Street roots
March 2, 2012
Fair and balanced? Hardly, but was it ever?
BY PAUL K. HAEDER
CO N T R IBU TIN G WRITER
he foundational question all
journalists — all Americans, for that
matter — should be asking is: How
should news and information flow through
American democracy, and who can access
that media? Believe it or not, the founders
- of the United States, through huge fits,
spasms and debates created the U .S . Postal
Office in 1774 to move newspapers
throughout the land, for hardly anything or
nothing at all.
How times have changed, with media
monopolies lobotomizing the news, the
centralizing of newspaper and broadcast
reporting, the looming death of independent
publishers and booksellers and the
evisceration of U .S. mail service. In fact,
much of the ugliness in the media
associated with Rush Limbaugh, Sean
Hannity, Bill O ’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Glenn
Beck, Rupert Murdoch and other
mainstream corporate press shills is a rerun
of this country’s media history.
The groundbreaking book, “News for All
the People,” takes the reader on a 400-year
journey from the past transgressions to
today’s democratic crisis, one largely
created by the deeds of those controlling
the media and the narratives our citizens
are actually “consuming.” It delves deeply
into why those narratives are slanted,
misrepresented or scrubbed altogether by
the so-called liberal media. “It is our
contention that newspapers, radio and
television played a pivotal role in
perpetuating racist views among the general
population,” write Juan Gonzales and Jose
Torres.
What do Torres and Gonzales find? For
one, they dig up haunting stories of
T
News for All the
People: The Epic
Story of Race and
the American
Media, by Juan
Gonzalez and
Joseph Torres
monikers for non-white criminals,” the
authors write. “Those early accounts thus
establish a voluminous and entirely one
sided newspaper narrative: Native
Americans were depicted as cunning,
barbaric, and evil — and certainly
undeserving of the vast lands coveted by the
European settlers.”
The pair makes a clear case on how
marginalized people of color literally fought
to fund and publish their papers. There
were contradictions among them, to be
sure. Many Native American editors held
slaves. Some of the white Hispanic editors
were proponents of Indian removal. But
these tales are overwhelmed by stories like
that of escaped slave Frederick Douglass.
As the editor of several African-American
newspapers, he not only employed black
male writers, he was a feminist who
employed dozens of female writers, too.
In his papers, Douglass railed against the
U .S . war against Mexico: “We have seen for
eighteen months, the work of mutilation,
crime and death go on, each advancing step
sunk deeper in human gore. By every mail
has come some new deed of violence. Cities
have been attacked, and the cry of helpless
women and children has risen, amid the
shrieks and agony of death and dishonor.
The living have gone forth, and dead
corpses encased in lead have returned.
Thousands of widows and orphans have sent
up to the heavens their pitiful wail.”
The authors tell us about John Rollin
Ridge, a Cherokee writer and novelist, who
moved to California and founded the
Sacramento Bee. He sold the paper to
James McClatchy, one of his employees.
McClatchy developed the Sacramento Bee
into the flagship newspaper of the
McClatchy newspaper chain. It’s a great
R e c o n stru c tio n -e ra n e w s p a p e r e d ito rs
sto ry . B u t h e r e ’s w h a t’s so su p e rb a b o u t
calling for the lynching of abolitionists, the
burning of alternative presses and the
hateful stigmatization of Native Americans,
Latinos and blacks. And it’s clear early on in
this book that the two Latino authors know
history repeats itself, constantly, when it
comes to media and the press:
“Descriptions of ‘Sculking’ or ‘barbarous’
Indians were commonplace then, much as
today’s news media use terms such as ‘wolf
packs,’ ‘drug gangs, and ‘super-predators’ as
Torres and Gonzalez’s work: On the
McClatchy website, they find no mention
that a Cherokee was the founder of its first
paper.
The co-authors have earned their
journalistic chops. Gonzalez co-founded
“Democracy Now!” in 1996; currently, its
daily news show, “The War and Peace
Report,” is heard on more than 950 T V and
radio stations. Gonzalez has codified his 30
years working in corporate media and 15
years with the award-winning radio program
into this seven-year book project with
Torres, himself a journalist, a former
National Association of Hispanic Journalists
deputy director and adviser for the media
reform organization, Free Press. All this
expertise comes together in “News for All
the People.”
Their book ends by
bringing us into the
modern era of
Latinos, Asians,
This booh w ill help
Indians and African
contextualize how media
Americans fighting for
outlets s w e ll as Fox News or
their own voices in
Clear Channel have become
media. They get into
debates about
propagandized and cruel, as
whether the Internet
w ell as why the lim ite d
will stay free and open
num ber of publishers
— if it ever was in the
co n tro llin g a m a jo rity of
first place. Both
authors are clear
printed m aterials Is bad lo r
about the need for an
democracy.
alternative press, and
more debate and
discussion of news for
and by the corporate
war state.
“One of the things that we’ve uncovered
is that this fundamental debate that is
constantly occurring is: Does our nation
need a centralized system of news and
information, or does it need a decentralized,
autonomous system? And which serves
democracy best?” Gonzalez said on
“Democracy Now!”
This book will help contextualize how
media outlets such as Fox News or Clear
Channel have become propagandized and
cruel, as well as why the limited number of
publishers controlling a majority of printed
materials is bad for democracy. And the
book also shows what gave rise to
pugnacious independent writers and
alternative periodicals of old, along with
those still waging the fight today. “In These
Tim es,” the “Texas Observer,” “Mother
Jones,” “ProPublica” and “The Nation” give
us some hope that an alternative press will
gain favor over the profit-driven, war-
promoting mainstream press.
Reprinted from Real Change Newspaper,
Seattle, Wash.
What Brought Him
by David Mair
What brought him to end it
Thought of having it all
Top the world was he
Even to the far reach of each tree knew he
Mourning after, Morning after, Mourning,
Waking to the smell of every cry
Faking to want to help why?
Flushed with power
Hushed by the hour
Living in the cobblestone grave of his own
Bombs of despair blew
Couldn’t find the time to meet his mind
He knew the dagger of love beseech the power
Simply forgot to measure
For it was always right
in front of him
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