CNN's
Vice President Of Racism
By Stephen Lendman
31 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Move over Bill, Chris, Michelle,
Rush, Sean, & Company. Make way for a worthy challenger to the title
of leader of the racist rant pack holding court weekday evenings on
his hourly show on CNN. Who would have thought back in the days when
this well-known cable TV financial news anchor was CNN's executive vice
president and then president of the ill-fated CNNfn program he launched
that one day he'd switch roles on the network and become the managing
editor and anchor of a nightly news program he calls Lou Dobbs Tonight.
And who might have guessed this well-thought of financial host would
transform himself into a raving racist never letting a program pass
without blaming all the country's ills on the poor and desperate people
"the color of the earth" south of the border for practically
everything going wrong in the country from the fraudulent war on terrorism
to the falling dollar.
He does it on the nightly
segment he calls "Broken Borders," and it hardly matters to
this anchor/commentator (or most any other one on corporate-run TV)
that these people only come here in desperation because the 1994 NAFTA
trade agreement destroyed their livelihoods and lives at home, and the
only way they can find work to feed their families is to come el norte.
It would never occur to this program host or CNN's management that they
they owe their audience an explanation why most people everywhere have
no wish to leave their native lands, move to a strange new one where
they don't speak the language or have any ties, and face a hard period
of adjustment along with leaving their loved ones at home to do it.
They only come here or elsewhere because they have no other choice if
they wish to survive, and instead of blaming them, we instead should
expose and denounce the US-led NAFTA-codified dictates that caused their
immiseration in the first place.
What You Won't Hear
About Immigrants On CNN
Most immigration, legal and
illegal, around the world is the result of unemployment, poverty or
conflicts forcing desperate people to move to more developed countries
to find jobs or safety unavailable at home. According to the International
Labor Organization, it's not just a US problem. It's a global one that
in 2005 forced 200 million people to emigrate to a new country, up from
175 million in 2000 and 82 million in 1970. With at least half the world's
population living in poverty and the numbers increasing annually (and
a number of serious conflicts ongoing as well), is it any wonder so
many of them are on the move each year seeking relief to be able to
survive.
It's not getting any easier
for them as the US and Western imposed globalized so-called neoliberal
"free market" economic model is little more than a race to
the bottom driven by giant corporations exploiting the developing world
and its people for greater profits. It's what Michel Chossudovsky wrote
about in his important 2003 book titled The Globalization of Poverty
and the New World Order. In it he explains the current WTO/IMF/World
Bank imposed system is one of "capital creation through destruction."
It creates big profits for transnational corporations at the expense
of mass and growing poverty, human misery, the ability of the planet
to sustain life, and eventually will lead to less demand for the exports
these corporations need to continue increasing their profit growth.
So why would smart corporate CEOs be willing to do this knowing a day
of reckoning is ahead. Simple - today they reap the big profits they
seek and Wall Street and investors demand and manana is for a future
CEO to worry about. For the poor and desperate people south of our border
and around the developing world, manana is today, and millions of them
are on the move because of it.
Why Programs Like
Lou Dobbs
Tonight Get Regular Air Time
So why does CNN put up with
the kind of demeaning and racist programming Lou Dobbs specializes in?
Simple, because it draws large audiences meaning CNN (self-dubbed "the
most trusted name in news") can charge premium rates to corporate
advertisers that want their message heard on highly rated programs.
It's the profit motive stupid like it always is. If it sells, it gets
air time because that's what this business or any business is all about.
Understanding that, you might believe TV networks would consider running
porno films every night in prime time if they could get away with it
as apparently that kind of material and gambling draw the largest audiences
online. They surely would attract a big following on prime time TV as
well although advertisers would have to be innovative in drawing audiences
to their message after they'd been watching that other fare.
But as long as advertisers
love it, will pay well for it, and it's allowed over the airwaves, CNN
lets Dobbs get away with his crusading advocacy journalism that clearly
crosses the line and violates the basic principles of honest news reporting.
It's delighted to give him an hourly weekday sound stage to preach his
message of hate and misinformation that fills the CNN airwaves with
vitriolic language like "alien invasions" and "innundations"
(illegal ones, of course). At other times he's called Mexican immigrants
an "army of invaders" wanting to reannex parts of the Southwest
- meaning, of course, their presence in large enough numbers threatens
our white Anglo-Saxon culture. Still other outbursts refer to "illegal
alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some
of our national treasures." He also claims "the invasion of
illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans (with) deadly
imports" of diseases like leprosy and malaria.
