Media Alliance

Newspaper Guild Prez targeted for Comments on Iraq Deaths

June 17, 2005

The Guild Reporter
By Andy Zipser, Editor

Linda Foley, President of the The Newspaper Guild-Communication Workers of America, has become the latest target of right-wing extremists, who have mounted a multi-media attempt to force her resignation over comments made May 13 at a media conference in St. Louis. The campaign, started by Sinclair Broadcasting, Fox News and the Washington Times, then fanned by a growing number of bloggers, echoes a similar effort that earlier this year forced the resignation of CNN news chief Eason Jordan.

Foley served on two panels at the National Conference for Media Reform, addressing labor issues and the problems of media consolidation. She analyzed the profit-driven pressures that cause newspaper monopolies, workforce reductions, a commoditization of the news and plunging newsroom morale. She pushed for greater diversity—in viewpoints, coverage, staffing and ownership. And she hammered on the theme that it’s the system as a whole that’s the problem.

But it was an aside near the tail end of her remarks that got all the right-wing attention. Journalists often are blamed for the ills that they report on, Foley said, “particularly from the right of the political spectrum.” And then, as if extending an unwitting invitation to prove her point, she added that journalists aren’t being targeted just verbally and politically.

“They are being targeted for real in places like Iraq,” Foley said, referring to the deaths, detentions and physical abuse of American and Arab journalists. (The full text of Foley’s remarks may be read online at www.freepress.net/conference/=sessions.)

Brief as they were, those comments uncorked a torrent of bile—once the right took notice. Four days after the panel, Sinclair started calling TNG-CWA headquarters with requests to interview Foley. The next day, Tony Snow from the Fox network followed suit. Although both were rebuffed, Fox and Sinclair commentaries May 18 triggered hundreds of e-mails to Foley and the Guild office. Scores of phone callers were so abusive that for a couple of days all calls to Guild headquarters were routed through voice mail.

Then the blogosphere rumbled into action, including creation of the web site foleygate.com (“Watching Left Wing Journalists So You Don’t Have To”) “to report on what will happen to Linda Foley”—presumably as a result of the campaign it began orchestrating. Right-wing bloggers with quaint populist names (“Ankle Biting Pundits,” “Tennessee Rant,” “My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”) piled on, shuttling around the same few links to Foley’s selected comments while urging all red-blooded Americans to voice their displeasure. More e-mails flowed.

“I would love to hear the proof you have to support your irresponsible claims that the military ‘target and kill journalists.’ If you have proof, then say it. If you don’t have proof, then keep your stupid biased asinine comments to yourself,” wrote David Wiseman. “Listen you piece of human garbage—American soldiers do not waste bullets on crap like you,” chimed in H. Olszowy. “Traitors and scum like you deserve to be shot, but our military has too much pride and courage to waste time on newspaper reporters. It figures however that someone with a union mentality like you would fabricate a story along the lines of CBS and Newsweek. You have zero credibility.”

While few e-mails acknowledged that journalists had been killed or wounded in Iraq, some suggested perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “Just saw your idiotic comments concerning the collateral damage of journalists in Iraq,” wrote someone with the online name civwar46. “Now my comment. We should have open season on journalists in Iraq. Traitors.” Added Slimpknsanytime: “The mission of the military is to destroy the enemy, his equipment and will to resist. When the military follows this directive it is defining the enemy, even if they are ‘Journalists.’ ”

There’s more at work here, in other words, than just anger at a union leader for trying to defend her members. For the looniest fringe of the right wing, an independent press and its “journalists” are the problem. The irony is that such extremists are trying to prompt the mass media into attacking . . . the media.

The attempt to obscure discomfiting truths with a smokescreen of allegations about the truth purveyor—challenging his or her motives, techniques or basic character—is not new, but in recent years the volume has been ratcheted way up. For Paul Waldman of Media Matters for America, a progressive research and information center that tracks conservative disinformation campaigns, the poster child for such tactics is Ward Churchill, a much vilified University of Colorado professor.

This past January, the extreme right wing stumbled across an essay Churchill had written—more than three years earlier—in which he argued that the money changers at the World Trade Center had suffered the consequences of U.S. military aggression and unjust foreign policies. The result was a blizzard of right-wing outrage, flogged relentlessly by shouting heads like Bill O’Reilly. “Were some people offended by what Churchill had to say? Yes,” Waldman says. “Was he worth hundreds and hundreds of stories? Obviously not.”

But Churchill, Waldman adds, was simply one in a series of cases that the right has leveraged to advance its crabbed view of liberalism. Finding anecdotes that it can pump up to outsized dimensions in an echo chamber of right-wing commentators, talk shows, editorial pages and web blogs, the right transforms the specific into the general. “Linda’s case is one of those they’d like to make into a cause celebre, that the media hate the military, that they’re unpatriotic, blah-blah,” Waldman charges.

Because of such tactics, for example, the question of whether George Bush fulfilled his National Guard requirements was eclipsed by the question of whether Dan Rather used bogus documents in his reporting. The question of how the U.S. military is treating several hundred “detainees” at Guantanamo was shuffled into the background by Newsweek’s retraction of a story that claimed a copy of the Koran had been flushed down a toilet. Legitimate questions about the conduct of the entire “war on terror” have become such lightning rods for right-wing abuse that an official British government memo describing how the Bush administration lied its way into the war on Iraq received scant U.S. media coverage for more than a month after it was first reported in Great Britain.

