Downing Street Memos and the Media Triangle

Our media should really bow their heads in shame. Not only did they fail to fulfil their watch dog role three years ago, before the republican president engaged in his war of choice against Iraq, our media now fails to inform the public on just how it was that Bush and crew willfully mislead our nation into war. All right, all right, so am being a little harsh, but that’s only because I care — my rancor comes from a place of love; love for the ideal of what committed and idealistic journalists can and do do for democracy. Well, I guess I should also add that there are two kinds of media journalists, really. There are print journalists, whom by enlarge have done a far, far better job than their counterparts in the broadcast media.

It is this second group, broadcast journalists, that should really be taken to the woodshed, and not be let out till they’ve done their penance — the fact is that these journalists are just glorified TelePrompTer readers, always in pursuit of ratings to please their corporate masters. I would go as far as denying these TelePrompTer readers any media credentials and barring them from all newsrooms — they simply don’t deserve to even be called journalist nor to be associated with anything having to do with news.

And now to the point of my rant.

It is only until now that the NY Times has deemed it worth their while to cover the Downing Street Memos, which even I covered here about a year ago — that’s right, a year ago. If you recall, these are the documents that high ranking British government officials prepared for Prime Minster Blair summarizing meetings between the Bush and Blair governments some eight months before the Iraqi invasion. The documents make it blatantly clear that the republican president, Bush, was ready to go to war (even though he publicly claimed the opposite):

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Read that again. Here’s a British government official telling Prime Minister Blair that the republican president was going to war, no matter what and that, in fact, the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invasion. Now, some simply interpret that as the Bush Administration placing an emphasis on evidence to support the invasion of Iraq. Of course, there’s another interpretation, a more sinister interpretation. And that’s that the republican president would go as far as fabricating evidence to invade Iraq. There’s certainly evidence to support the conclusion the Bush Administration would, in fact, fabricate evidence by provoking Iraq:

Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]".

Of course, am certainly not the only one that’s noticed the lack of coverage that this subject has received, in spite of the Downing Street Memos finally being written about in our so-called paper of record.

Peter Daou writes about the memo and how we, Liberals, simply lack the media organization to be able to make this a nationally talked about issue — similarly to how conservatives manage, on a regular basis, to inject their narratives into our national discourse. Daou points out that, unlike conservatives, Liberals simply lack what he calls the Media Triangle, that is: grassroots, politicians and media surrogates working in concert to affect the national discourse. The Liberal media triangle is broken, the grassroots is ineffective at affecting our elected politicians and there simply aren’t any influential, much less reliable, liberal voices in our mainstream media.

According to Daou, the Downing Street Memos story is the perfect sort of hook to build a narrative on, one that can cut to the heart of the thin national defense veneer that republicans still enjoy. However, until we figure out how to get the Liberal media triangle going, we’ll always be merely reacting to the conservative narratives that they tell us about ourselves.

More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants’ Rights

That’s what am talking about [LA Times - March 25, 2006]!

Joining what some are calling the nation’s largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

Republicans, as they always do, counted on scapegoating another out group in the 2006 election cycle. In 2004 they went after "the gays" and this year it looks like Republicans counted on vilifying "illegal aliens" to agitate their narrow minded, yet always reliable, base. Well, as it occurred in California in the 1990s, when the Republican governor at the time, Pete Wilson, backed the draconian 187 anti-immigrant proposition, it looks like this latest scapegoating attempt by Republicans will back fire over the long term (and, hopefully, over the near term, too).

Pete Wilson’s support of proposition 187 turned the Latino community in California against the Republican party for years to come; and, now, even after the Republican efforts to reach out to Latinos, it looks like they miscalculated and never anticipated the Latino community’s reaction to the latest anti-immigrant push by Republicans.

Here we see how grassroots organizing and a cooperative communications network (Spanish language stations have aired announcements for these national marches for a while now) must go hand-in-hand to mobilize people. Now, all the organizing and communications coordination that got out 500,000 people to the streets of LA occurred unnoticed because it was happening out of the mainstream and in Spanish. However, the combination of grassroots organizing and a cooperative communications network, I’m convinced, can mobilize any community, whether it be Spanish speaking or English speaking. And here’s where the equation for organizing mainstream progressives has been broken: we’ve lacked a cooperative and truly liberal broadcasting network. The moment we have a truly liberal and cooperative voice on one of the major broadcasting outlets, that’s when mainstream progressives will be agitated and mobilized — and that’s when we’ll pour onto the streets, just as the Latino community and their supporters have done over the past week. Si se puede!

My Wish List

There are a lot of reforms that our electoral process could stand for. My wish-list of reforms would include:

1. Media reform so that Federal election candidates get free and reasonable access to the public air-ways — they are our public air-ways, after all.

2. Dump the electoral college — it’s undemocratic, and unnecessary in the 21st century.

3. Campaign reform to get us closer to 100% public financing for Federal elections (or, at the very least, the presidency).

4. Viable and true multiparty representation, so that we’re not limited to only two parties, giving us more choice — it’s the American way. Lord knows I like a Sprite every now and then, and not just Coke vs. Pepsi.

5. And, in the immediate future, more debates between presidential candidates where issues are debated; and where the media-talking-heads do their job (for once), stick to the issues and avoid the “he-said vs. he-said” scenario we all detest.

This is my wish-list. Of course, it’s not very likely to happen any time soon. However, Mr. Kerry’s proposal of conducting weekly debates between now and Nov. 2nd is certainly a good thing, if one is interested in hearing about the issues from the candidates themselves. I say let’s let them go one-on-one, Mr. Kerry has already volunteered (like he did when he chose to go to Vietnam); Mr. Bush in the other hand… well, let’s just say that Mr. Bush is AWOL, and has sent others to rebuff Mr. Kerry’s proposal.