Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 312 Editor's Choice: 6
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Elephantman...
[Read the article: Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe the real question runs more along the lines of,
"Where is the counterpart to Pacifica's programming, to be found anywhere else on the airwaves at all?"
I haven't noticed any other broadcast news outlet- including any of the C-Span outlets- broadcasting any excerpts of the recent March 13-16 2008 Winter Soldier hearings, consisting of Iraq War veterans testifying to atrocities by US forces in which they participated or witnessed:
http://tinyurl.com/3pby4k
Some background on the hearings: "...The first Winter Soldier [Vietnam War era] met with a groundswell of criticism, including accusations that the testimonies were untrue or deceitful. This time around, though, IVAW will leave little room for critics to attempt to invalidate their stories. A 20-member verification team, made up mostly of combat soldiers, is collecting and vetting all the testimony before it is presented. "Among the far right-wing fringe we'll be accused of being 'phony soldiers,' and there will probably be accusations of false testimony," O'Brien said. "But we're confident that the case we'll be making is very credible."..."
http://tinyurl.com/5yel9e
What major media outlet other than Pacifica has given the Winter Soldier hearings even a mention? I don't know of any. Find me one. That paucity of coverage extends beyond the broadcast and cable news media to the daily newspaper media, by the way. The Washington Post ran one story during the weekend of the hearings, in their Saturday Metro section (the hearings were held in the DC suburb of Silver Spring.) The New York Times made no mention of it. Find me another paper that did.
Without the Pacifica broadcasts, there would have been a nearly complete blackout of the Winter Soldier hearings in the US media.
Pacifica Radio has a total of 5 stations.
Of course, the fact that only Pacifica covered the hearings allows ideologically driven partisans to dismiss the sole record of the hearings as "unbalanced leftwing hateAmerica yaddayadda", due to their conditioned insistence on demanding a political litmus test from the messenger before allowing the merest audience to the message- a mental shutoff/bypass mechanism that conveniently relieves themselves of any obligation to review the actual testimony of the Iraq war veterans for themselves. Ironically, in this and similar cases, Pacifica is granted something akin to the lone duty of upholding the principle of the "American free press", due to the fact that their broadcast and reportage of the hearings was not forbidden by government decree.
A convention of Holocaust deniers would have gotten more coverage.
Elephantman, what made this story so off-limits? Listen to the hearings. Do you find the testimony of trivial import? Does it utterly lack newsworthiness? Was Pacifica treasonous or disloyal for recording the proceeedings and broadcasting them? How about the 200 soldiers who testified- are they treasonous or disloyal for offering their testimony? What's the payoff, for them? Did the absent news media do them or the nation a credit, by ignoring the story?
Elephantman, what similar stories can you think of that have been so completely ignored- shut out from even a mention- due to what you characterize as the "left-liberal slant" of the broadcast newscast media?
A somewhat different example- what other network or popularly syndicated news show provides a forum for commercial-free, extended debates like this recent example, between Alan Greenspan and Naomi Klein?
http://tinyurl.com/4dke67
I'll grant that C-Span occasionally comes up with very similar offerings, as part of their ongoing programming.
Given that this is the case- what's would you characterize as the difference between such a debate as recorded and aired on C-Span, and one recorded and aired on Pacifica? Did moderator Amy Goodman skew that debate in any way, on account of her ideological leanings? How so? Did her presence somehow imbue the discourse with Left-wing commie cooties?
Democracy Now! appears on some NPR affiliates, typically 5 hours a week. What makes 5 hours of that program a week a totally unacceptable deal-breaker to your sensibilities, Elephantman?
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Elephantman...how do you miss the point so totally?
[Read the article: Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I can't tell you if "Winter Soldier II" was covered by the broadcast tv networks or the cable news networks. I suspect it was; I don't know,"
The blackout of coverage was nearly total, with the apparent exception of a brief clip reported as being aired on ABC News. The sole on-line reference to ABC News mentioning the hearings is found in a single-on-line comment by a reader, responding to this opinion column- http://tinyurl.com/ywuxzu. It may have been a local newscast, I don't know.
Furthermore, the link you supplied to the media coverage of the Winter Soldier II hearings archived by Iraq Veterans Against the War supports that contention of the near-complete blackout of the story in the American media, both broadcast and print media.
If you "don't know", it's because a) your reading comprehension didn't pick up on that part of my message- it was, after all, one of the main points; b) you didn't put some relevant terms into a search engine, in an attempt to refute it; c) you didn't even bother to skim-read the link you supplied.
http://www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier/media
Your reference to "wide-scale coverage in the left-wing press" of the USA is an oxymoron- unless one views the American left-wing press as including ABC, CNN, and the New York Times, in which case it is a falsehood.
It's possible for someone to call 3 days of military veteran witness testimony of personal experiences in combat zones a "photo op", for course.
It's also possible to call an eagle an ostrich.
My God, the smugness of diligently applied ignorance.