December 10, 2004  

None Dare Call It Censorship
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

     The talking heads on KCAL who read the  nightly  news  in Los Angeles are scripted  to  say  every  evening,  “We know that you have many choices for news and we thank you for choosing KCAL.”  The only problem is that you really don’t.  Between 7 pm and 9 pm you don’t have much of a choice in TV news. At 10 pm one or two more other stations come on with news, but it’s all basically the same stories. At 11 pm channel 9 (KCAL) goes to its sister station on channel 2, which basically repeats the same news over again. Channels 4 and 7 have competing news at this time, too, but again what is the real difference? It is all pretty much the     same—except for a difference of opinion on tomorrows temperatures in the weather report, which may vary by a few degrees. 
     Is the national network news much better? One has to wonder how it is that with all the resources at the command of these corporations and all of the access that they have to reporters nationally and world wide that their evening news ends up being so stunningly similar and bland.  If their goal is to bore everyone into a complete stupor of ignorant bliss, then they are quite successful. Yet they continue to bemoan the issue of declining viewer ship. 
     In his recent book Tuned Out—Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News journalism professor David T.Z. Mindich researched why young Americans are turning off the news and not reading daily newspapers. Where exactly are they getting their information on the world from– MTV, ESPN or the internet? The answer is, mostly, none of the above.  Nothing fills the void as statistics show a general decline of daily newspaper readers by almost half of what it was thirty years ago. One anomaly to this trend, that Mindich cites, was the spike in TV viewer ship in the three-month period after 9/11. A spike in ratings, that had all the networks executives drooling over new revenues that could be charged for advertising. The odd thing was that 90 days later the viewer- ship spike fell flat to levels below that of pre-September 11, 2001.
     My point in all of this, and my critique of Mindich’s research is that first of all he was only looking at the mainstream corporate-owned press as his thermometer while ignoring alternative newspapers like this one—the one segment of the industry where new papers are still being opened, rather than closed and merged.
     He also overlooks the huge turnout of young activists at both the WTO and anti-war demonstrations in recent years. How do you explain this kind of civic/political involvement without being informed? Clearly something else is going on.
     The conclusion I’ve come to is that young and old Americans have grown tired and sick of the prepackaging of the news as some kind of lite-infotainment and they have stopped buying it. Just look at what happened the other week at the basketball game in Detroit when a real fight broke out between the fans and the players.  Everybody stopped to look, everyone who didn’t see it live knew about it within a day. This is exactly the unscripted kind of news that the public longs for—one in which the outcome is not predetermined or subject to editing. This is truly “reality TV.”
     The coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should reveal more of the problem. With all of the instant digital imaging via satellite transmission, live coverage on the ground from Baghdad or Kabul should be an hourly occurrence.  Internet access and CNN should have 24 hour coverage of the wars and analysis of what is actually going on from people who know—not just press conferences with Rumsfeld or some three-star general mumbling doublespeak to lapdog reporters who sleep in guarded hotel rooms. Reporters who are only let out on leashes, embedded with troops and whose reports are screened before being sent home.
     So how is the war going these days? Up until the CIA station chief leaked his report to the New York Times this week everything was just ducky, according to the nation’s press and the spin-doctors at the Pentagon. This report follows on the heels of other statements from CIA spooks that all is not well with the glorious “war for democracy” in Iraq . That if the truth be known things are unraveling there faster than George W. can sing another hallelujah praise from his Christian songbook. And that once again, like so many times before, we are loosing this one because we can’t win the hearts and minds, and thus the loyalty of a people with the use of arms. You cannot bomb people into accepting democracy. You can only bomb them into submission…for a while…maybe. Should we just roundup every adult Iraqi at gunpoint come next January and force them to vote? Now that would be real compassionate conservatism in action. 
     The Bush régime knows that if they let the news hounds off a very tight leash and they loose the control over the American press that the American people won’t be far behind and with the thin margin that they claim to have won the recent election by it wouldn’t need to be very much to turn things around. If we were to call this by its proper name we would have to admit to this being censorship at its core and this is an abomination for the so-called bastion of democracy.