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The Netroots Battlefield in the '08 Presidential Campaign

Posted by David B. Briones - October 3, 2007 at 9:04 pm

The Netroots Battlefield in the ’08 Presidential Campaign
Declarations of the Death of Blogger Power Are Greatly Exaggerated

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
October 3, 2007

Full Story: http://www.narconews.com/Issue47/article2816.html

Comments

An asterisk: the media assassination of Dean

Submitted October 4, 2007 - 7:18 am by Benjamin Melançon
The "Dean scream" was a media assassination of a candidacy the corporate oligarchy considered a threat.

It wasn't just over-played:

the cable and broadcast news networks aired Dean's Iowa exclamation 633 times -- and that doesn't include local news or talk shows -- in the four days after it was made

(Not sure if that includes the nightly news replaying late-night show spoofs.)

It was a media-created myth:


(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DIANE SAWYER, ABC (voice-over): And what about the scream as we all heard it?

DEAN: Yeah!

SAWYER: Well, listen to how it was in the room. The so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

From a CNN transcript showing Sawyer's well-after-the-fact, but important, reality adjustment.

Rob Williams is the only person I know making the point now, but media retaliation against Dean for his strong statements opposing big media was predicted by Norman Solomon.  Predicted.  As in, in advance, December 2003:

Dean's record in Vermont hardly reflects an inclination to take on corporate power. His obsession with balancing budgets and coddling big business often led him to comfort the already comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Low-income people suffered the consequences of inadequate social services.

But let's give the doctor-turned-politician some credit for a new direction. Midway through his Dec. 1 appearance on MSNBC's "Hardball" show, Dean said that he wants to "break up giant media enterprises."

Dean went well beyond the hold-the-line stance adopted last summer by large majorities in Congress, who voted to prevent more media deregulation by the Federal Communications Commission. He declared that maintaining the media status quo isn't good enough.

"Eleven companies in this country control 90 percent of what ordinary people are able to read and watch on their television," Dean said. "That's wrong. We need to have a wide variety of opinions in every community."

Host Chris Matthews asked whether Dean would "break up these conglomerations of power" -- specifically "large media enterprises." The candidate replied: "The answer to that is yes. I would say that there is too much penetration by single corporations in media markets all over this country."

Dean added a comment that could be echoed in communities across the nation: "We need locally-owned radio stations. There are only two or three radio stations left in the state of Vermont where you can get local news anymore. The rest of it is read and ripped from the AP."

Pressing for more clarity about Dean's presidential agenda, Matthews asked: "Are you going to break up the giant media enterprises in this country?"

"Yes, we're going to break up giant media enterprises," Dean responded. Moments later he went on: "What we're going to do is say that media enterprises can't be as big as they are today. I don't think we actually have to break them up, which Teddy Roosevelt had to do with the leftovers from the McKinley administration. ... If the state has an interest -- which it does -- in preserving democracy, then there has to be a limitation on how deeply the media companies can penetrate every single community. To the extent of even having two or three or four outlets in a single community, that kind of information control is not compatible with democracy."

That kind of talk is not compatible with media oligarchy.

As it happened, Dean was appearing on a cable channel partly owned by General Electric, which possesses the NBC network and many other outlets. His remarks were certain to raise hackles in the corporate boardrooms of GE and huge media firms such as AOL Time Warner, Disney, Viacom and News Corp.

This is not relevant to Giordano's point (and the Dean campaign's financial mismanagement might have sunk it in any case), but this is critical political history, facts that unfolded in front of our eyes, and if we don't see and understand what happened we don't have much of a chance of making things better within the system (with any candidate) or outside the system.

This is what we're up against.  But don't just beware the media.  Be the media.

Fund for Authentic Journalism
http://authenticjournalism.org/

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