Iowa Illusionists astride the synonymous Donkey
Journalism most fixed
by
DC Larson


"Bipartisanship is political apartheid to third parties and independents. Bipartisan means fair to a Republican and a Democrat. Bipartisan translates into manifestly unfair to those who have no intention of running in or voting for either major party. Bipartisan to third parties and independents is a term akin to all -white, if you are black and trying to buy housing...to all-male, if you are female trying to get a job...it has a 'Do Not Enter' sign on the door; it is separate and unequal..."
-- Teresa Amato, "Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice In a Two-Party Tyranny" (2009 New Press)


Amato served as 2000 and 2004 National campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader. And though it is correct, hers is not a perspective one often encounters in mainstream media
news. Through rigged coverage and sympathetically slanted editorializing, MSM daily braces the very political discrimination Teresa deftly indicts.

Bipartisan does have a commercial press counterpart. "Both sides" sounds inclusive, until one reflects that numerous and diverse challenging views draw breath beyond accepted parameters

What mainstream paper, magazine, or network doesn't decorate and implicitly restrict electoral coverage with reproductions of Thomas Nast's elephant and donkey?

It's indoctrination and control, and it's very ugly. This fixed-ideas circus is familiar to any who take a daily from the rack, or switch on a radio or television.

Rather than spotlight the many significant voices in our society, MSM contrives a disputatious mid-opinion spectrum spectacle. Mock Left spokespeople are routinely propped before audiences, but they do not challenge fundamentals. All rally 'round a belief system embracing as sacrosanct capitalism, state power, private globalization, and world-rending militarism.

(Some would argue -- and I am in their rank -- that several conservative speakers ubiquitous in MSM are considerably closer to the Right-most edge than their counterparts are to the genuine Left one. It is much easier to imagine Cal Thomas sporting a pointed hood than, say, Maureen Dowd directing a brick toward a Starbucks window.)

Sadly, much the same is so of self-bannered "progressive" online sites. Milquetoast agonists the Huffington Post and Daily Kos grant loyalists the placard-hoisting myth that they are raging against the machine; all the while they are instead enabling its terrible career. Real dissent and rebellion do not dwell on such pages, ones that offer only smugly contrived soft-core outsider fantasies that inevitably recommend the donkey.

Focusing on the two major parties is logical when covering national office holders, as nearly all belong to one or the other. But it is wholly illogical and negatively discriminatory to do so when observing movements and candidates, or analyzing competing notions. It permits MSM to pre-filter candidates (a function not legitimately MSM's to undertake), helping ensure that all of us not already within halls of power remain locked out.

(And there is another element decisive to MSM's non-coverage of us: potential advertising profits. Teresa advises, "Just visit the Alliance for Better Campaigns, now a part of the Campaign Legal Center, or the Center for Media and Public Affairs, or the Annenberg Public Policy Center, or the Pew Charitable Trusts reports...You need to pony up for the home team, put out the dollars for paid spots. By definition, if you don't have enough money to advertise, you are not worthy of coverage, unless you do something very extreme.")

Like its big-pond siblings, Iowa's Des Moines Register (the state's largest daily, owned by Gannett, and influential on smaller Iowa papers) dotes on the doings of the elephant and the donkey -- to the point of 'editing' unfavorable realities.

An example of this journalism most fixed presented itself on July 6. A post on the paper's website by reporter Jennifer Jacobs informed that, "Democratic voters still outnumber Republicans in Iowa." Not until paragraph 4 did readers learn that the number of Iowa voters claiming "No Party" surpassed those choosing either of the majors.

It was as if a report on the Indianapolis 500 had trumpeted the second and third-place finishers, citing the winning driver only as an afterthought.

"[B]eat reporters need to report equally on what all the candidates say and do," wrote Register columnist Rekha Basu, last April. That she and the paper do no such thing -- blacking from coverage third party and independent candidates and excluding them from debates the Register sponsors -- went unacknowledged by Basu.

From 2000 to mid-2004, I served as the Iowa Green Party's state media coordinator. I left the Greens to accept the post of state coordinator for the independent Nader/Camejo presidential
campaign. All the while, I maintained records of state-level media treatment.

