Media and the politics of empathy
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Hollywood revives McCarthyist climate
by silencing and sacking war critics

By Andrew Gumbel

Los Angeles, California, Apr. 21— Hollywood is often depicted in the US media as a hotbed of anti-government dissent and left-wing politics, but that’s not how it feels to Ed Gernon.

Gernon was, until recently, a television producer at CBS responsible for a four-part miniseries on Hitler’s rise to power, which will be shown next month. He thought the timing was apt, and said so in an interview with TV Guide magazine.

“It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war,” he said. “I can’t think of a better time to examine this history than now.”

That was far too strong for Leslie Moonves, CBS’s chief executive, who promptly fired him. No reasons were given, although politics and a strong desire not to fall foul of the Bush administration apparently had plenty to do with it.

Another person who does not find Hollywood particularly liberal these days is the comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo, whose outspoken views on Iraq have made her the object of a vicious e-mail and telephone campaign that has intimidated ABC into pushing her new sitcom, Slice O’Life, into next year’s mid-season. Again, the network’s fear of losing viewers and advertisers seems rather stronger than its desire to defend the freedom of speech of its stars.

The clearly emerging pattern is that entertainment personalities who speak out on touchy political subjects — particularly Iraq — do so at their peril. The group intent on stringing up Garofalo, Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits, has campaigned energetically against everyone from Martin Sheen, whose anti-war views led to a credit card commercial of his being scrapped, to Susan Sarandon, dropped as a speaker at a Florida branch of the umbrella charity group United Way, to Sarandon’s husband, Tim Robbins, whose invitation to a 15th anniversary screening of the baseball movie Bull Durham at the National Baseball Hall of Fame was withdrawn because the Hall’s president, a former Reagan administration press secretary, felt his very presence might undermine the efforts of American troops in Iraq.

Beyond the film world, powerful radio station chains with strong political ties to the Bush White House have been orchestrating boycotts and hate campaigns against several anti-war performers, most notably the Dixie Chicks, the Texas country trio now fearing for their safety — not to mention their plummeting record sales — after their singer, Natalie Maines, said at a concert in London last month that she was ashamed to hail from the same state as the President. One radio chain, Cumulus Media, responded by arranging for a tractor to crush Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes and videos in an episode that carried uncomfortable echoes of historical book-burnings and other cultural purges.

The venom behind these campaigns is disturbing enough but there is a second strand to the story. And that is that Hollywood might not be such a liberal place after all. As Robbins said in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington last week: “I am sick of hearing about Hollywood being against this war. Hollywood’s heavy hitters, the real power brokers and cover-of-the- magazine stars, have been largely silent on this issue.”

The wife of a prominent Hollywood entertainment lawyer who attended a high-powered pre-Oscar dinner party was shocked to find that most of the assembled company was in fact heavily pro-war. “Here they were, all these so-called Hollywood liberals, and they were making jokes about peace activists and cheering on the troops,” she said.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Hollywood actors or executives being less liberal than their stereotype, but there is something troubling in the way in which their public image is manipulated, especially by the political spin doctors in Washington.

Hollywood has long been a favorite target of conservatives, who have repeatedly blamed the entertainment industry for gun violence, or drugs, or sexual promiscuity. Now there is an attempt to dismiss the anti-war celebrities in similar fashion — as morally irresponsible, overpaid know-nothings who would do better to keep their mouths shut.

Mike Farrell, one-time star of MASH who is now one of the industry’s most prominent liberal activists, sees a distinct political strategy at work.

“The suggestion that Hollywood speaks with one voice is of course silly,” he said, “but the perspective articulated consistently in the media, courtesy of the right wing, is that celebrities are taking advantage of their forum to spew left-wing views. What this is really about is stifling dissent on a national scale. It does not matter a whit whether we are celebrities or not. What galls them so much is that we have access to the media.”

The intimidation experienced by Ed Gernon, the CBS producer, or the Dixie Chicks, is certainly having its effect. In his speech to

the National Press Club, Robbins cited an unnamed “famous middle-aged rock-and-roller” who thanked him for speaking out against the war but said he did not dare do the same himself because of the power of Clear Channel, the nation’s largest radio station owner, which has an unabashed pro-Bush agenda. “They promote our concert appearances,” the rocker said. “They own most of the stations that play our music. I can’t come out against the war.”

