they would be reporting this. It strikes me as a bigger story than Natalee Holloway, which is a tragedy for one family. What we are trying to do here is save millions of families from going through tragedy.”

One of the callers pointed out that her story was the lead editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times.

“It is getting a lot of mainstream attention,” she said. “That is a gratifying result of what is happening. It’s putting the war back on the front pages, back in the news where it belongs. It belongs there every day whether a grieving mom is sitting outside the ranch in Crawford or not. We have to realize we are a nation at war.”

She said again if not for the Internet, “We wouldn’t know the truth about what is going on over there.”

The blog conference call was hosted by Joe Trippi of JoeTrippi.com, Bob Fertik of Democrats.com and AfterDowningStreet.org, and Jodie Evans of CodePink4Peace.org.

Editor’s Note: I will be calling the Secret Service this afternoon to get their reaction to this story.

But I just wanted to inform my regular readers that while I was working on this story, several things happened that make it clear there are forces in this country trying to prevent the truth from getting out.

First of all, just as I started to blog, this site was attacked again by a series of trackback pings and comments from a Texas spammer flooding us with Texas hold ‘em poker and casino sites. Our home phone and cell phone were flooded with telemarketing calls. And, although a minor, scattered thunderstorm came through this area during the conference call, it was over by the time I started to blog. Yet Alabama Power tripped the power here as I was trying to post, forcing me to restart the computer and reset the cable modem. Fascism indeed.

Courtesy of long-time UPI reporter and professor Ted Stannard from the UPI Downhold Wire on Bill Moyers, the state of public broadcasting and what can be done in the face of the controversy, republished here with permission.

While dressing this week, I watched a major chunk of Moyer’s media reform
speech on C-Span. Sorkin’s St.Louis P-D story gives the gist and flavor well,
but omits the detailed, sarcastic and very direct zapping of CPB chief
Tomlinson by name.

Moyers take on Tomlinson was extensive, pointed and withering, with some lovely
sardonic comment on his spending of $10,000 in public funds to research what a
subscription to TV Guide or a phone call to Moyers could have accomplished –
and then denying public access to the research results. I’m surprised Sorkin
gave most of it a pass.

Moyers, in my view, is the most eloquent, rational and forceful liberal voice
on public and church podiums today. For those who haven’t seen them, check out
these lucid, substantive and impassioned talks in the past year:

Fight of Our Lives, NYU Keynote,Inequality Matters Forum

The Society of Professional Journalists 2004 National Convention

Riverside Church, New York City

Second National Conference on Media Reform

Moyer brings to the rostrum an amazing blend of precise intellectual nuance and
skilled, impassioned oratory. It is in the best liberal tradition to make
people think and stir them to care. It was once in the best conservative
tradition too, before the conservative label was hijacked by a power-hungry
alliance of military-minded neocons and assorted monomaniacal elements of the
apoplectic and apocalyptic right.

Moyers reflects the rising concern among many Christians that these “true
believers” in the Eric Hoffer sense, having already to an alarming degree
swarmed the centerstage and seized the microphone, are now positioning
themselves as speaking not just for THEIR faith, but for THE Christian faith -
very much as the militant Islamist radicals in the Middle East have seized the
microphones of the neighborhood mosques, the center stages in their societies,
to claim to speak for all Islam.

How the evangelical spread across the American broadcast spectrum is coming to
dominate and sometimes drown out other voices gets a richly informative,
on-topic look in the current Columbia Journalism Review:

STATIONS OF THE CROSS, By Mariah Blake, CJR May-June 2005:
How evangelical Christians are creating an alternative universe of faith-based news.

It would be interesting to hear comment on this piece from, among others, our
LatAm DHer in mission broadcasting - whatever his perspective.

But let’s all keep in mind that any discourse involving religion and politics should
distinguish between religious organizations and structures, and religion as a
body of personal values and beliefs. The one hosts the other, but does not
necessarily rule it.

Oh yes! For an outraged voice from outside the “faith-based community,”
checkout Nicholas Hoffman’s May 5 rant in the New York Observer, still
available free on an offcenter range of sites, including The Smoking Chimp.

