The Times they are A'Changing?
by DarkSyde
Thu Apr 03, 2008 at 06:23:03 AM PDT
The traditional media gets a lot of knocks in the blogosphere these days. But they bring much of it on themselves with their endless complicity in serving a far right-wing agenda. Glenn Greenwald has a new book coming out soon which takes this on directly:
Glenn Greenwald -- The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates ... An aggressive campaign to demonstrate how absurd and destructive are these right-wing leaders, how deceitful is the media's personality-based glorification of them, is absolutely necessary.
What better place to start exposing the right-wing media infestation than the Washington Times? This newspaper was founded in 1982 by cult leader Sun Myung Moon and his second in command Bo Hi Pak. It has lost about $3 billion to date and according to the Wikipedia, is only still in business because of a subsidy from News World Communications, Inc., described by the Columbia Journalism Review as "the media arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church." As business ventures go, a three billion dollar loss doesn't appear terribly attractive (So much for that 'free market' conservative magic, huh?). But as a propaganda appendage of the Moonie/GOP empire, it's worth every penny. Here's just a few of their greatest hits courtesy of John Gorenfeld and his new book chronicling Moon's antics, Bad Moon Rising:
In 1988 the Washington Times started a rumor that Michael Dukakis was mentally ill, inspiring Reagan to joke, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid." Wash. Times, "Dukakis kin hints at sessions," August 4, 1988.
In 1992, it pushed the story that Clinton might have been an agent of influence for the KGB while traveling as a Rhodes scholar. Wash. Times, "Clinton Can't Recall Much of Soviet Trip; Unable to Give Details," Oct. 6, 1992.
In 2007, its sister publication Insight was the first publication to print that Barack had attended an Islamic Madrassa. "Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa...?" Lead from a January 17, 2007 article on Insight Magazine that was cited by CNN. - John Gorenfeld
Based on past performance, it's a fair bet that the Washington Moonie Times will publish more negative nonsense this election cycle and that those hypothetical fabrications will then be magnified by wingnut hate radio and neocon bloggers. What is unknown is why otherwise legitimate media venues continue to enable the media appendage of an ultra conservative cult leader with a national, credible platform, without so much as a ticker to viewers that it's coming from a paper controlled by whacked-out extremist right-wing religious maniac, who has proclaimed himself the Messiah and claims to channel dead American Presidents. If and when the next political hit piece does appear in the Moonie Times, how will the traditional media react? Will they once again fall into that comfortable, familiar trap? Or will they finally, this time, not play the helpful fool, and instead turn and do a story on the Washington Times' agenda in pushing Moonie bullshit? We'll know soon enough, if the times really are a'changin.
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