Right-wing coup d’etat becomes normalized

By Edward S. Herman

We have just gone through a remarkable moment in US history, in which a Republican activist-dominated Supreme Court has refused to allow a complete vote count in Florida which would have given Al Gore the presidency, and by judicial fiat simply awarded the presidency to their preferred Republican candidate. The tricks by which Scalia and company accomplished this were extremely crude, their judicial reasoning was puerile and cited no valid precedents for their actions and rulings; and Scalia even wrote that the final ruling was no precedent but was “limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” But the ruling was quite clear that varying standards in counting votes violates the 14th amendment, and could be the basis of undercutting any election. As Vincent Bugliosi points out in a crushing article in The Nation (“None Dare Call It Treason,” Feb. 5, 2001), “in other words, the Court, in effect, was saying its ruling ‘only applied to those future cases captioned Bush v. Gore. In all other equal protection voting cases, litigants should refer to prior decisions of this court.’”

The Republican activist majority on the Supreme Court, usually gung ho for deferring to state rights, and who “almost never use equal protection jurisprudence except in striking down affirmative action programs” (USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky), were brazenly explicit that they were overriding a state court, and stopping a vote count, because it might cause “irreparable harm” to George W. Bush. The fact that stopping it might cause “irreparable harm” to Gore and deny voters their opportunity to have their votes counted was of no concern. They then terminated the electoral process in Florida because there wasn’t time for a vote count which they had delayed to assure that result.

This was a genuine coup d’etat, with the Republican Court majority simply awarding the election to their favorite and denying the general populace the right to determine an election outcome. Not only did Gore already have a national majority, the actual retrospective vote count has shown that he won Florida as well and thus an Electoral College majority.

But this judicial theft of an election was quickly normalized by the mainstream media. The court was criticized for its actions, sometimes even a bit severely, but only for a day or so, and in a tone that hardly did justice to the events. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial on the subject was entitled “Hail To the Chief,” giving Bush immediate full recognition, and their text says “Accept Bush’s win, but also lament the high court’s sad failure.” (Dec. 13, 2000) In the New York Times, the court was alleged to have “rarely seemed so openly political” and “missed the chance to reach an enlightened compromise” (ed., Dec. 14). These seem a wee bit mild, considering that the activist Republicans on the court had simply taken it upon themselves to choose the president, “abandoning any pretense at behaving like a court of law” (law professor Anthony Amsterdam).

The media had been full of election details for months on end, and here we had the Supreme Court nullifying all that purported democratic activity by its hugely political intervention, and we are asked to just “lament” this lapse and hail the new chief. And in the succeeding weeks the media pretty much dropped the subject. When in late January, retrospective vote counts disclosed that the Court action had deprived Gore of a majority vote in Florida, The Guardian of London reported this under the title “Florida ‘Recounts’ Confirm Gore Winner” (January 29, 2001). But the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times didn’t even find this story newsworthy.

Although Bush not only didn’t have a “mandate” but rather lost the popular voting election and represents illegitimate authority, his monstrous selections of Ashcroft, Norton, Chavez (then Chao), which were aggressive assaults on minority groups, environmentalists, and labor, were treated very gently by the mainstream media (even though both the Inquirer and Times came out against the Ashcroft nomination). They didn’t question these appointments in terms of the non-mandate of voters, or juxtapose these appointments with his alleged aim of “civility” and “unity,” and the Times took at face value “his drive for bipartisanship” (ed., Jan. 24). For the Times, “Bush’s Transition [Was] Largely a Success, All Sides Suggest” (Jan. 28, page 1).

With Monica Lewinsky the media were pleased to stay with a topic that had no inherent political relevance for months on end, giving it hundreds or thousands of times the space devoted to the Supreme Court’s coup d’etat. This is media manipulation and corruption of a high order. Why have the media normalized the Republican coup d’etat? One reason is that the Republicans are far more aggressive in pursuing their political ends than the Democrats, and in fact the Democrats quickly folded after the Supreme Court coup decision and failed to seek justice either in the Senate or law courts. I am convinced that just as the Republicans pursued the Lewinsky case without relent, so if the Court had treated them as Gore was treated they would have fought back and the subject would be highly newsworthy.

Of course, the Republicans benefit from the fact that they dominate the pundit and talk show host cohort and have the Wall Street Journal editorial page continuously available to press their agenda aggressively and with great indignation. This enables them to push their cases a la Lewinsky, with “liberal media” cooperation, whereas the Democrats repeatedly defer to the “national interest” and need for “unity” in letting the Republicans get away with serious political crimes (the Iran-contra scandal, the “October surprise,” the Bush administration’s secret support of Saddam Hussein).