What's most troubling is
people believe this stuff, and he's winning awards for his work. In
2004, Dobbs received the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage
of Immigration and the Man of the Year Award from The Organization for
the Rights of American Workers for the other more credible regular segment
he features on his program - the corporate outsourcing/exporting of
US jobs to low-wage developing countries resulting in this nation joining
the race to the bottom along with all the others exploiting working
people for profit.
Dobbs is very hard line as
a managing editor as well having the final say on what issues are discussed
and who appears on his program. He makes no bones about wanting to avoid
alternate views to his own and has said in so many words that the truth
is what he says it is. To keep it that way, he carefully chooses guests
whose views match his own making sure other versions of the truth almost
never have a voice on his air time. So for viewers wanting to understand
what the immigration issue is all about, they'll never find out tuning
in to Lou Dobbs Tonight. But for extremist hate-mongers like the vigilante
Minutemen, self-appointed to guard our southern border, challenge dark-skinned
workers at day labor centers, and use violence with impunity to do it,
Dobbs is preaching to the choir. Their hate-filled white-supremacist
message to their followers is much like what Dobbs and his guests tells
their audience - that Latino immigration here is "a silent Trojan
Horse invasion that is eroding our culture." Wht they never explain
is that demonizing immigrants and controlling their movement across
borders is part of an imperial elite strategy used to exploit workers
for power and profit and use xenophobic-induced fear as a way to help
do it.
Dobbs Has Lots of
Company In the Race-Baiting Game
It wouldn't be so bad if
Dobbs and a few others were just outliers running counter to most other
programming where viewers wanting objective journalism could still get
it. But expecting that from the Fourth Estate anywhere on corporate-run
television would be as likely as finding carnivores that were vegetarians.
Just on CNN alone, Lou Dobbs has an array of worthy challengers. Take
longtime anchor and commentator Jack Cafferty on air in the afternoons.
He's as scornful of immigrants' rights as is Dobbs and derides them
with vicious hate-talk like "mobs of illegal aliens....who don't
belong here....and have no rights." He calls for "pull(ing)
up the buses (demanding) these people...show their green cards....and
the ones that don't have them, put them on the buses and send them home."
While Cafferty doesn't say
how he wants these people assembled to prove their legal residency status
or citizenship, it sounds like he favors neighborhood and house-to-house
searches to find them. In other words, in Cafferty's strange mind, brown-skinned
people are criminals, don't belong here, have no rights and should be
deported back where they came from. Apparently it never occurred to
Cafferty, Dobbs or other CNN hosts and commentators just as guilty at
times of hate-talk that these so-called 'illegals" give back far
more than they get here. They pay billions of dollars annually in taxes
and get few social services for them in return. So the net-net from
them is they help grow the US economy, and their employers value their
services. If these immigrants, legal or illegal, weren't here and wanting
work, the employers hiring them would be hard-pressed to fill the jobs
most others don't want.
Spreading fear and hate is
also the tactic former CNN commentator, now ensconced as an MSNBC political
analyst, Pat Buchanan perfected years ago and is now preaching in his
outrageous new book called State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion
and Conquest of America. In it, Buchanan makes it sound like "the
barbarians" are at our gates, they have us surrounded, outnumbered
and outgunned, and our days are numbered as they're about to take us
over, destroy our society and culture and make us over into whatever
it is Buchanan thinks they have in mind. Buchanan has never shied away
from controversy on-air, in his syndicated column or in an August 8
online one in which he referred to George Bush's "La Raza immigration
policy, featuring amnesty and a 'path to citizenship' for 12 million
illegal aliens, (and) pardons for all businesses that hired illegals."
Thirty years ago while condemning Hitler as an anti-semite and racist,
he praised the Nazi leader as "an individual of great courage"
and wrote of his "geius (being) an intuitive sense of the mushiness,
the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality....of the
statesmen who stood in his way." It sounds a lot like sympathy
with and praise for a man most consider the most heinous of all 20th
century dictators.
He's also been on the extreme
fringe in his views about African-Americans and the civil rights legislation
so essential to them and once when serving in the Nixon White House
told the President "the integration of blacks and whites - but
even more so, poor and well-to-do - is less likely to result in accommodation
than....in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed....by government
side by side with the capable." He's also said and written much
that makes him fair game to be called an anti-semite and equal opportunity
racist believer in white superiority, opposed to gay rights, demeaning
of women and their rights, a believer that Christianity is the superior
religion to all others, and hostile to the notion that real democracy
is preferable to "quasi-dictatorial rule" from his undisguised
admiration for Hitler's "courage (and) genius" and praise
for the dictatorships of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet
in Chile calling them both "soldier-patriots."
