The Devolving World of the Right-Wing Media

by Mark Harris

"War means crucifying the truth-tellers."

—John Reed, 1917
In the early 1970s when I was in college, I occasionally used to hitchhike the 350 miles from the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University (SIU) to the Chicago suburbs where my family lived. One spring morning about an hour north of Carbondale on Interstate 57, a middle-aged man driving a white sedan stopped to offer me a ride. It had taken me two short rides to get about 40 miles north of Carbondale, so when the driver said he was going all the way to Chicago, I was thrilled. I got in the car and we were on our way.

The man told me he was on a sales trip and had been in Atlanta. He was now on the last leg of his trip on his way to his home in Madison, Wisconsin. For a while we chatted casually in the way two strangers traveling a long stretch of highway might do. I told him I was a history major at SIU, and my family, originally from California, now lived in the western suburb of Glen Ellyn. I thanked him again for offering to take me such a long distance. Maybe I could give him some gas money? No, not necessary, he said. How long had he lived in Madison? I asked. He and his wife had moved there 20 years before. They had lived in the same house all those years. He mentioned they had a son named Robert. He was their only child.

How old is he? I asked.

That's when he told me his son had died two years ago. He had been drafted and sent to Vietnam, he explained. Died there, he said.

I told him I was sorry.

He asked me how old I was. Nineteen, I replied.

Bobby was 20 when he died, he told me. I wasn't sure what to say so I said nothing. He remarked that his son had loved basketball and played varsity in high school. His wife was a homemaker, devoting herself to raising their boy. He mentioned again that he was their only child.

I didn't tell the man I was active in the campus antiwar movement. In fact, I was the chairperson of SIU's chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee. Nor did I mention I had frequently argued with my own father over the war. A year earlier in 1972 he had ordered me not to travel to New York City to attend the large peace rally planned for April 22. When I ignored him and went anyway, traveling by bus to join the 100,000 others who gathered in Times Square to demand an end to the war, he was angry.

I had been moved that day when John Lennon and Yoko Ono suddenly bounded onstage, surprising everyone and asking the thousands gathered to join them in singing "Give Peace a Chance." In the peace movement I had discovered an antidote to the anger and frustration I felt about the ongoing madness of the war. But I didn't share all this with my older traveling companion. Instead I just remarked that I thought the war was a tragedy. I hoped it would end soon. He just nodded. Too many people are dying, he told me. For a moment he looked lost in some private thought. You know it's all for nothing, don't you? He said this to me as if it were a warning. He wanted to know if I was in danger of being drafted. I didn't think so. My lottery number was high.

We changed the subject then and spent the next few hours talking about this and that and nothing at all. We stopped at a roadside cafe where he bought me coffee and a sandwich. The man's sadness permeated those hours. I took some of it with me when finally he exited one of the Chicago expressways and dropped me off close to my home. Stay safe, he said. And then he drove away.




The Politics of Personal Insult

I've thought about that long-ago trip while pondering the treatment antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, another parent who lost a son to war, has received at the hands of the contemporary right-wing media. Sheehan has earned the wrath of the right-wing media for daring to reject the legitimacy of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Instead Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq in April 2004, denounces the war in unequivocal terms, calling President Bush a liar and a hypocrite. She wants the troops brought home now.

Good for her, I say. Sheehan has the courage of her convictions. But to gain notoriety as a war critic also means entering the target sights of the right-wing insult machine that currently patrols the media landscape. Sheehan enrages the self-proclaimed super patriots of talk media for refusing to play the stock role as the grieving but stoic mother who bravely accepts her son's sacrifice to "keep America free." Thus we witness the tawdry spectacle of media warriors such as CNN's Glen Beck, Ann Coulter, and others call Sheehan everything from a "tragedy pimp" to an "airhead" to the "commander in grief." In 2005 Salem Radio's Mike Gallagher brought his compassion directly to Sheehan when he organized a counter-protest against her peace vigil outside the President's Texas ranch. "We don't care! We don't care!" chanted Gallagher and other flag-wavers from across the way. For Rush Limbaugh, Sheehan is just a patsy of the far left, her patsiness made possible because she has "the IQ of a pencil eraser." The equally high-minded Melanie Morgan of KSFO Radio in San Francisco, who likes to joke on-air about torturing and executing various liberals, charges Sheehan is a "pornography addict."

It's a sign of the times that a mother who refuses to go along with the rationale for a war that cost her son his life is treated with such cheap disdain. To her credit, Sheehan exhibits a calm integrity responding to the snarls and bared teeth of the talk media predators. When far right columnist Michelle Malkin, author of a book defending the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during WW II, declared that Sheehan's son would not have approved of his mother's antiwar activism, Sheehan asked simply how many times had Malkin cried over her son's grave? Had she met her son even once? No matter. Malkin is the kind of sensitive soul whose response to the report of three prisoner suicides at Guantanamo was a touching "boo friggin' hoo." We can only imagine what Malkin might have said if the dead men had actually been legally convicted of anything.