The Screen Actors Guild has likened the atmosphere to the McCarthy-era anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. It issued a statement saying that no performer should be denied work on the basis of his or her political beliefs. “Even a hint of the blacklist must never again be tolerated in this nation,” it said.

Within three hours of that statement being posted, the guild was inundated with the by now familiar deluge of hate mail. Nevertheless, the statement remains steadfastly posted on the guild’s web site.

Source: Independent (UK)

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Media and the politics of empathy

By Norman Solomon

Apr. 18— The day after America’s tax deadline, President Bush signed a $79 billion spending bill to cover military actions in Iraq. Then he visited a Boeing factory in St. Louis, where employees make Super Hornet F/A-18s. While some union leaders, Democratic politicians and pundits took the opportunity to complain that Bush had opposed extending unemployment benefits for aviation workers, the criticisms didn’t question the use of such warplanes, which flew many missions over Iraq this spring.

American media consumers have caught only glimpses of the carnage. National networks sanitized their war coverage. News magazines provided some grisly pictures. A few print reporters, notably Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post and Ian Fisher of the New York Times, wrote vivid accounts of what the Pentagon’s firepower did to Iraqi people on the ground; only a closed heart could be unmoved by those stories.

But our country is largely numb. Media depictions of human tragedies may have momentary impact, but the nation’s anesthetic flood of nonstop media leads us to sense that we’re somehow above or beyond the human fray: Some lives, including ours of course, matter a great deal. Others, while perhaps touching, are decidedly secondary. The official directives needn’t be explicit to be well understood: Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions.

As always, on television, the enthusiasm for war has been rabid on Fox News Channel. After a recent makeover, the fashion is the same for MSNBC. At the other end of the narrow cable-news spectrum, CNN has cranked up its own militaristic fervor. In contrast, millions of radio listeners take refuge in the more soothing reportage from NPR News.

But NPR has its own style of numbing. Consider the spirit of discourse, in the midst of the war, as two of the network’s mainstays held forth on Saturday morning’s “Weekend Edition.” During an Apr. 5 discussion with host Scott Simon, the NPR news analyst Daniel Schorr exclaimed: “It really is quite amazing, whether one likes the plan of the Pentagon or not, it certainly, as of now, has been a most roaring success.”

Simon replied: “And let’s remind ourselves today, of course, there have been casualties. So far, according to NPR’s estimate, 67 US troops have died, 16 are missing, seven captured; 27 British troops dead, none missing or captured. Recognizing that these are all sacred souls that have been lost, at the same time the casualties seem to be standing a good deal lower than some people had projected.”

The response from Schorr: “That’s right. And, you know, an interesting thing is one of the great successes of the week is what has not happened. One is that there have not been very major casualties. Another is that they have not been able to devastate the oil fields. Another is that they have not been able to cow the American Marines and the troops by sending in suicide bombers. They’ve managed to cope with that. There’ve been some unfortunate deaths of civilians there. But whatever was the strategy of resistance has not worked, and whatever is the strategy for marching to Baghdad seems to be working pretty well.”

Such media assessments are guided by overarching PC sensibilities — Pentagon Correctness. The homage is to victory. Americans and their allies are the sacred people. And accolades go to iron fists in the White House. “If real leadership means leading people where they don’t want to go,” Michael Kinsley writes in the Apr. 21 edition of Time magazine, “George W. Bush has shown himself to be a real leader.”

In 2003, militarism in America is a runaway train on a death track. Kinsley observes: “The president’s ability to decide when and where to use America’s military power is now absolute. Congress cannot stop him. That’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what the War Powers Act says, but that’s how it works in practice.”

Mostly, it works that way in practice because countless journalists — whether they’re flag-wavers at Fox News or liberal sophisticates at NPR News — keep letting authorities define the bounds of appropriate empathy and moral concern. I know of very few mainstream American journalists who have pointed out that President Bush has the blood of many Iraqi children on his hands after launching an aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg principles established more than half a century ago.

“The character of our military reflects the character of our country,” Bush told the Boeing workers in St. Louis. But “our military” is not supposed to let any unauthorized empathy get in the way of following orders. When the commander in chief says it’s time to kill, then it’s time to kill.

If that reflects the character of our country, then our country must change.

Source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

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