This article originally appeared at Online Journal


In Bush's inaugural speech, which he (of course) did not write, he spoke soaringly of our nation's fate being led by angels in whirlwinds (or was it sugarplum fairies?) and of including all Americans. However, in an MSNBC interview aired the night before the inaugural, Bush dismissed the vast number of Americans opposed to Ashcroft and other Cabinet nominations, describing his opponents as "fringe people" (his exact words).

Who are the fringe people? The term is vaguely scary, invoking images of wild, hairy Neanderthals, peering from caves with spooky intentions of rising up and doing heaven-knows-what to the agenda of the wealthy.

Bush became teary-eyed during the inaugural, but where are his tears for the millions of folks he and his media bulldogs routinely batter and malign, the so-called fringe? His speech writers and think tanks put shimmering words of unity and love into his mouth, but the actual unspun Bush-brain lets slip his true prejudices.

Fringe is dictionary-defined as "a marginal or minor part," and "at the outer edge." Bush and his mainstream media mouthpieces repeatedly describe all dissenting environmentalists, African-Americans, women's rights organizations and civil liberties groups as "far leftwing fringe."

Most Americans know that groups such as the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women and People for the American Way are neither far leftwing nor fringe. Most of us also realize that not all Americans opposed to the Bush appointees and agenda (your truly included, FYI) are members of any organized political group, far leftwing or otherwise.

In fact, the people in favor of environmental protection legislation, legal justice for minorities and women, and laws protecting civil liberties are the American mainstream. Robert W. McChesney writes about the difference between the interests of the majority of Americans and the interests of the small minority of wealthy special interests represented by the likes of the Bush team.

McChesney is a media critic and a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He says:

"The needs of the minuscule investor class can never be equated with the needs of the citizenry or with the foundations of a democracy."

Bush and Company would like us to believe they represent "the American people." In fact, they represent only about one to five percent of the people. The remainder of us are fringe.

Robert McChesney says of the miniscule ruling class, "some go so far as to present democracy as being defined first and foremost by individual freedoms to buy and sell property and the right to invest for profit. That there is any distinction between those liberties and the democratic right to free speech, free press, and free assembly is dismissed categorically."

The Bush team and the mainstream media folks who promote their views, equate market rights with political freedom and capitalism with democracy, a correlation McChesney rightly calls absurd. Many nations, McChesney notes, have protected market rights while "having little respect for any other civil liberties."

How does the Republican party, which exists to protect the financial interests of a small minority of Americans, convince ordinary working people to support their policies? In a word: advertising. In a less charitable word: propaganda. The Republican party spends millions on campaign ads and takes advantage of free TV time to present itself as the party of "character." As journalist Bill Greider says ("Who Will Tell The People," 1992), the Republican party "poses as the bulwark against unsettling modernity."

Republicans, says Greider, advertise themselves as defenders against "alien forces within society that threaten to overwhelm decent folk -- libertine sexual behavior, communists, criminals, people of color demanding more than they deserve." In doing so, the Republican leadership pretends to care more about sexual behavior than they actually do, and they play on fears and prejudices regarding race and class.

Somehow Republicans also manage to convince their working class supporters that their tax cuts and other economic plans benefit average working folks. However, those cuts demonstrably shift the tax burden from the very wealthy onto the backs of lower and middle income Americans.

Rush Limbaugh and other media voices of rightwing outrage give Republicans a virtually non-stop propaganda vehicle. However, the Limbaugh types are not the only media promoters of the economic interests of the wealthiest Americans.

In "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy," journalist James Fallows writes: "Until about the mid-1960s, journalism was essentially a high working-class activity. In big cities the typical reporter would make about as much as the typical cop."

Fallows says before the mid-60s, reporters often expressed "an instinctive pro-little guy outlook." He quotes Washington Post correspondent Richard Harwood, "In the early times, we were not only describing the life of normal people, we were participating in it....Most of the reporters came from the lower middle class, which is where the readers and most of the subjects came from too."

Starting in the mid-1960s, newspapers began to hire better-educated, higher-paid reporters, and salaries of TV journalists moved into the multi-millions. Fallows says we can not generalize about the media, since it "contains both Diane Sawyer, who is paid $7 million per year by ABC, and the reporter in Wichita who earns $24,000 (which is less than Sawyer gets per working day.)"

However, their economic climb means that many journalists identify with, and promote the interests of, the very wealthy. The press, says Fallows, sympathized with NAFTA and GATT, trade treaties which benefited the wealthy but caused job losses for lower-income Americans.