In his new book, already
a best-seller from all the free media exposure it's getting, Buchanan
conducts a verbal racist jihad against all non-European immigrants meaning
all those not white. He uses language like the US must keep "Americans
of European descent (from becoming the) minority (in order to) survive
(and George Bush's immigration policy) will lose the American Southwest
to Mexico linguistically, ethnically, (and) culturally (and the Southwest)
part of America is moving back to Mexico, from whom we took it in 1848."
He further wrote "We are witnessing how nations perish....We are
entered upon the final act of our civilization....Chicano chauvinists
and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through
demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war....(we're
losing ground) in the midst of a savage culture war (and) The first
imperative is an immediate moratorium on all immigration....But even
(then), success is not assured."
Buchanan also believes the
Bush immigration policy is "economic treason against the American
worker....(will result in) the complete Balkanization of America, (and)
by 2050 America will be a Third World country....Our great cities will
all look like Los Angeles today. Los Angeles and the cities of the Southwest
will look like Juarez and Tijuana." With views like these, it would
seem Pat Buchanan would rank high on the list of the kind of guests
Lou Dobbs wants to feature on his nightly program even though he now
works for a competitor.
Another Longtime
CNN Anchor Who Excels In A Different Kind of Race-Baiting - Against
Muslims
One other CNN stalwart also
deserves mention and considerable scorn. He's longtime CNN reporter
and anchor Wolf Blitzer who daily spews a different brand of racism
along with the usual mix of US empire-supportive lies, myths, rationalizations
and lots more heard all over the corporate media airwaves. Blitzer currently
hosts a weekday afternoon program called The Situation Room as well
as the Sunday Late Edition talk show. He began his journalism career
with Reuters in their Tel Aviv bureau before moving to Washington as
White House correspondent for the hard line ultraconservative Jerusalem
Post. He's held a number of positions at CNN as military affairs reporter
during the Gulf war, White House correspondent and more. What's ignored
about Blitzer that should stir controvery is that at one time he was
a lobbyist for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC). That and his one-time connection to the Jerusalem Post are
part of his roots making it impossible for Blitzer to be objectivereporting
on anything about Israel or events in the Middle East. It's easy and
probably accurate to see him as AIPAC's on-air man at CNN. It's also
no surprise that the preponderance of guests he has on with him share
his views which are clearly one-sided and strongly pro-Israel.
Blitzer, his guests and others
like them can't hide their disdain for Muslims they demean by inference
as well as in language like "Islamic fundamentalists," militants,
gunmen, terrorists and "Islamo-fascists." It's always been
part of Blitzer's stock and trade which he clearly showed right after
the high-profile Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing in April,
1995. He was quick on air to baselessly accuse Arabs (meaning Muslims)
of an act of terrorism against the US even though US Army and Gulf war
veteran Timothy McVeigh later was arrested, convicted and executed for
the crime. That faux pas hardly mattered to Blitzer as throughout his
career he's been consistently one-sided in his reporting on the Middle
East that's never viewed Arabs, their Islamic religion or culture favorably.
In fairness to Blitzer, culturally sanctioned forms of bigotry directed
against Arabs and Islam have always been tolerated in the US going back
decades. It's especially evident in the media and Hollywood films where
rabs have long been the butt of language referring to them as "camel
jockeys, desert warriors and terrorists."
Post-9/11, however, that
kind of characterization rose to an unrelenting Islamaphobic frenzy
with the US in the vanguard of a new Western crusade against Islam though
never calling it that. It's part of the Bush Administration's Messianic
mission and need for convenient scapegoats to allow it and the interests
of capital it represents free reign to pursue their quest for world
dominance using preventive war and state-sponsored terrorism as the
way to get it. Today that quest is centered in the Middle East and its
vital oil reserves with the US and its Israeli ally jointly waging illegal
wars of aggression with the aid and comfort given them by on-air empire-backing
and racist flacks like Wolf Blitzer who never met a US or Israeli initiated
war he didn't love and support.
It passes without irony or
notice that this kind of racist warfare happened once before 900 years
ago in the First Crusade. Back then Pope Urban II (no doubt seen as
a good Christian then and now) launched an earlier holy war against
Islam and Muslims to regain control of the Holy Land and sacred city
of Jerusalem for Christianity. When his forces entered the city, they
slaughtered the Muslims, Jews and even Eastern Christians living there
believing no doubt they got their marching orders to do it from the
Almighty. Today, a modern-day empire is on the march, and their faithful
servants like Wolf Blitzer and his on-air guests spew their message
of hate and support for it to convince a naive public tuning in it's
the right thing to do, it's spreading democracy and Western civilization,
and it will make us more secure and the world a better place for everyone.
