Won’t Back Down
By Leslie on October 14, 2007 at 4:27 PM in Current Affairs
PrchrLady emailed me this to encourage everyone, via Firedoglake by Naomi Wolf:
I wish people would stop breaking into tears when they talk to me these days.
I am traveling across the country at the moment — Colorado to California — speaking to groups of Americans from all walks of life about the assault on liberty and the ten steps now underway in America to a violently closed society.
The good news is that Americans are already awake: I thought there would be resistance to or disbelief at this message of gathering darkness — but I am finding crowds of people who don’t need me to tell them to worry; they are already scared, already alert to the danger and entirely prepared to hear what the big picture might look like. To my great relief, Americans are smart and brave and they are unflinching in their readiness to hear the worst and take action. And they love their country.
But I can’t stand the stories I am hearing. [Story continued here.]
Americans might not feel so isolated, so alone in this fight, if the media would help by doing their jobs. So we often criticize the media, and rightly so, for helping Bush push the propaganda. But, lest we forget, the Bush administration has also been using intimidation and fear against journalists as well. For example:
• The FBI acknowledges that journalists’ phone records are fair game.
• Katie Couric recently lamented there was “a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat” on the Iraq war.
• The anthrax attacks targeted Democrats in Congress, such as Tom Daschle, as well as the media, such as ABC.
• CNN’s top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN “was intimidated” by the Bush administration and Fox News, which “put a climate of fear and self-censorship.”
• Glenn Greenwald writes about how Bush followers attack the freedom of the press, specifically its ability to report on the administration’s misconduct. And how Bush’s DOJ is aggressively pursuing a criminal investigation into the disclosure by The New York Times of the Administration’s decision to violate the law when eavesdropping on Americans.
• The continuing attacks by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and Fox News to smear anyone who dares disagree with the Bush administration, including children [such as Graeme Frost]. But they especially target politicians and the so-called liberal media.
The Bush administration knows that adversarial journalism is one of the last checks on it. This is one of the reasons why blogs are so important. They’re largely unencumbered, by having to please editors say, to challenge the new McCarthyism and fight for democracy, while they help empower people to get involved and collaborate.
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