From: spl@pitstop.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Re: The Satanic Roots of Rock - Creating the Counterculture
Date: 5 Oct 92 01:04:39 GMT
Organization: University of Calif., San Diego/Microscopy and Imaging Resource
NNTP-Posting-Host: pitstop.ucsd.edu

In article <1ao07qINN109@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker) writes:
>                                             [re:the press]    ... I
>disagree with your implication that in the Nixon case this community of
>liars and whores spontaneously found the courage to do what was right. I
>think the same people who can cause the press to ignore news when they want
>it suppressed can cause them to focus on it selectively when they want to
>"dump" a politician who no longer serves their purposes.

I think you, to some extent, oversimplify the way the sorry excuse for
a press in this country works.  I believe what happened (and, again, I
wholeheartedly agree with the outcome) in the case of Nixon, _et_al_,
was more of a feeding frenzy.  A whole hell of a lot of careers in
journalism were made in those days -- Dan Rather, Bob Woodward, and Carl
Bernstein, just to name three of the more notable.  "Investigative"
journalism was all the fad in those days.  Every little podunk teevee
station established its own "investigative" unit and began nosing
around.  It became fashionable (and relatively safe), for a time, to
thumb one's nose at the high and mighty.

It certainly helped that Nixon was hellaciously unpopular at the time
and that there were a lot of folks in the halls of power (as well as
many of us in the streets) who hated his guts.  Certainly, without the
cooperation (some might say complicity) of Congress, especially Sam
Ervin and his band of merry pranksters, Nixon would have gotten away
with his high crimes and misdemeanors.
	
>Suppose that in a couple  of months or a couple of years the mainstream
>press were suddenly to discover that Bush has been lying about Iran/Contra
>etc. and began to make a big deal of it. This would NOT signal a sudden
>attack of conscience among these lying hypocrites, rather it would signal
>a decision by elements of the American Establishment that Bush was now a 
>liability rather than an asset.

No, it wasn't conscience.  To be a journalist, you have to abandon
that at the door (I speak as a former member of the broadcast industry
and sometime radio journalist myself).  Nonetheless, I don't believe
that there was any conscious decision by the American Establishment to
"get" Nixon.  I believe that Watergate was simply a turn of
journalistic fashion.  One week it's the House banking "scandal," the
next week it's Somalia, then off we go with Gennifer Flowers for a
brief fling.

If anyone manipulates the American press, it is the government itself.
An even cursory look at the travesty of Desert Whatchamacallit shows
how the press is manipulated to whatever ends the Administration and
the Pentagon desire.  And why?  So that the "journalist's" egoes can
be stroked by being close to the centers of power by being invited to
all the "right" cocktail parties and fundraisers and rubbing shoulders
with the rich and powerful.  A truly independent journalist quickly finds
that sources rapidly dry up and phone calls don't get answered.

In a perverse way, it would be nice to think that there was a cabal of
the power elite running things, pulling the strings of the press and
our government.  Then they could be the first ones up against the wall
when the revolution comes. :-)

But it just ain't so, I'm afraid.  It's mostly just plain old human
greed, stupidity, and laziness.

							spl
-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (619) 534-7968 -- spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu
UCSD Microscopy and Imaging Resource/UCSD Med School/La Jolla, CA 92093-0608
"If you don't think people are this crazy, you need to move to LA!"
                                     - Gary Stollman