A Response to George Salzman's Open Letter

I’ve never had an open letter addressed to me before. And neither Emily Post’s nor Quentin Crisp’s guides to good manners indicate what is the proper etiquette when receiving one. So I’ll improvise and respond simply as if it is a regular letter or email from a valued colleague and truth-teller… George’s letter begins by mourning the death by apparent suicide of our Narco News School of Authentic Journalism colleague and friend Gary Webb. And he shares my expressed hatred for those who helped push Gary toward an early end. (As Thomas Paine wrote in The Crisis: “God put hatred in men’s hearts for good reason; to ensure justice.”).

George then takes me to task for having “bought into the corporate media’s pronouncement of (Bush’s) electoral victory.”

He’s no doubt speaking of what I wrote on my (now hibernating) personal weblog known as Big Left Outside, and my November 3rd entry, Now What? First We Kill the Media, in which I referred to George W. Bush “really being elected this time” (in contrast to the decisive fraud that stole the 2000 election).

George asks aloud about my words (and those of Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Claire, Juan Cole, William Blum and Ben Melancon):

Why did they allow themselves, on this occasion, to join the sheep of America? I believe it happened in part because they are infected with News Junkie Disease (as we all are to greater or lesser extent), that desire to “be on top of it, to know the latest.”

George notes that he wrote to a colleague at the time, saying:

“I believe we must try to reverse the announced result, and not allow ourselves to be influenced by the all-pervsasive corporate media. Even Al and other right-on fighters are living within the mileau generated by 'their' language and their maps – e.g. all the false assumptions that follow from accepting the picture of "red" and "blue" states. I've just read your article, "Republic Car-jacked . . ." and it seems to me you too are overinfluenced by what passes for 'the news'.”

It was remarkable how many very bright and informed people had immediately assumed the truth of the officially announced results, among them Al Giordano, Ben Melançon, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Juan Cole, to name but a few.William Blum’s comments, one month later, made the same assumption. Each of them tried to understand why, not if, Bush had won.

What impelled each of those who commented almost immediately to take for granted the media announcements of early November 3? I think it’s partly because we suffer from news junkie disease.

I ask: Is it that simple? That I (and these other commentators) suffer from a pathology called News Junkie Disease?

The truth is, I don’t read the New York Times or any English-language periodical. It’s not part of my day. It’s not worth my time.

So the impression that George (and probably others) has that I’m a “news junkie” is pretty novel to me. I know from long experience that what appears on the pages of those periodicals is untrue. Additionally, it’s usually boring and formulaic: it’s the “news writing formula” that guarantees that truth cannot be sought or told through those journals.

Sometimes I’ll read what these commercial publications have to say about my beat – the drug war and democracy in Latin America – usually to offer critique and fact-checking. But that’s more akin to covering a story (the story being the bad reporting of the news) than part of my search for original information.

As far as the elections in the United States go, I got my “news” mainly from other bloggers. The official results concluded that George Bush got 59 million votes and John Kerry got 56 million, more or less.

I had commented at the time that Kerry’s 56 million amounted to more than any challenger had ever received against an incumbent president, and that in a normal year that would have brought Kerry to victory. The surprise, for me, was that Bush got 59 million.

Now, were likely Kerry voters repressed from voting? Absolutely. Did that repression of the vote swing key states – Ohio and Florida – from Kerry to Bush? Probably. In Ohio, could the “Diebold Overlords” have rigged the voting machines to affect the outcome? Possibly. And those Authentic Journalists like our friend Greg Palast who have worked so hard to document the fraud have all my support.

But I ask: Did the fraud, nationally, constitute three million votes, enough to change the outcome of the popular vote? I doubt it. No matter how you slice it, my old friend John Kerry did not get a majority, or even a plurality, of votes nationwide. As much as I dislike the outcome, and the consequences of that outcome bother me to an extreme, it’s hard for me to get too bothered by “the process,” because I don’t support the Electoral College system to begin with.

I think what George and others are arguing is that Kerry won on a technicality – the Electoral College voting system – while having lost the popular vote. And I see their point, fair is fair, that’s what happened four years ago in the inverse when Bush lost the popular vote but won the “new math” of the Electoral College (and even that, he did by cheating in Florida and with some powerful friends in the Supreme Court).

Lord knows, I’d be sitting pretty if my old pal Kerry were to occupy the White House come January 20th.

But it’s my right – in fact, I see it as my duty - not to play by rules I don’t support.

And it’s also my right to allocate my labor strategically according to my own priorities. The fact is, I feel that I (and everyone) spent too much time on the U.S. elections to begin with, and we let the permanent campaign against tyranny slide in the process.

Instead of devoting my labor to the election fraud investigations in a country where I do not live, I have prioritized my time and efforts to Authentic Journalism South of the Border: In other words, to doing the very kind of original, investigative, non-commercial journalism that George argues so eloquently is so necessary to combat and replace the power of Commercial Media.

It is absolutely my right to conclude that fighting against the electoral fraud in the United States is not my highest priority. That doesn’t make me a corporate news junky. Au contraire: I march to my own drummer and do the job that nobody else is doing. I remain at my post, a soldier for truth-telling and authenticity in the global South.

I am in solidarity with those who choose their own priority to be uncovering the electoral fraud in the United States. I hope every day that the smoking gun will be unearthed and the official results will be overturned. But I’m not going to desert my post to jump on what others, but not I, consider to be “the most important story.”

I’ve never done journalism that way. An Authentic Journalist doesn’t follow the pack. He and she “work the margins,” the borders, the edges. We fight from the outside, in. (I received similar criticism in 2003 for refusing to drop my work in Latin America to joint he pack devoting their labor to making media against the Gulf War. In retrospect, I'm glad I resisted the pressure.)

The fact is that political life in the United States is fucked up on all sides of the spectrum. “The Left” is daily as ridiculous as “The Right.” Blue State voters have their cars, their credit cards, their mortgages, their useless degrees, their unhealthy “health care” plans, and use, per capita, a greater share of the earth’s resources than anybody is entitled to take. I recently visited a blue state and found it difficult to tell who the enemy is: folks have Kerry stickers on their cars, they have nose-rings and tattoos, they lead “alternative lifestyles,” but they still take, take, take from the rest of the world for their techno-toys and consumer pleasures, they have forgotten what it is to be human, they have become, as much as the fundamentalist whackos of the right, part of a post-human species, and it’s harder and harder for me to sympathize with such people.

That they voted against Bush doesn’t change the fact that they have too much, and they fight too hard to protect it, and that the boots on the necks of my neighbors to the South are worn equally on the left and right feet of the North.

I have yet to see a coherent, convincing, case made that Bush lost the popular vote in any kind of media, alternative or other. If someone could make that case convincingly, I might feel differently about the urgency of fighting against the official results. But it seems to me that good people are dickering over a technicality – the Electoral College results – and for me to enter that battle would be to endorse “the process,” a process that I oppose, a process that lets the minority rule.

In democracy, the majority should rule. I want to weep when I realize that the majority in my native country voted for a war criminal. I guess I know how some Germans of conscience felt after a similar election some seven decades ago. But that’s the fact. And the mark of an authentic small-d democrat is his and her willingness to accept results we don’t like, or at least fight them from other directions that don’t involve endorsing the fixed rules of a sad game.

Meanwhile, I’m still at my post, reporting from Latin America, building an Authentic Journalism to replace the inauthenticity of a Commercial Media.

I’m not a “news junky.”

I’m a “news pusher.”

News is a drug, and this is Narco News: I’m a dealer, not a user. So bust me!