Indeed, the war in Iraq has posed numerous challenges to Americans’ beliefs about themselves; some respond by denying the validity of any information that doesn’t fit those concepts. The June issue of Editor & Publisher, for example, includes a column describing the right-wing attacks and death threats against freelance television correspondent Kevin Sites—for filming a U.S. Marine shooting an unarmed Iraqi insurgent. “It is important to tell the truth, the whole truth,” Sites contends, in response to critics who claimed the segment unfairly undermined U.S. morale.

The killing of unembedded journalists in Iraq is one of those discomfiting facts, especially when such deaths come at American hands. To be sure, journalists in Iraq—of whatever nationality—have more to fear from the insurgents than they do from the U.S. military. As reported June 6 in a front-page story in The Washington Post, at least 85 journalists and other media workers, the vast majority of them Iraqis, have been killed in Iraq since March, 2003; only 14 of them were killed by American forces.

But “only” 14 is a troubling number nonetheless, and even more so given the government’s repeated unwillingness to objectively investigate the deaths. As recently as April 8, TNG-CWA and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists again sent letters to President George Bush, calling on him to “heed the requests from journalists around the world for an independent investigation into the record number of deaths among media staff covering the war in Iraq.” And, as in the past, the plea was ignored.

The deaths referenced in the April 8 letter won’t come as a surprise to readers of The Guild Reporter: the April 15 issue led with a cover story questioning the apparent targeting of journalists two years ago at the Palestine Hotel, where a single tank round killed two and wounded three. That same day, the article noted, U.S. forces also bombed the Al Jazeera television station—killing one—and attacked Abu Dhabi TV. The Al Jazeera bombing was especially worrisome because the network had provided the U.S. with its station’s coordinates precisely to forestall such an attack.

Such incidents—and the subsequent lack of vigorous inquiry—raise questions about military intentions. Others create the equally troubling impression of a more generalized trigger-happiness, caused by fear or lack of discipline, that places all civilians at risk. On May 24, for example, Aaron Glantz of Pacifica Radio told Amy Goodman, host of the radio program “Democracy Now,” that in covering the war “I’ve had a gun pointed at me by American soldiers numerous times and felt that my life was threatened by an American soldier, simply because they were so scared and trigger happy.”

Moreover, Glantz added, as Western journalists are so intimidated by such behavior that they pull out, “the Iraqi journalists who remain and the Pan-Arab journalists who remain are specifically being targeted by the U.S. military, I believe, when they broadcast controversial material.”

Adding heft to such assertions is the independent Committee to Protect Journalists, which has observed a general U.S. military lack of respect for journalists. For example, a May 12 CPJ statement expressed “deep concern about the detentions of at least eight Iraqi journalists by U.S. and Iraqi military forces,” but in response to its demands for a public explanation of the detentions, a U.S. military spokesman said only that the journalists pose a “security risk to the Iraqi people and coalition forces.” The spokesman would not provide further details or identify the detainees, all of whom work for Western news organizations and none of whom had been charged with any crime.

Rather than focus on such troubling behavior, however, the right-wing extremists find it more useful to abuse those who question the disconnect between our actions and our professed beliefs. “Abuse” is not too harsh a characterization: the attacks on Foley have been personal—“bitch” and “idiot” have been the leading epithets—and simultaneously abstract, a curious blend of invective neutered by its very lack of specificity. At least half-a-dozen Guild locals have been contacted by foleygate.com readers demanding that they seek Foley’s resignation. A direct if vague threat was delivered by a New York resident, who phoned Foley to say he would be in Washington D.C. and was planning to visit her in response to her comments.

Piling on also has been Boston-based writer Hiawatha Bray, who made his bones with the right wing last fall in a sclerotic attack on John Kerry and now has taken to the blogosphere to go after Foley. Although Foley told Bray she’d be glad to speak with him as the Guild president responding to questions from a Guild member, but not for publication, Bray apparently felt he had a right to elicit public comments. “I’ve phoned her several times,” he posted on his web site. “Foley has said that she will make no further public comment on the matter. This won’t do.”

Bray’s response? The launching of a write-in campaign to win a seat on his local’s executive council—a move he explains was inspired by watching Jack Nicholson in the movie “Hoffa.” He ended up getting five votes, of more than 400 cast.

Yet for all the strutting and chest-puffing, a certain note of frustration keeps intruding into the right-wing echo-chamber: the mainstream media just aren’t paying attention. And if the MSM, as it’s typically termed, won’t devour its own, who will play the end-game? As one blogger fretted, “I’m afraid we may be beating a dead horse on this Foley thing. The MSM is just not gonna cover it. And if they don’t cover it, it must not be news.”

Meanwhile, support for Foley also has emerged. The New England District Council, meeting in Portland, Maine on May 22, unanimously endorsed a resolution that declared: “The safety of working journalists is of primary concern to The Newspaper Guild. We support the efforts of TNG-CWA President Linda Foley to promote the safety of journalists in war zones and throughout the world.”

And Aidan White, General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, responded to questions about “Foleygate” by writing: “Linda did no more than speak out, eloquently and strongly, about the fundamental rights of media staff who are the victims of violence. In doing so she does great credit to the IFJ and her union, and the fact that she is attacked vigorously by a prejudiced and ill-informed minority, who are mostly detached from the harsh realities of reporting from conflict zones, illustrates that we are living in an age when the American spirit of tolerance and free speech which has served democracy well for so long is under greater pressure than most of us have seen in our lifetime.

“Foley deserves the support of all journalists for speaking out,” he added. “Certainly, she has the unanimous backing of the world journalists' movement.”

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