I remember the first time that I understood, with complete clarity and utter certainty, that the media
was acting in support of the right wing (particularly the fiscal right), and was in no way objective.
This is a lesson that has to be learned by each successivegeneration…
 -The Diva, Tammy Talpas-

I rarely watch broadcast news anymore.  I don’t listen to it on the radio either, other than to
check traffic reports and the weather.  I’ve discarded from my life all talking heads and
disembodied voices that offer to “inform” me.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am a “news junkie.”
I spend several hours a day pouring through information from sources I trust.  But quite
frankly, I’ve grown tired of being lied to.  Lies coming from the broadcast frequencies that I,
and the rest of the American citizenry own.  I see no purpose to being gentle, or kind here.
The time has long passed for mincing words with amiable complaint.

Tony Snow, Bill O’Reily, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Tim Russert, Cokie Roberts, Sam
Donaldson, and others too numerous to name, you are all congenital liars.  I challenge you
to prove to the American people that you are not, but you can’t and you won’t.  Even if you
could, for just one moment, rise above you cowardice, and confront criticism to its face, I
would strip each of you naked with specific lists of the lies that you’ve told.  You are, each
of you, spoiled and pampered rich children, with no greater purpose than to protect your
corner of the sandbox, while sucking from a corporate teat.  There is not a one of you who
would even vaguely consider rising above your petty self interest to address or answer
something higher.  I believe you are completely oblivious to the damage you have done, and
are doing, as accessories to the destruction of the worlds greatest engine of enlightened
discourse and democracy.

In Ken Burns’ excellent documentary, The Civil War, historian/author Shelby Foote was
asked the cause of America’s bloodiest conflict.  He said that the Civil War was caused by
our failure to compromise in that time and place.  Mr. Foote said that one tends to think of
Americans as an uncompromising people, but in fact, that is our brilliance.  “Our whole
government is founded on it,” he said, and he is right.  But in order to compromise,
competing factions must understand the issues and perspectives from both sides.  That
requires an honest forum of ideas, and free, national discourse.  Without that, democratic
principles will shrivel, and we will lose the republic that Ben Franklin once challenged us to
keep.

Our forefathers guaranteed us the right to a free press, and with every right comes
responsibility.  As it is said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” it seems logical to me,
then, that the absolute corruption that is born from absolute power, is the absolute lack of
responsibility.  When a small cadre of financial interests take complete charge of the most
influential vehicle of our national discourse, taking absolute power over it, there can only be
the absolute corruption of our ancestors’ greatest legacy, a free and open press.

I am 48 years old.  I am a member of the first generation that grew up with a television as
the constant feature in every family room.  I grew up with legends delivering the nightly
news from the various television networks.  I remember Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner,
Chet Huntley, and of course, “the most trusted man in America,” Walter Chronkite.  All
were mentored to some degree by the greatest legend of them all, Edward R. Murrow, who
created the standard that all subsequent broadcast journalists were expected to follow.  It is
the legacy of these giants that the sniveling likes of Bill O’Reily (the on-air voice of his
master, Rupert Murdock) promises repeatedly to destroy.

O’Reily and the rest of his band of blithering idiots, equate any federally sponsored social
consciousness with socialism or communism.  Such is the excuse given by the “Taliban”
wing of the Republican right to deny the people access to the national microphone.  The
podium once occupied by fairness in presenting all reasonable points of view, was fenced off
by Bush I, sadly neglected by Bill Clinton, and will shortly be dismantled for all time by
Bush II.  Very shortly, as a quid pro quo for granting complete control of the airwaves to a
handful of financial elitists, America will hear little over the airwaves but the propaganda of
power elitists.  The successful war against the First Amendment will have been won by a
two pronged attack.  The first attack shut down the Fairness Doctrine, the regulation that
promised the people that opposing voices would always have the chance to be heard; the
second attack assaulted anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that prevented conglomeration of
the airwaves into the hands of only a few.

