Robert Parry, Consortium News
George W. Bush’s electoral victory is chilling proof that the conservatives have achieved dominance over the flow of information to the American people and that even a well-run Democratic campaign stands virtually no chance for national success without major changes in how the news media operates.
It is not an exaggeration to say today that the most powerful nation on earth is in the grip of an ideological administration – backed by a vast network of right-wing think tanks, media outlets and attack groups – that can neutralize any political enemy with smears, such as the Swift boat ads against John Kerry’s war record, or convince large numbers of people that clearly false notions are true, like Saddam Hussein’s link to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The outcome of Election 2004 also highlights perhaps the greatest failure of the Democratic/liberal side in American politics: a refusal to invest in the development of a comparable system for distributing information that can counter the Right’s potent media infrastructure. Democrats and liberals have refused to learn from the lessons of the Republican/conservative success.
The history is this: For the past quarter century, the Right has spent billions of dollars to build a vertically integrated media apparatus – reaching from the powerhouse Fox News cable network through hard-line conservative newspapers and magazines to talk radio networks to book publishing to well-funded Internet operations and right-wing bloggers.
Using this infrastructure, the conservatives can put any number of “themes” into play that will instantaneously reach tens of millions of Americans through a variety of outlets, whose messages then reinforce each other in the public’s mind.
Beyond putting opposing politicians on the defensive, this Right-Wing Machine intimidates mainstream journalists and news executives who will bend over backwards and cater to the conservative side, do almost anything to avoid being tagged with the career-threatening tag of “liberal.” [For details on this history, see Robert Parry’s new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
Liberal Resistance
In contrast to the Right’s media juggernaut, the Left relies largely on a scattered network of cash-strapped Web sites, a few struggling magazines and a couple of hand-to-mouth satellite TV networks.
Plus, the evidence is that wealthy progressives still don't "get it." Even with Election 2004 looming, Air America, a promising AM radio network to challenge Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk radio monopoly, was hobbled by the refusal of rich liberals to invest in the venture. In a new book, Road to Air America, Sheldon Drobny, one of the network’s founders, describes his frustrating appeals to East and West Coast “limousine liberals” who didn’t want to engage in the project.
I have encountered similar rebuffs dating back to the early 1990s, after my experiences as a mainstream investigative journalist for the Associated Press and Newsweek convinced me that the biggest threat to American democracy was the growing imbalance in the national news media. Mainstream journalists were increasingly frightened that their careers would be destroyed if they came under attack from the Reagan-Bush administrations and their right-wing allies.
Yet, even as conservative foundations were pouring tens of millions of dollars into building hard-edged conservative media outlets, liberal foundations kept repeating the refrain: “We don’t do media.” One key liberal foundation explicitly forbade even submitting funding requests that related to media projects.
What I saw on the Left during this pivotal period was an ostrich-like avoidance of the growing threat from the Right’s rapidly developing news media infrastructure.
Right-Wing Money Sources
As the liberals stayed on the sidelines in the 1980s and 1990s, the conservative media gained powerful new momentum from foreign sources of money, particularly from South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Moon alone invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington Times and other conservative outlets, while gaining protection for his dubious money operations from Republican defenders inside the U.S. government. [For more on Moon’s secret money sources, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
The Right also made clear that its plan was to wage what it called the “war of ideas,” which conservatives did not mean in a metaphorical sense. The Right’s goal has been to destroy or at least marginalize its enemies through various kinds of information warfare. To reverse Karl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, one might say that conservatives view the “war of ideas” as an extension of violent conflict by other means, including the use of propaganda and disinformation.
Yet, instead of joining this ideological battle, the liberal/Democratic side largely divided up its money between do-good projects, such as buying up threatened wetlands, and spending on activism, such as voter registration and get-out-the vote drives. While there’s nothing wrong with these activities, the outcome of Election 2004 has demonstrated again that in an age of media saturation, street-level activism isn’t enough.
Even when liberal money is earmarked for media, the funds are usually controlled and spent by political activists. For instance, Campaign 2004’s “Media Fund,” which was run by former Clinton administration official Harold Ickes, spent millions of dollars from liberal donors on TV ads placed with mainstream media outlets. Little, if anything, was spent on building year-in-year-out media, like the conservatives have done.
That means that at the end of a campaign, nothing of permanence is left behind. The liberals wait until the next election cycle to gin up their operations again, while the conservatives spend the next four years, every day, pitching their arguments to the American people and making their political base even stronger.
