The Invisible 99%: Sunday Morning Talk Shows Ignore Occupy Wall Street
PoliticsUSA October 2, 2011
By Jason Easley
The five Sunday morning talk shows on CBS, Fox, CNN, NBC, and ABC devoted zero segments with zero guests to Occupy Wall Street today. To the media inside the Beltway, the 99% do not exist.
A day after over 700 protesters were arrested during a march over the Brooklyn Bridge, the five network Sunday morning news shows virtually ignored the story. The only program that the arrests were even mentioned on was ABC’s This Week, “More than 700 demonstrators protesting corporate greed, among other issues, were arrested last night on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. The grassroots movement has swamped Wall Street for more than two weeks now.”
What was more important than thousands of Americans taking to the street to protest greed and corruption?
CNN’s State of the Union spent their time allowing Dick and Liz Cheney to rewrite the history of both 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Fox News and This Week were hyping up the latest corporate media creation, the revived presidential candidacy of Herman Cain. The media created the rebirth of Cain story after the candidate won a non-binding Florida straw poll, which became a story after the corporate media decided that the meaningless poll did in fact, mean something.
The other media generated story is the speculation over a potential Chris Christie 2012 presidential campaign. All the talk shows spent some time talking about Christie even though he isn’t even running. CBS’ Face The Nation trotted out John McCain to talk about Chris Christie, Libya, and DADT, and Meet The Press gave us a couple of governors and a roundtable discussing the 2012 election.
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Posted in Commentary, tagged Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers, Vietnam War on February 17, 2010| 1 Comment »
Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg. (Courtesy of Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg)
Four decades later, Ellsberg again powers a moral drama
Ty Burr | Boston Globe | February 12, 2010
Toward the end of “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,’’ you begin to realize just how much four decades of history owe to one man.
If Ellsberg, a Defense Department-contracted policy analyst, hadn’t leaked 47 volumes of top secret CIA documents to the press and Congress in early 1971, the Vietnam War might have continued indefinitely. Broad public sentiment wouldn’t have finally turned against the conflict, and the Nixon administration wouldn’t have adopted a paranoid bunker mentality. The president wouldn’t have formed his dirty-tricks squad of White House “plumbers’’ to stop the leaks, wouldn’t have sent them out to dig up dirt on Ellsberg by burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office. The Watergate break-in wouldn’t have happened. Nixon wouldn’t have resigned.
And so on, and so on – no historic 1971 Supreme Court First Amendment case, no politicizing of the nation’s press for better and worse – and all because one stiff-backed ex-Marine refused to ignore his conscience. “The Most Dangerous Man in America’’ – the epithet comes from Henry Kissinger – is hardly evenhanded: It views Ellsberg as a hero and a genuine patriot and allows him, at a grey and dignified 78, to narrate his own story. But evenhanded is one thing and fair is another, and directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith make their case that if you or I had known what Ellsberg did – the secret story of US involvement in Southeast Asia and the cynical misleading of the American public by five presidential administrations – we would have, or should have, done the same.
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