Note: This is the third of a six-part series.
Part 1, Part 2.

The Corporate-Controlled Media's Assault on Free Expression

The dominant major media have always functioned to achieve what noted Australian academic, author and psychologist Alex Carey called "taking the risk out of democracy" to "protect corporate power against democracy" by acting as national thought-control police gatekeepers controlling what information reaches the public and what's suppressed. It's worse than ever now resulting from virtually uninterrupted media consolidation with friendly Democrat and Republican administrations allowing five giant global media cartels today to control most newspapers, magazines, radio, television, book publishing, and films. Other than the internet, they hold a stranglehold over the kinds of news, information, entertainment and other programming and material most people get from which they form their views of the nation's state, its government, and the world.

The media giants supplying it are master manipulators. They make sure the public gets their one-sided corporate/state-friendly views in their role as government/business partners instead of their watchdogs. It's called censorship, the willful suppression of free expression, ideas and thought in an age of sophisticated mind control "manufactur(ing) of consent" (see Manufacturing Consent - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky) in a democracy where it can't be done by force. It's an effort to program the public mind to go along with whatever agenda best serves wealth and power by effectively suppressing dissent against it.

The work of three noted print journalists are prominent cases in point, but shamefully what's true for them applies across all the entire dominant media landscape that ranges from pathetic to appalling. One example is Washington Post columnist and so-called dean of the Washington press corps and political "pundits" at age 77, David Broder. In many ways he's the worst of a bad lot because of his ill-deserved image as a man of integrity, decency, honor and perceived wisdom. It hides his dark side unprincipled support for the rogue administration in power and his willingness to cover for it and suppress its indisputable record of lawlessness and contempt for ordinary people everywhere.

Since George Bush took office in 2001, Broder has been out in front characterizing him as a strong, decisive, effective, and principled leader protecting the nation against threats to our national security including waging just wars for it. His harshest comments are reserved for Bush critics he attacks maliciously like calling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a "loose cannon" and "an embarrassment" for daring to say Iraq is a lost war even though anyone with common sense knows it is including high present and former Washington officials unwilling to deny what Broder does.

Broder is an "award-winning" journalist. It's long past time he took his ill-deserved trophies and ended his morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest lifetime career of misreporting at the Washington Post where he's done it for the past 40 years.

The New York Times never met a Republican president or US-instigated war of aggression it didn't love, fully support and be willing to give plenty of front page space to journalists like Judith Miller assigned to wave the flag and lead the journalistic charge. Miller had the dubious honor leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 and held it until she was forced to resign in disgrace in late 2005 ending her controversial 28 year career at the Times but not her presence in the corporate media where she's welcomed on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal never shy to publish material extremist enough at times to make a Nazi blush.

Miller is picking up there where she left off in shame across town with her latest near-full page "When Activists Are Terrorists" piece defending New York police Gestapo thuggery against anti-war protesters. Removed from leading the charge to wars of aggression, Miller's now out in front supporting police brutality and illegal political spying against people exercising their First Amendment right to protest publicly she can't tolerate so she's taking aim against them in a venue always friendly to her kind of extremist views.

With Miller gone, the New York Times continues its pro-war stance with military correspondent Michael Gordon, and former Miller co-conspirator, now putting out regular propaganda like they both once did together and Gordon always was comfortable doing alone. Michael Munk in an online February 11, 2007 After Downing Street.org article calls him "The Ghost of Judith Miller" citing one example of his reported "evidence" that Iran is supplying Iraq resistance fighters with "more effective IEDs" without a shred of evidence to prove it because there is none. The New York Times shamelessly ran Gordon's preposterous piece February 10 (and all his others prominently) titled "Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran (and) Used Against US Troops" citing anonymous sources only to back up his unsupportable claim.

Like Miller, Gordon excels in state and corporate supportive Times-speak suppressing the free and open kind his readers want but never get from him. Most often he cites as sources unnamed "American intelligence (or) Western officials (or those old faithfuls) high administration (or) Pentagon officials" while almost never quoting others with contrary views debunking his and theirs. Gordon, like Miller, is important because he writes lead stories on what media critic Norman Solomon calls the most valuable print real estate in the country - the front pages of the New York Times that are read by government and business leaders and opinion-makers everywhere. He's also the same Michael Gordon who wrote the false and discredited story on Saddam's aluminum tubes. He now continues putting out regular falsified reports on the Times front pages as an agent of the state he and his employer serve.

One of his latest efforts is titled "General Says Iraq Pullback Would Increase Violence." In it he parrots Iraq military commander General David Petraeus' administration-friendly line that reducing US forces would increase "sectarian violence" and increase internal instability caused, in fact, by the military occupation the general's in charge of running. Without a US presence, the generalissimo says, "It can get much, much worse (and) right now (with the troop surge) it's a good bit better" claiming "sectarian" killings declined two-thirds since January while ignoring how out-of-control things really are and the reverse of how he and Gordon portray them.