He makes a strong point about the implications of the term.
The genius of “framing,” brilliantly utilized politically by Rove and Co., is in
popularizing phrases or terms in some issue of the moment which get picked up
in the general buzz without analyzing or challenging tendentious underlying
assumptions. By using the phrase, we in effect treat those unexamined
underlying assumptions as a “given” and tacitly validate their perspective.

These would be good times for American culture to throw up some heavyweight
political philosphers - powerful, articulate thinkers who could command some
attention - to debate and clarify questions and durable principles important
to 21st Century societies and challenges.

Just going with the flow is no option when you can hear the mounting roar of a
cataract ahead; we need to decide which direction to paddle -and how hard.

Blog on . . .

Newsweek is the latest U.S. news outlet to be slapped into the stocks for sloppy journalism, pelted with criticism for a story alleging American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet. But the case also underscores the fact that some stories are politically riskier than others - especially if they upset the Bushes, according to this report by Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com.

But possibly a more dangerous consequence of the story is that it will reinforce the growing perception in Washington journalism that the fastest way to ruin your career is to write something that gets you on the wrong side of George W. Bush and his administration. That means there could be even less critical reporting about the War on Terror and the Iraq War.

Arguably the gullible U.S. reporting about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-03 contributed to more death and destruction than the Koran story did, including more than 1,600 dead American soldiers. But no one news organization has faced the condemnation that Newsweek has for its mistake.

Already some right-wing media critics are citing the Newsweek case as proof of dishonest “liberal” journalism, even though top Newsweek editors often have sided with conservative or neoconservative foreign policy agendas. They certainly did during my three years at the magazine when Editor Maynard Parker regularly lined up with Reagan-Bush policymakers.

Hmmm. The liberal press. Right.

Sitting up late blogging and watching C-SPAN, I managed to catch the speech by Bill Moyers taking on the media and the government at the conference put on by a non-profit group called Free Press, “working to involve the public in media policymaking and to craft policies for more democratic media,” according to its mission statement.

I may as well publish my own book on the press now, since the Newsweek debacle will make it even harder to do or sell any meaningful investigative journalism for some time to come.

Meanwhile, the MSM thinks it can stop the bleeding circulation numbers and the plummeting public trust in public opinion polls by covering more church. What a joke.

At least there’s one newsman on TV willing to take on a sycophant like Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman who let gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon in the press room and who is now blaming Newsweek for deaths in the Middle East and diminishing America’s reputation in the world. I think someone needs to look in the damn mirror.

Keith Olbermann is calling on McClellan to resign. It won’t happen, of course, but at least someone has the guts to say it out loud in front of a camera.

Is the American press as we know it doomed - along with 229 years of experimentation with Democracy?

Let us all now bow down and give praise to famous men, right? Shouldn’t we all just be grateful for the crumbs they throw us?

I already know one real reporter who recently had to take a job as a grocery store checkout clerk just to feed her family. We’ll all be working for Wal-Mart soon - if a lot of people don’t by dog stand up and protest the direction we are headed.

It’s just a damn good thing the Republican Party decided a long time ago that presidential terms should be limited to two in the wake of FDR’s four terms during The Depression and World War II. Otherwise, the organized religious forces in this country might just anoint George W. Bush king for life and we could kiss this great experiment in Democracy good bye.

The good news is, there will be more elections in 2006 and 2008. There is some chance that the libertarian independents might just split from the religious conservatives and help the pendulum to swing back and allow a few more Democrats back into power.

Otherwise, dear friends, Hunter S. Thompson may prove right to lament the death of the American Dream. It sure seems to be slipping away these days. It’s hard to even muster a decent “ho, ho.”

Bill Moyers denounced the politcal right and top officials at the White House for trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media, according to this report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government “stenographers,” the Dispatch reports. And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases.

Moyers, whose reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s, spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. He is a former newspaper publisher and was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s.

Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists “who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.”

Answering for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal, Moyers described those officials as “obsessed with control” of the media. He said they are using the government “to threaten and intimidate.”

Those charges came from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Republican, who paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers’ show, “Now.” Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series “Wide Angle.”

On the recommendation of administration officials, Tomlinson hired a senior White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, according to a May 2 report in The New York Times.

Give ‘em hell Bill.