But the other factor is that the corporate media are part of a national establishment that is highly sympathetic to the political and economic status quo, and just as they treated Nader as outside the pale and the two party and plutocratic domination of the election as highly satisfactory, so they are anxious to legitimize no matter what the outcome. So while the Guardian of London may be prepared to find deep flaws in the 2000 election here, and dwell on the subject, the mainstream media are not. In his devastating analysis of the Court’s actions Bugliosi makes a compelling case that “These five justices are criminals in every true sense of the word, and in a fair and just world belong behind bars.” Nothing like this in the US mainstream media. The Philadelphia Inquirer could editorialize that Clinton’s last minute blitz of pardons was “One last outrage” (January 23), which is what it was, but the far more outrageous actions of the Supreme Court are merely something “sad” and to “lament,” not “outrageous.” The mainstream media are agents of power and in this role handled the 2000 presidential election well.

Source: Znet: www.zmag.org

MEDIA WATCH

NY Times on Iraq bombing: zero dissent

Statement of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Feb 23— Despite the chorus of international condemnation that followed last week’s large-scale airstrikes on targets in Iraq, not a single word of criticism or dissent could be found anywhere in the New York Times’ February 17 coverage of the attack. US and British planes struck five Iraqi air-defense targets February 16 while patrolling their self-declared, internationally unrecognized “no-fly zone” over the south of the country.

The Times ran four articles dealing with the raid— a news article, a news analysis, an unsigned editorial and an op-ed. None featured any criticism of the airstrikes whatsoever. The lead story on the front page quoted seven sources; all seven were government or military officials, all of whom supported the attack— a Pentagon spokesman, a “senior Pentagon official,” a “senior defense official,” a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Bush, and a Republican and a Democratic senator.

David Sanger and Frank Bruni’s accompanying news analysis, “The World Stage, Act I,” mused emptily about what kind of “statement” Bush was making in authorizing the strikes, concluding that Bush had “arrived on the world stage,” that “despite his inexperience” in foreign policy, “he was a player.” No dissenting views were included.

Official Iraqi media reported 2 civilians killed and 20 injured in the raid. But in the Times’ 1,600-word news story, the subject of civilian deaths and injuries was brushed off in two sentences: “Iraqi television reported numerous civilians had been wounded” but “Pentagon officials said they have no evidence of civilian casualties.”

The Times appears to have great confidence in the sincerity of official US statements on Iraqi casualties. However, when former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq Hans von Sponeck independently investigated civilian damage from several US-British airstrikes in 1999, finding 144 people killed and 446 injured that year, the Clinton administration tried to have him fired and he soon quit in protest. (“UN resignations point to failure of US-led sanctions against Iraq,” Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, 2/26/00). His replacement, Tun Myat, has no plans to investigate the damage from the latest bombing, a UN spokesperson in New York told FAIR.

In announcing Bush’s arrival on the world stage, the news analysis article quoted his explanation of the attack — “Saddam Hussein has got to understand that we expect him to conform to the agreement he signed after Desert Storm” — but refrained from pointing out that Bush had made a gaffe: The post-war agreement with Iraq contained no mention of no-fly zones, dealing only with Iraqi withdrawal and compliance with UN resolutions. Unlike the Times, the Washington Post pointed out the mistake in a Feb. 19 article, “Bush on Stage: Deft or Just Lacking Depth?”

The Times’ opinion pages kept up the cheerleading, with a lead editorial judging the airstrikes “justified” and “timely.” Instead of printing a balancing view, the facing op-ed page ran a piece by military hawk Anthony Cordesman headlined “No Choice But To Strike” that declared the bombing a “necessary if not vital” step. Cordesman was condemned by Amnesty International last year for a report he authored for the Center for Strategic and International Studies proposing the use of “interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture” against Palestinians as one viable method of enforcing a peace agreement. (See “ABC News Analyst Advocates Brutality,” 11/21/00, http://www.fair.org/activism/abc-cordesman.html .)

The total absence of criticism in the Times stands in marked contrast to the outpouring of criticism around the world. In the days that followed, one country after another, including key NATO allies, lined up to condemn the attack. Several said the bombings were a blatant violation of international law. France expressed “incomprehension” and “disappointment” (AFP, 2/17/01); the Italian prime minister called it “counterproductive” (ANSA, 2/21/01); the German foreign minister, though publicly circumspect, protested the bombing in diplomatic meetings in Washington (Agence Europe, 2/19/01). Turkey, Jordan, and Iran— three of the neighboring countries supposedly being protected from Iraqi aggression— denounced the strikes, later joined by even Saudia Arabia (London Guardian, 2/22/01), while the other Gulf states “maintained an embarrassed silence” (AFP, 2/17, 2/18/01). None of this was reported by the New York Times.

All of this raises poignant questions about the Times’ journalistic priorities. Instead of printing a windy disquisition on Bush’s “arrival” to the world stage, the paper could have dispatched a reporter to Baghdad to check on Iraqi reports of US-caused civilian deaths. Rather than invite Anthony Cordesman to make exactly the same pro-bombing argument on the op-ed page as the editorialists did on the facing page, the editors could have published an opposing view.

Source: Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR): www.fair.org