We return to the theme of writers and writing. We have a piece on Russia’s president Putin who has been doing his best to develop a media that is loyal to his concept of corporate Russia. This is nothing new. All he wants to achieve is that which has always existed in the West — a media that conforms to the best interests of a nation’s corporate owners. The owners of every country do their best to have a media that is friendly to their cause. If the powers that be feel threatened they come down hard on the media to make them conform.
At least one staff member of CNN has admitted in public that the station was intimidated by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal into being positive about the attack on Iraq. Embarrassed by their cowardice CNN has been doing its best since Katrina to avoid the label of White House Mouthpiece.
The politics of fear is apparently the only game the Bush gang knows. With Osama bin Laden still roaming free, Bush is doing his best to wind up American public support for an attack on Iran. If one war fails, start another one to keep the dupes distracted.
Unless a cause is just, repression at home is a tool the fear mongers find essential. Take the Bush PATRIOT Act, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, torture, habeas corpus, mass detentions, preventive war, warrantless wiretapping and other forms of surreptitious surveillance, as well as other “homeland security” measures.
Today we have several stories dealing with writers and writing. One is about an American billionaire couple putting up 10 million dollars to establish an independent investigative organization that will allow reporters to work free of the pressure of corporate owners. We have another that wonders where the right-wing ends and the media begins. And we look back 60 years to the McCarthy witch hunt that caused many a gullible American to look under their beds for reds. Read the article to learn who fought back and who surrendered. Some of the top names in Hollywood. In the final analysis it was much ado about nothing but thousands of lives were ruined. (It happened in Canada too but quietly, in the Canadian way.) It’s a lot of reading but worth every word. Print the long ones and curl up and read at your leisure.
Looking forward
Carl Dow
Editor and Publisher
True North Perspective
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