For me, early indication of the Des Moines Register's hostility toward electoral independence came as a 2000 editorial. Decrying Iowa Green/Nader ballot access ambitions, the paper hissed,
"inclusion for third parties might seem harmless now, but just wait until Nazis, too, seek official status."

To the two-party partisan journalist, one is a Democrat, a Republican, or interchangeably fetid. A Green is a Socialist is a Libertarian is a Prohibitionist is a Communist is a Reformist is a Nazi.
(Third parties moving in? There goes the electoral neighborhood.)

The Register adorns its Sunday Opinion section with the First Amendment. But its editors (and their like-biased fellows) do not truly believe in it. After all, the right of a citizen to seek office under any party banner or no such banner is certainly a form of speech, inexorably entwined with the right to vote.

One cannot truly support one part and not the other. (Which is not to say that Register editors are entirely anti-free speech; they did cheer the Citizens United decision.)

Too, it is customary for neo-liberals to rightly condemn the political discrimination carried out during the McCarthy Era. But denying someone electoral/professional opportunities from political motivations is exactly what the Register itself does when it accords coverage based on ideology.

(A farm-state editorial meeting room full of corporate lib Tailgunner Joes?)

While representing Iowa Greens, I submitted to Register editors (one of whom hung up on me as I was in mid-sentence -- now, that's the arrogance of political bigotry, for you), reporters, and columnists a surfeit of press releases detailing our events, issue positions, and commentaries on current affairs.

These were never heard of again. I assume other of the state's third parties also pursued press outreach, though I saw very little of them.

Despite her unsavory and snottily-dismissive late-2000 "Later for Nader," I made a point of sending to columnist Rekha Basu numerous Green and Nader releases. (To be fair, she did once write favorably of our 2002 agriculture secretary candidate. Former columnist David Yepsen also once wrote positively of exploring alternative electoral options. These 'fairness moments' were anomolous, though; the two quickly returned to two-party bias mode.)

The Register barred from its 2002 gubernatorial debate officially registered candidates from Iowa's Green and Libertarian parties. And the paper's No 'Others' Allowed policy rose again in 2008, as the paper excluded both Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich from appearing in its Democrat nominees debate, moderated by Register editor Carolyn Washburn.

The paper did not even note these registered candidates' existence, in its Editorial Page candidates' profiles.

Recall that during the 2000 and 2004 contests, some counseled that Nader seek the Democrat nomination. Then, went the argument, he could make his cases before national television audiences.
But as the Register's (and ABC's Ted Koppel's) discriminatory treatment of Gravel and Kucinich pointed up, even major party campaigners not to corporate media liking could be dismissed and disappeared.

In "Grand Illusion," Teresa writes, "Witness the establishment media's contempt for the so-called second-tier candidates inside the major parties...According to [Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting's] Peter Hart, in May 2007 Howard Kurtz said that, 'News organizations are allowing ego-driven fringe candidates to muck up debates among those with an actual shot at the White House.'"

Later with Nader, I continued to include the Register in release circulations. As before, though, we were largely unseen in the paper's ad-larded pages. (Scattered mentions of Nader's 2004 campaign were fewer than those of his 2000 one. 2008's coverage was practically non-existent.)

Register columnist Basu in 2004 saluted as noble a Democrat loyalist who filed a frivolous and ultimately thrown-out challenge to Nader's inclusion on Iowa's ballot. That attempted legal barring was an Iowa Democrats dirty trick to stifle democracy by rigging the election. It stunk of polititical bigotry.

But Basu enthusiastically applauded, charging that Nader "lets Republicans help put him on the ballot."

In "Grand Illusion," Teresa writes "But this is a focus group-tested line that Dems used to tarnish Ralph." A Center for Responsive Politics study the author cites showed that in 2004, Kerry and the Democrats took in over $10 million from GOP-identified donors, compared to only $111,700 received by the Nader campaign from similar sources.

Neither the Register nor Basu mentioned any of this, despite its being publicly accessible information.

The Register's coverage of last March's antiwar Washington rally consisted of a single-paragraph item. The presence of "Indict Bush Now" signs was noted. Unmentioned were protesters' criticisms of Obama for continuing that war and betraying supporters. Cindy Sheehan's arrest at the rally was reported, but her branding Obama a "war criminal" received no ink in the Register.

It goes without saying that the paper blacked out mention of protest speaker Nader.

