Gonzo journalist checks out of the Hotel America
Hunter S. Thompson, the pain in the butt over the top innovator of Gonzo Journalism, has committed suicide at the age of 67. Watch the future ofDoonesbury to see what will happen to the fictional cartoon character based on Hunter. Will art imitate life?Meanwhile, many journalists have been the news lately instead of reporting the news. From the Mole hired by Bush to distract from real issues in his White House press conferences, to the three other journalists paid to spread right-wing propaganda as normal news, to the CNN journalist forced to resign for daring to tell the truth about the shocking and unprecedented life-expectancy of journalists in Iraq, to the crew fired at CBS, included Dan Rather who will retire early for even attempting to point out that our Emperor used the silver spoon in his mouth to get out of the war in Vietnam, and then went AWOL from the National Guard (yes the documents were forged, which allowed everyone the stupid excuse to forget that the charges were really true). Bush is playing the mass media like a great big Wurlitzer organ, which blares whatever keys he presses.
Disinformation campaigns run by the government are now revealed, as back in the '60s, to be standard practice. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that democratic decisions based on false information is fake democracy, pseudo-choices made by people who've been fed a bunch of lies. Where truths are omitted, democracy doesn't exist. Hence my insistence on the terminology about "post-American" imperialism and neo-fascist religion.
This cartoon is now dated. The devolution has continued into a lower stage in the 21st century.
Not only is Gonzo Hunter gone, who no doubt killed himself because he could no longer bear the creepy perversity of what passes as mainstream now, but also that gang of overly smarmy tokens are also now irrelevant to the new low we've arrived at.
We now need to add a post-contemporary panel: in 2005 the new brand of journalists get extra paychecks directly from the White House, and take their orders directly from the Pentagon. If they step out of line, they're forced to resign. Or they go into exile, like Greg Palast in London.
Again, these are more desperate times than yesterday. Legal opposition to illegal practices has been ineffective. Again I propose the search for unprecedented means, perhaps neo-gonzo means.
So long, Hunter.
posted by E. Heroux @ 1:25 AM
2 Comments:
Yet another journalism-as-hypocrisy in the news lately, viz., Bob Novak of CNN is the very guy who technically should be imprisoned for outing a US spy (Valerie Plame) in order to shut down her husband who was revealing the Administration's lies. Yet Novak is still on CNN passing along all kinds of rightwing disinformation. Meanwhile, 2 other reporters are threatened with imprisonment for _not_ publishing the name of the US spy! Here's an excerpt:
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington upheld an earlier court ruling that New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper should be jailed for contempt for failing to disclose the source of a story neither had any intention of publishing in the first place.
Meanwhile, Bob Novak, the only columnist in the country who actually published Plame's identity in violation of federal law, sits comfortably ensconced on CNN's "The Capital Gang" bloviating as usual.
Miller and Cooper will probably go to jail for "witnessing" a federal crime and refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity. So why is it that only two of the three reporters who allegedly "witnessed" the crime are being threatened? ---end of excerpt.
PS.(That's a "rhetorical question" by the way. If you don't know the answer by now, please send in your queries and my secretary will reply.)
PPS. (To make matters worse, the Administration again is let off for such crimes, now almost innumerable, although one article numbers 34 scandals, each of which should have led to hard time for our Administration officials. Instead, innocent journalists are threatened, while guilty journalists are paid; and the Administration official-- widely said to be Rove himself-- gets promoted. This is the ultimate distillation of the stench of corruption.)
PPPS.: A thorough review of the case of the CNN journalist, Eason Jordan, is appearing online for the next few days out of TruthOut. Eason, an oddball opportunitst who has been criticized in the past by both the Left and the Right, was forced to resign for expressing his opinion at a meeting of the global elites. He opined that individuals within the US military "targeted" certain journalists for ill treatment, and moreover that the high number of journalists killed in Iraq is partly due to individual cases where US soldiers shot them, _and were never investigated nor tried_.
Tomorrow, TruthOut will review the case "of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, where on April 8, 2003, an American tank crew killed two journalists and wounded three others. The U.S. military never took testimony from a single journalist who was there, and never disciplined any military personnel." This story surfaced back in 2003 among the alternative press, and was investigated by the group Reporters Without Borders, which provided evidence that the tank was ordered to target that part of the hotel in an attempt to frighten and silence journalists there. To this day, the story has been buried.
Obviously the Pentagon cannot and does not have a policy to kill journalists. But it does indeed have a policy and effective procedures to control journalists. What is at issue here is whether or not that official policy of controlling information cultivated an environment in which certain more gungho and less thoughtful individuals within the military pursued that policy to its ultimate extreme.
See 1st part of the 4 part series at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022405A.shtml
Post a Comment
<< Home