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Gordon also goes along with Petraeus' assessment that "The new hydrocarbon law is of enormous importance," ignoring how it's structured to suck out Iraq's enormous oil wealth transferring most of it to Big (US) Oil from Iraqis who own it. Finally, comes the key part of the article with Gordon trumpeting the general's unsubstantiated claim of continued (unrevealed) evidence showing Iran is providing Shiite "militants" military and other support. Citing computer documents supposedly seized in a March Karbala raid, Petraeus claims "There are numerous documents which detailed a number of different attacks on coalition forces, and our sense is these records were kept so they could be handed in to whoever it is who is financing them" - pointing his finger directly at Iran from his previous comments with Gordon obligingly implying the same view on the Times front page.

Along with falsifying news, the Times also excels in suppressing it as willing Pentagon partners going along with Department of Defense (DOD) rules on reporting on Iraq. An absurd one on its face states: "Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member's 'prior' written consent." Of course, the Times and rest of the dominant media rarely ever do what this DOD regulation forbids so, rule or no rule, the Bush administration's happy-face-of-war is preserved to suppress its true ugly hidden one.

One other recent example of intimidation and censorship also deserves mention. It's a story reported April 27 by AP, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere that a straight 'A' Chicago area Cary-Grove High School senior of Chinese ethnicity, with no history of disciplinary problems or trouble with the law, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct for comments he made in an assigned creative-writing classroom essay. Students were told to "write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing" and apparently were also told to exaggerate. Lee followed instructions, made comments his teacher thought were violent, and she reported it resulting in his arrest and removal to an off-campus learning program.

This is a small incident, likely to be easily resolved, about one student in one school. Yet it signifies a state-induced climate of fear and intimidation heightened by TV transmitted color-coded terror alerts, daily reports of permanent war, imagined enemies stalking us everywhere, and events like the over-reported and hyped Virginia Tech shootings making it worse. Now even freely expressed creative classroom speech is threatened with suppression and punishment unless it conforms to acceptable school content norms, whatever they are. In the age of George Bush, it's another reminder of former press secretary Ari Fleischer's warning that Americans (even teenage straight 'A' high school students) "need to watch what they say," or else.

Organizations in the Lead for Free Expression

The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) was founded in 1974 to support our constitutional right of free expression and defend against the dangers of censorship. It's an "alliance of 50 national non-profit organizations, including literary, artistic, religious, educational, professional, labor and civil liberties groups" united for that common purpose and to promote an open marketplace of ideas and thought.

It does it through local and national grassroots organizing and activism on:

-- free speech issues;

-- educational activities;

-- conferences and public meetings;

-- publications like its quarterly Censorship News reaching 25,000 readers;

--providing help, advice, and information to individuals, organizations and community groups around the country;

-- monitoring and interpreting litigation and legislation on First Amendment issues;

-- and aiding "thousands of artists, authors, teachers, students, librarians, readers, museum-goers and others around the country opposing censorship" on issues ranging from:

-- politics and political correctness

-- the media and internet

-- academic freedom

-- race and ethnicity

-- religion

-- culture

-- the arts and entertainment

-- sex education and orientation

-- class

-- science

-- obscenity, and more.

NCAC rejects all barriers in a pluralistic society on any material no matter how controversial or abhorrent to some. That's what the free interchange of speech, ideas and thought are all about in a democratic society that can't be one without upholding that freedom. Today, supporting and telling the truth is what Orwell called "a revolutionary act" in times of "universal deceit" now plaguing us. It's why organizations like NCAC are important defenders of our constitutionally protected free speech rights as well as being bulwarks against the forces effectively denying them to us.

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression is in this fight as well to defend "free expression in all its forms (as) concerned with the musician as with the mass media, with the painter as with the publisher, and as much with the sculptor as the editor." The Center was established in 1990 and is based near Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, VA, also near the University of Virginia he founded in 1819 is and with which it has close ties. Its mission ranges over a wide range of programs in education, the arts, and in judicial and legislative matters involving all forms of free expression. Each year around Jefferson's April 13 birthday, "Jefferson Muzzles" are awarded to individuals or organizations committing especially outrageous affronts to free expression. Annual William J. Brennan, Jr. Awards (honoring the former High Court Justice) are also given to individuals or groups showing special commitment to free expression issues and values in the spirit of the former Justice.

The Free Expression Network (FEN) is another organization, among many others, in the struggle for free and open expression. It's an NCAC financially sponsored "alliance of organizations dedicated to protecting the First Amendment right of free expression and the values it represents, and to opposing governmental efforts to suppress constitutionally protected speech." It does it through its Free Expression Network Clearinghouse web site as well as maintaining a listserv for private communications among its members who also meet quarterly with invited guests to share information and strategies. Its many member organizations include the Thomas Jefferson Center, People for the American Way, ACLU, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, The Center for Media Education, Feminists for Free Expression, and First Amendment Center.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com