Protests are heating up again in Iran, so comment on the following is timely.
In June 2007 I remarked on Amy Goodman’s fawning interview with left extremist John Pilger, a declared supporter of the Iraqi insurgency, an admirer of Hezbollah and apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers, and a Balkan genocide revisionist to boot. (Pilger considers himself part of the “peace movement.”) Now Goodman has aired another fawning interview with Pilger (hat tip Brett), in which he issues the following Palin-esque statement on Iran:
Now there is no doubt that among the people protesting, the many people protesting in the streets of Iran, are those who want another Iran, those who want greater freedoms, we have heard from that in the past, but without any smoking gun, without any credible information, without any evidence that that election in Iran was rigged. Rigged to get rid of something like 10 million votes. I mean, I don’t think anyone does in an election like in Iran or in the United States, there is a fraud. In most elections, there are. They may well have been extensive fraud in the Iranian elections.
Goodman fails to challenge this doublespeak. No credible information? No evidence of fraud? Iran’s Guardian Council has conceded there were widespread irregularities. We also have Chatham House’s authoritative study, which Juan Cole endorsed and linked to on June 22. The argument is settled. Goodman posted the Pilger interview on July 6 and she says their discussion occurred “last week.” So Pilger is either ignorant of the Chatham House report, or he chooses to deny its existence. (The late Harold Pinter on Pilger — my italics: “He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is.” Nonsense.) It is Goodman’s duty as a journalist to mention the Chatham House study to her listeners. Widely hailed on the left as a tough-minded and well-informed interviewer, she is neither.
Incoherent as it is, Pilger’s quote above allows him some wiggle room to deny he’s wholeheartedly backing the Iranian regime. But there’s no mistaking it — in this epic contest between the Iranian people and the baton-wielding state, Pilger is nauseatingly sympathetic toward the latter:
[Obama] has made a number of patronizing appeals to the Iranians, but now, as he is in effect saying, the protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Tehran. Turn that around. What if it was suggested that protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Washington?
Again, Goodman — I remind you, she is host of a program called Democracy Now! — fails to challenge Pilger on this chillingly anti-democratic statement. But it is helpful to know that if unruly mass protests were ever to break out in evil Washington, Pilger would apparently put in a word for random beatings and arrests, shootings, street surveillance, total blockage of the media and social networking and so on. Maybe he feels the Kent State and Chicago ’68 protesters had it coming.
Along the way, Pilger hails Democracy Now! as an “alternative source of information.” In truth, it is a softball, back-patting forum for the fringe left.
PS — Goodman has also interviewed Cynthia McKinney about her arrest and deportation from Israel. As Adam Holland has reported, McKinney is making the rounds of racist and antisemitic hate radio, first on something called Information Underground, more recently on the program of Daryl Bradford Smith, a fellow who believes in a “Judeo-Bolshevist plot against Christianity.” Don’t expect Amy Goodman to report on McKinney’s hard-right fascist ties anytime soon. And shame on pro-Palestinian activist Adam Shapiro for consorting with her.
Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader, has been gunned down by assassins on motorcycles. Steve Coll has published a long, extraordinary statement from Wickramatunga in anticipation of his own death:
It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.
Also this:
The free media serve as a mirror in which the public can see itself sans mascara and styling gel. From us you learn the state of your nation, and especially its management by the people you elected to give your children a better future. Sometimes the image you see in that mirror is not a pleasant one. But while you may grumble in the privacy of your armchair, the journalists who hold the mirror up to you do so publicly and at great risk to themselves. That is our calling, and we do not shirk it.
Read this and then think of the detestable Joe the Plumber, who has traveled to Israel not just to weigh in on a conflict of which he has no knowledge, but to declare that journalists should not be permitted to cover war. “You [journalists] make a big deal out of it,” he whines. Just think about that: Wickramatunga goes to his grave open-eyed to fight for the right that Wurzelbacher, a man with no credentials of any kind, mocks while enjoying the privilege of speaking on camera, on a topic he can teach no one anything about.
Peter Phillips of Project Censored has responded to my critique, in which I point out that the director of an entity nominally devoted to fighting censorship actually supports censorship, as long as it’s done in Cuba. You’ll find Phillip’s largely boilerplate response, which fails to engage any of the points I made, at the bottom of the original post. He notes that Project Censored and his own reporting work are two different things. Yet his work appears prominently on the Project Censored website and clearly carries its imprimatur.