Once I considered that all of this was the accidental outcome of a capitalist society, but now
I believe that there is deliberate design.  Before I am accused of being another wild-eyed
conspiracy theorist—no—I don’t believe that there is one small active group seeking to
enslave America, but I do believe that there is a “loose cabal” of entities with their own
agenda that have an implicit understanding of the consequences of the current course of
events.  For those few seeking exclusive ownership of our airwaves, they see the opportunity
for massive profits by holding total control over a very limited national resource.  For those
few seeking to eliminate opposing viewpoints, they see the success of an agenda already
discarded by the majority of Americans at the polls.  The partnership of the two understand
the national implications and consequences, which emerge as being unworthy of concern
when weighed against their own narrow self-interests.

The specious excuse given for this dismantling of the First Amendment, from the inside out,
is silencing the voice of  “the liberal media.”  Our founding fathers understood that the way a
democracy must operate to combat any point of view is to provide a more powerful,
dissenting opinion; not to deny access to the debate.  What is an attack on the First
Amendment if it is not the attempt to silence a particular voice?  Yet I should not go too far
out of bounds by even answering a notion that has less substance than a fairy tale.  Anyone
who can weigh the facts, and then even consider that broadcast news was ever liberal, sits so
far to the right that they are quite willing to point to the likes of Rush Limbaugh as a voice
of reason.

The master propagandists in the Third Reich taught us that if you tell the big lie often
enough, it will become a part of the national lexicon.  The author of this particular big lie
was Spiro T. Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president.  Agnew was forced from office on
charges of bribery, and taking bribes.  This paragon of truth subsequently pleaded “no
contest.”  Richard Nixon won the presidency, in part, because he had promised the American
people that he had a plan to end the war in Vietnam, and to maintain America’s robust
economy.  By the time he was running for a second term in 1972, the war had been steadily
escalated, and we had drawn into a deep recession.  Any reporters who simply stated this
truth were referred to by Agnew as “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and dismissed as part of
the “liberal press.”  Yet, in 1972, eighty percent of “the liberal” newspapers endorsed
Richard M. Nixon for re-election.  I shouldn’t have to point out that “Tricky” Dick was
never a darling of the left.

We have all seen the right-wing think tank studies that tell us that most media reporters are
registered Democrats.  These studies are supposed to convince us of the truth of liberal bias.
For the most part these studies are old, made at a time when the majority of ultra
conservatives were Democrats (that faction of populist racists, like Jesse Helms, who have
since abandoned the Democratic party for the Republican party).  In fact, at the time, the
large majority of all registered voters were registered in the Democratic party. Yet
Republicans still managed to win the national debate often enough to be elected to public
office on nearly an equal basis.

It shouldn’t be very hard to figure out that someone’s party registration may have very little
to do with their overriding beliefs.  I know liberals who are registered Republicans, and
conservatives who are registered Democrats.  Why they do this is not for me to say, but I
suspect that each feels that such is the best way to influence their respective affiliations in
primary elections.  I remember once watching Tim Russert try to prove his lack of bias by
claiming that he was not registered either Democrat nor Republican, but Independent.
Really, Tim?  If I go out and change my registration to Republican, will people take what I
say here as conventional conservative wisdom?

The simple fact is that the right wing of a right wing party has a nasty habit of accusing any
holder of a dissenting opinion of being a little “pink,” at the very least.  Do you want a
recent example?  Allow me to introduce to you Senator Jim Jeffords.  Senator Jeffords has
long been know as a conscientious voice of conservatism.  However, in attempting to address
the needs of his constituency, he was forced to disagree with much of the Bush agenda.
Because of this, he had become so marginalized by the right wing of his own party that he
was forced to declare himself independent.  Being a right leaning individual, he could not
bring himself to join the Democrats.  Yet since that day, we have all heard Jim Jeffords
called everything from a closet Democrat to an overt socialist by the likes of Tom Delay and
others within his former party’s leadership.

Over the past twenty years, a slow but sure dismantling of regulations designed to insure the
voices of varying opinions, and to give power to truth, has allowed everything from the
impeachment of Bill Clinton to the theft of a presidential election.  In that light, what is
happening at the Federal Communications Commission my be the most important issue
facing America today.  Next week, in Part II, I will discuss the brief history of the covert war
against our national discourse, and into whose custody America’s microphone has been
handed.