What's Never Allowed
On-Air In Contrast To What Always Is
It also passes without comment
or notice that no subject is more sensitive in the West and over the
corporate airwaves than any criticism of Israel. It's never aired because
the corporate media won't allow it to be. In the US especially, it's
the metaphorical "third rail" on-air and in politics. Touch
it and pay dearly - severe denunciation, labeled an anti-semite or self-hating
Jew, even ostracism. Today the powerful AIPAC Jewish lobby (Blitzer's
former employer) has a lot to do with this and is part of an unholy
alliance with the equally powerful Christian fundamentalists in the
US and dominant neoconservatives running the Bush administration, Republican
party and the country. It's unwritten and unspoken, but their message
is clear and emphatic - no criticism of Israel is ever allowed and full
unconditional support and encouragement is always extended to the Jewish
state no matter what it does.
Whatever action Israel takes
is thus viewed through the lens of self-defense, but whenever an Arab
state or group like Hezbollah or Hamas defends itself against an Israeli
attack it's called terrorism. It's always this way even when Israel
is the aggressor, which is nearly always the case, as it was on June
25 when it invaded Gaza and the West Bank (again) and attacked the Palestinians
and again on July 12 when it (again) did the same thing to the Lebanese.
The Bush administration, US Congress, UN, world community and dominant
corporate-run media voiced their wholehearted approval and support for
what Israel did on both occasions and condemned the Palestinians, Hamas
and Hezbollah as terrorists. It's impermissible to have it any other
way, and it's always that way on programs like the ones Wolf Blitzer
and Lou Dobbs host and in the language these hosts and their carefully
chosen guests use.
The Dirty Business
of Serving the Interests of Wealth and Power By Any Means
Since when do wars ever do
anything besides cause more wars. And how do mass deaths and destruction
from them or virulent racism at home supporting them do anything but
anger those on the receiving end making them want to strike back in
retaliation. It hardly matters in the corporate media world where TV
hosts, commentators and those allowed air time with them take full advantage
of their public platform to spread hate messages beneficial to those
they represent and support but harm their targets and the rest of us.
Program hosts like Lou Dobbs and Wolf Blitzer would never even consider
the wars they feel are justly waged were and are in violation of international
laws under the Hague Regulations, Geneva Conventions and UN Charter.
It's of no concern to them or any of the other on-air (or in print)
US and pro-Israel flacks and propagandists that include most all high-profile
TV hosts, commentators and so-called pundits. Their stock-in-trade is
disinformation so viewers not on to their dirty business ony get the
one-sided views the more savvy among us know are false, disingenuous
and harmful to those on their receiving end.
Blitzer, like Dobbs, Cafferty,
other CNN regulars and the whole unhealthy array of others all over
the corporate radio and TV airwaves and in print like Pat Buchanan are
there to do the job they're paid for and have shown they're willing
to sell their souls to do it. They do it so the interests of wealth
and power are well served and allowed to pursue the benefits they seek
by whatever means they choose to get them. In that kind of world, wars
are good because they're good for business and racism is allowed because
easy to pick on scapegoats are needed, it never hurts the bottom line
to demean and slander them, and it's always OK in the empire when the
targets are people of color, the poor, unwanted immigrants, and especially
Muslims collectively referred to as radical Islamists, militant jihadists
and Islamo-fascists. It doesn't matter that most Muslims or people of
any religious faith or race are just ordinary people like us in the
West wanting to live their lives in peace and care for their families.
But the message delivered
on the corporate-controlled airwaves rarely ever explains that. Alternative
voices of reason and sanity are mostly shut out so the public can't
hear views denouncing wars, racist hate, religious intolerance, and
the need to work together for social equity and justice for all. The
public also never hears that all religious faiths range in diversity
and practice from liberal to fundamentalist, and aside from a small
segment of extremist outliers in them all (Christianity and Judaism
included), their adherents most often express their beliefs and live
their daily lives according to the core principles they all espouse
of moderation, tolerance of others and non-violence.
They hear none of that in
the corporate media because that kind of thinking and discussion isn't
good for business that thrives on conflict, dominance of the strong
over the weak, and exploitation of the developing world and the people
in it for profit. That kind of sanity and understanding also isn't good
for the highly-paid on-air empire-backing flacks like Dobbs, Cafferty,
Blitzer and the rest spreading the same kind of one-sided hateful, destructive
messages. Their salaries depend on how well they serve their corporate
employers, the numbers of viewers and listeners they get to tune in
to hear them, and the bottom line profits the media giants get from
the unrelenting cultural war they wage on-air for them. Our leaders
call it "Western civilization," a corrupted notion of moral
superiority that our way is best and all others are inferior to it.
They want to export it to the world whether or not it wants it and at
the barrel of a gun if it doesn't. The on-air empire flacks like Lou
Dobbs, Wolf Blitzr and the rest are there for one purpose - to help
them do it.
Stephen Lendman
lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.