Phillips accuses me of “bias,” which is rich coming from someone who undertakes a reporting trip to Cuba to meet with journalists who are either sympathetic to the regime, or unable or unwilling to share any dissenting views, and then concludes that Cuban journalists willingly censor themselves so as not to aid in any “counter-revolutionary” plots. Right. For a supposed foe of censorship, by the way, to throw around the Stalinist term “counter-revolutionary” in the year 2008 is also noteworthy.
Phillips asserts that Project Censored has elicited only a “handfull [sic] of negative stories on just of few of our reports,” which says a good deal about the preach-to-the-choir culture of the left and very little about the merit of PC’s work.
While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship…
I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list presented as a mock-petition: “We, the undersigned, believe that music can still be a political force of note and not just the soundtrack to over-consumption.”
The leadoff track, “The Story,” comes with a written admonishment from Herbert that we visit the website for Project Censored. For years, Project Censored, a nonprofit affiliated with Sonoma State University, has compiled a list of top-25 news stories that, if not censored outright, were underreported or overlooked by the mainstream media in the U.S.
Herbert’s listeners will want to consider that Project Censored has come under withering criticism of late from people on the progressive left, and for good reason. Back in 2000, Brooke Shelby Biggs of Mother Jonescalled PC’s annual list misleading, redundant and “a thinly veiled excuse for an alternative press self-love-fest.” Far more damningly, David Walls, writing in New Politics in 2002, detailed “how Project Censored joined the whitewash of Serb atrocities.” He demonstrated that PC has “departed the terrain of the democratic Left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists, Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.” As if to prove the point, Project Censored included on its 2007 list of top “censored” stories the theories of 9/11 Truth huckster Steven Jones, a decision which prompted the resignation of judges Robert Jensen and Norman Solomon.
But a glance at PC’s website reveals the most salient thing of all: much like the Clear Skies Act, Project Censored actually does the opposite of what its name suggests.
Director Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State, visited Cuba in May of this year and wrote this Potemkin village report under the headline “Cuba Supports Press Freedom” — a manifest lie, as this Human Rights Watch dispatch (“Fidel Castro’s Abusive Machinery Remains Intact”) spells out. Phillips mocked the idea that Cuban journalists labor under a “Stalinist media system,” which they most certainly do, and wrote:
Nonetheless it did became clear that Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. [...]
In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.
This is practically stenography dictated by the Cuban regime. More to the point, Phillipsaccepts, without a hint of skepticism, the disingenuous argument the regime has long used to justify media crackdowns. Put another way, the director of Project Censored supports censorship. He goes on to insist, astonishingly, that the U.S. “honor the Cuban peoples choice of a socialist system.”
Here is Human Rights Watch on the “choices” available to the Cuban people: “For almost five decades, Cuba has restricted nearly all avenues of political dissent. Cuban citizens have been systematically deprived of their fundamental rights to free expression, privacy, association, assembly, movement, and due process of law. Tactics for enforcing political conformity have included police warnings, surveillance, short-term detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, criminal prosecutions, and politically motivated dismissals from employment.”
It’s clear that Project Censored, under Phillips’s leadership, has no regard for democracy and no principles or moral credibility on the subject of censorship. As for Matthew Herbert, he should reexamine his own criteria before telling the rest of us what we should be reading.
Beyond the debate, CNN seems worse than usual these days. One report on Sunday’s Turkish election carried the screen banner “Radical Islam Threat,” which paints a totally misleading picture of Turkish politics (the Islamic AK Party is doggedly pro-European Union, while the secular opposition is in some ways more hostile to democracy). I also note with mounting impatience the fact that Lou Dobbs has abandoned journalism altogether, and no one seems to call him on it. Seven days a week, in the prime slot of 6pm, Dobbs is given a platform for his strident anti-immigrant activism.
I’m no expert on the topic of illegal immigration, but I know a climate of resentment and hate when I see it. Yesterday one of Jack Cafferty’s email respondents referred to illegals as “freeloading parasites.” If this gave Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer pause, they didn’t say so. Lou Dobbs may strenuously deny it, but he’s stirring up the poison of bigotry. It’s time for CNN to give equal time to opposing views on the subject.
[Update: Actually, Rick Sanchez, another CNN anchor, is someone who has challenged Dobbs. Not long ago he told Dobbs to his face that "as the son of Paco and Adela" he finds Dobbs's stance troublesome.]