The Des Moines paper's misreporting of that event illustrated its ongoing, unethical activity as partisan shield for Obama and corporate Democrats against substantive critiques from progressives (or "fuckin' retards," to quote Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel.).

Voters are manipulated like chess figures, their Pavlovian ballot-booth reactions to road-tested Republican and Democrat bogeymen bankable projections. The public interest, meanwhile, goes unserved. Indeed, important efforts never leave drawing boards.

It is a contemptible business, one the Des Moines Register's editors aid gleefully.


Postscript

Submitted by me to Register Editorial page editor Linda Lantor Fandel, on 2/23, the unsolicited opinion piece, "Democrat is just another word for Republican" was rejected without comment.
The paper had published two previous guest op-eds I'd written (one, co-written).Only one endorsed seeking political alternatives; it fell well between elections and mentioned no active candidacies.


Democrat is just another word for Republican
by
DC Larson

During my years as the Iowa Green Party's State Media Coordinator, and 2004 service as independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader's Iowa Coordinator, experience taught me that partisanship is the natural enemy of principle.

Among Bush Administration initiatives that I joined millions in decrying were the Iraq War, the odious and rights-trampling PATRIOT ACT, denial of civil rights equality to gays and lesbians, executions, mingling of public government and private religion, and denial of genuinely universal, single-payer health care.

Like others across the country, many Iowans were swayed by the Democrats and the Obama campaign. "Hope and change" had such a positive, invigorating ring to it. And so, anti-Bush voters fell in line, and believed.

And were suckered.

Bush-era conservative agenda items many of us protested have been continued by the Obama Democrats -- and sometimes even increased. For example, Obama's latest proposed military budget surpasses even its Bush predecessor.

Democrats have continued the PATRIOT ACT. They oppose equal marriage rights for gays. They refuse to investigate the Bush White House. The practice of sending "terrorism" suspects to countries that torture has not ended.

Obama and his party refuse to even consider single-payer health care, instead proposing that millions of Americans be indentured to private insurers, (Never mind that we're losing our jobs and homes.)
And it gets worse. On 2/4, the website CommonDreams.org reported that "the Obama Administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting select American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists."

Only the face changed; the execrable policies have remained.

The Democrat Party of 2010 is not that of 1965. It has devolved into a fully corporatized, pro-war, anti-civil rights, decidedly anti-progressive power vehicle. Today, Democrat is just another word for Republican.

And for real progressives, disappointment time and again rides a donkey.

Any who would argue that Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Tea Party conservatives constitute the greatest impediment to genuine progressive changes in the public's interest couldn't be more wrong.
Of course such conservatism is plainly inimical to social justice ambitions. And its adherants make obvious and visible targets,  with cartoonish personas, controversy-spading rhetoric, and foul, self-centered philosophies.


But despite all that, conservative Republicans are at most the #2 problem.


It is the deceptive and posturing Democrat liberal who most effectively frustrates practical progress in electoral and social justice spheres, who legislates practical offenses against the public interest.


A Democrat president aided by an obsequious, donkey-controlled Congress can get away with anti-public interest policies Republicans can only dream of. Ronald Reagan fired air traffic controllers and was rightly attacked by Congressional Democats for it.

But Bill Clinton's pressing NAFTA into law -- decimating organized labor, nationally -- was championed by Democrat office-holders.

Obama has followed in these regrettable footsteps, the most obvious instance being his simultaneous escalation of US militarism in Afghanistan and preening reciept of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I don't need to point out that deserved international uproar would ensue if a Republican were in that position.

Still, each election year, the same scenario is played out: Republicans put forward some Halloweenish harlequin on the order of George Bush or Sarah Palin, and among opponents the cry is raised -- we must elect any Democrat, no matter how indifferent to the public interest, lest The Right assume power.

Of course, true progressives oppose Republicans. And they also oppose Democrats.

Pursuing progress isn't for everyone. It means accepting that one will lose, and lose, and lose, before winning. It takes years. Decades.

I suppose it is more comfortable to go to the mall and buy a Che Guavera t-shirt than take an unpopular stand, refuse to abandon principle, and risk ostracization from one's peer group.

But breaking the dead-end 2-party addiction, declaring one's independence, has life-renewing and society-improving benefits beyond articulation!