Fallows quotes Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly: "It is a major problem that journalists have come to identify with the rich or upper middle class rather than with the poor. It has a tremendous effect on what they're interested in reporting. Because they are identifying up, their first thought is how the situation would look from the top rather than how it would look from the bottom," says Peters.

Is it any wonder we fringe people -- in reality, the vast majority of Americans -- and our concerns are all but invisible on mainstream TV news programs? In "Unreliable Sources," (Carol Publishing Group, 1992) journalists Norman Solomon and Martin A. Lee say that the liberal media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in reporting) once did a forty month study of Ted Koppel's Nightline program.

FAIR viewed 865 programs with 2,498 guests. A full 80 percent of Nightline's guests were professionals, government officials or corporate representatives. Only five percent were public interest spokespeople, meaning, for example, environmental, peace or consumer advocates. Fewer than two percent were labor leaders or members of racial/ethnic organizations.

When programs did address economic issues, "corporate representatives outnumbered labor spokespeople seven-to-one." The FAIR study said that based on the 2,498 guests and the subject matter of the 865 programs: "Nightline serves as an electronic soapbox from which white, male, elite representatives of the status quo can present their case. Minorities, women, and those with challenging views are generally excluded." Nightline is typical of TV news talk shows, including those on Fox, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN.

Robert McChesney lists subjects TV news talk shows fail to explore:

(1) Military spending. The U. S. spends billions on the military "for no publicly debated or accepted reason," says McChesney. However, military spending serves the wealthiest Americans by providing lucrative corporate welfare.

(2) The fact that "by 1998, discounting home ownership, the top 10 percent of the population claimed 76 percent of the nation's net worth, and more than half of that is accounted for by the richest 1 percent."

(3) The fact that the rate of incarceration in the U. S. "has more than doubled since the late 1980s, and the United States now has five times more prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times more than Western Europe....Nearly 90 percent of prisoners are jailed for nonviolent offenses, often casualties of the so-called drug war."

This third media-neglected category merits a little extra attention. Corporate-owned prisons often force prisoners to work for little or no pay thus turning prisoners into virtual slave labor. Around 50 percent of U.S. prisoners are African-American.

McChesney refers to attorney Barry Scheck's "Actual Innocence" (Doubleday, 2000.) According the Scheck, DNA testing has overturned scores of convictions and has proved that significant numbers of prisoners are innocent.

Amnesty International "United States of America -- Rights for All," October 1998, reports that a significant number of wrongly convicted people have been released from prison over the past thirty years. (David McGowan, "Derailing Democracy: The America The Media Don't Want You To See," Common Courage Press, 2000.)

According to Robert McChesney, the U. S. is "rapidly approaching rates of incarceration associated with the likes of Hitler and Stalin." The fact should concern civil liberties advocates, because our justice system is demonstrably stacked against the poor and is blind to corporate crime.

In 2000, says McChesney, a man received sixteen years in prison for stealing a Snickers candy bar. However, four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. were found guilty of trying to suppress and eliminate business competition in "what the Justice Department called perhaps the largest criminal antitrust conspiracy in history." They received easily affordable fines and prison terms from three to four months.

Why does it matter to average working Americans that the military squanders our national fortune only to funnel billions toward corporate welfare? Why is it important to fringe people that the George W. Bush team wants to divert the wealthy's tax burden onto average Americans in the name of a "tax cut?"

Why should ordinary citizens care that, according to the Atlantic Monthly (The Prison-Industrial Complex," December 1998), "The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist China," and that the U. S. incarceration rate remained stable for the first three quarters of the last century until it began "doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s."

We should care because, for example, the billions of our own tax dollars wasted on questionable military spending or funneled to the rich could instead be used to cure cancer or AIDS, provide the over 44 millions of uninsured Americans with health insurance, and otherwise improve the quality of life for average folks.

We should care because, as Robert McChesney points out, the rapidly growing corporate owned prison-industrial complex indicates human and civil liberties abuses of dimensions that "should be highly disturbing and the source of public debate."

George W's dad once accused his political opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being a card carrying member of the ACLU," implying that Bush, Sr., saw the ACLU's defense of civil liberties as a marginal "commie" threat. Evidently, George W. sees fringe people in much the same way.

When G. W. Bush speaks of angels and unity in one breath, and dismisses the actual American mainstream as fringe people in another, we should notice the forked tongue. We wild, hairy Neanderthals, we scary fringe folk, should leap from our caves, shake our rattles toward the skies by creating our own news media, and give the miniscule investor class something to really be afraid of-namely the simple raw truth.

© 2001
Reprinted with permission from Online Journal