The end result of this imbalance has been that American democracy has been diminished. Indeed, the great American experiment with a democratic Republic may be on the verge of becoming meaningless, since much of the information distributed through the conservative echo chamber is either wrong or wildly misleading – and since the mainstream press has been so thoroughly housebroken.
No Birthright
Yet, while it’s certainly true that the Bush administration and its allies have shown little regard for truthful information, it’s also a legitimate criticism of the Democrats and the Left that they haven’t fought nearly as hard as they should for honest information, the oxygen of any healthy democracy.
While many Americans see information as a birthright that is supposed to be delivered to them by the press like a newspaper thumping on the front doorstep, it is really a right that must be fought for like any other important right.
As George W. Bush celebrates his historic victory, the Democrats, left-of-center foundations and wealthy American liberals should finally recognize that their long pattern of starving honest, independent media has contributed to putting the nation – and the planet – on the edge of catastrophe.
John Kerry’s well-fought campaign – and the youthful energy that surrounded it – may have been an encouraging sign, but the hard truth is: it was too little, too late.
By Norman Solomon
At the moment, history seems to be holding its breath. The reporters, pundits and pollsters all agree: The presidential race is a dead heat.
Despite the magnitude of what’s at stake, the vast majority of daily reporting has a fragmented quality. Yet the sum is immensely greater than the parts.
Journalism is potentially a terrific clarifying force. During the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see whether the news media are up to the challenge. The signs are not encouraging. So far this election year, under the guise of being evenhanded, the standard news reports just give us snippets of information, misleading assertions, speculation, claims and counterclaims.
The battle between George W. Bush and John Kerry is much more than a struggle for power. It puts to the test our capacity for democracy. Voters are supposed to choose the president. But this essential right is under dire threat. That’s the big story -- the GOP elephant in the national living room.
The last week of October began with reports of a concerted Republican strategy to mobilize several thousand poll watchers in Ohio to specifically challenge the right to vote. Naturally, poor people and racial minorities -- always the most vulnerable -- are being targeted with this Election Day maneuver. Such no-holds-barred gambits are widespread in a number of swing states.
A former participant in bare-knuckle White House skulduggery, John Dean, authored a chilling new article for the FindLaw publication. With the Nov. 2 election on the near horizon, “this is a climate for trouble” that could bring “post-election chaos unlike any we’ve ever known,” Dean wrote, much older and wiser than when he served as special counsel to President Richard Nixon.
Up close, in his capacity as one of Nixon’s legalistic henchmen three decades ago, Dean saw an ugly grasp for illegitimate power. Yet, he writes, “even Nixon had his limits.” Dean is more downbeat about the current regime. “There is Republicans’ history of going negative to win elections.” Plus, there is George W. Bush’s top strategist Karl Rove and what Dean describes as “Rove’s disposition to challenge close elections in post-election brawls.”
And what about the press? Dean cites an article about Rove in the November 2004 edition of Atlantic Monthly, which points out that “Rove’s fiercest tendencies have been elided in national media coverage.”
That’s a polite way of saying that nearly all of the highest-profile journalists in our country have dodged the necessary task of fully exposing Rove’s long and sordid record as a political operative willing to do whatever it takes to win. The Rove repertoire, well documented in the recent book “Bush’s Brain,” ranges from media smears to legalistic sieges to manipulation of law-enforcement agencies to bogus events staged to pin wrongdoing on an opponent.
The field is now open for presidential dirty-fighting, on Election Day and well beyond, unparalleled in our lifetimes. “So far, no incumbent modern president has won or lost in a squeaker,” Dean writes. “Even races that looked close in the polls were subject to a last-minute surge in one direction.” But, he adds, “most of the undecided are now decided. So a true surge for either candidate is unlikely.”
According to Dean, “we could see simultaneous litigation in a number of states -- chosen either because the polling was especially close, or because there are significant numbers of vulnerable votes to try to disqualify. ... It may be days or weeks, if not months, before we know the final results of this presidential election. And given the Republican control of the government, if Karl Rove is on the losing side, it could be years: He will take every issue (if he is losing) to its ultimate appeal in every state he can.”
In this context, the journalists of the United States have their work cut out for them. Are they up to the task of exposing truth even when that means challenging the powerful? Like his boss, Rove is counting on them to fall down on the job.
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Norman Solomon is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of “Target Iraq:
What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” His columns and other writings
can be found at