More recently, Fox News host Sean Hannity had Sheehan as the inaugural "hot seat" guest on his new Hannity's America television program. Hannity was relatively restrained interviewing Sheehan, perhaps because he knows it looks bad to use his normal attack dog tactics against the parent of a dead soldier. Hannity's McCarthyite mind, however, remained on red alert throughout the interview. Did Sheehan regret occupying the same stage as Venezuelan "dictator" Hugo Chavez while he-take a breath!-condemns U.S. foreign policy? Did Sheehan stand by her denunciation of George W. Bush as a "lying bastard?" Did Sheehan actually believe the Iraq war is being fought to expand U.S. imperialist influence in the Middle East? Sheehan quite reasonably explained that she did regret using the word bastard, spoken as it was in a moment of anger. Otherwise, she apologized for nothing.

Actually, if anyone deserves to be on the political "hot seat," it is Hannity. This is a man who has spent the last four years publicly regurgitating every official Iraq deception, only to watch it all crumble before the "grave and deteriorating" reality that even the Iraq Study Group now admits is life in Iraq. Again, no matter. Hannity just soldiers on, grilling the war's doubters with his moronic "yes or no, answer the question"-style interrogations.

Characteristically, Hannity gave big play last summer to Sen. Rick Santorum's (R-PA) announcement of newly discovered evidence of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). With great fanfare, Santorum, who was trying to save his sinking re-election campaign, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) claimed that 500 chemical munitions had been discovered in Iraq. Hannity and the ever-accommodating Fox News ran the "At Last, the Missing WMDs!" story as if it were a political bombshell. Never mind that the Defense Department quickly rebutted the Santorum et al "revelation," noting the weapons in question were mostly degraded field remnants left over from the Iraq-Iran war. Unfazed, Hannity continues to insist illicit WMDs did exist, but were secretly (magically?) spirited away before the U.S. invasion. No word yet on when Hannity plans to unveil dramatic evidence proving the earth is only 6,000 years old.




Partisans of Anti-Liberalism and Steak Houses

In the end, Hannity is just the classic war apologist, a media "patriot" whose hallmark characteristic is an utter incapacity for doubt. But it's a mistake to treat such talk media warriors strictly on political terms. Their role as pro-war cheerleaders is less a product of stalwart vision than it is just product, period. They are partisans of anti-liberalism and Ruth's Chris Steak House, vendors of flowers and tirades and a good night's sleep on a Temper-pedic mattress. They sell not just the Iraq war, but culture war.

They also sell a disingenuous regard for life. Indeed, the failure of the U.S. intervention in Iraq offers some far right ideologues the opportunity to reveal even starker evidence of their moral bankruptcy. Mark Goldblatt, a writer for the right-wing National Review, renders this service in dismissing the estimate of the Johns Hopkins report that 650,000 Iraqis have died of causes related to the war since the U.S. invasion. In an Oct. 13, 2006, column, Goldblatt argues that even if the death figures are accurate, they would represent a decrease from the roughly 150,000 civilians UNICEF and the World Health Organization say were already dying annually under the pre-2003 U.N. sanctions. Thus, some 525,000 lives were spared when Hussein was tossed out and sanctions lifted in May 2003, claims Goldblatt. This means President Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam in the end only cost 75,000 Iraqi civilian lives! But Goldblatt offers even more fantastic news. If we allow for the fact that the margin of error in the John Hopkins study establishes a low-end estimate of 426,369 deaths, then the invasion of Iraq actually saved almost 100,000 lives!

Who would have guessed? Apparently, Iraqis should be grateful western powers have at least found a more cost-effective way to kill them.

Goldblatt's musings on life, death, and statistics serve only to reveal the twists along the road one pro-war apologist is willing to take in search of his personal comfort zone with mass killing. It's typical of the disconnect between the human tragedy of the war and the cold, pompous blather that characterizes so much media debate. Safely ensconced in their studios and offices, America's regiment of pro-war pundits barely pause to ponder the human sorrow of the war as they play their rhetorical games of one-upmanship with the hated liberals.

The cheap insults, moralistic pretentiousness, and near cultish defense of the President can leave the more sensitive among us weary with just how precipitous a decline the media-political culture has undergone. The "good news" from Iraq has become the bad news that just won't go away, and may soon be extended to Iran. On the media front the latter possibility now translates into the opportunity to watch people like Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC's Kudlow & Company vent his "dream" of using a few "low-level" nukes against Iran. It's unclear whether Kudlow finds his comfort zone with war in the same manner as the President's mother, not bothering his "beautiful mind" with non-tranquil thoughts about such matters as what heat and pressure do to human flesh. But there's no doubt the topic of the war's innocent victims has little appeal for the right-wing media. Some can't even stand the humanitarians who work on their behalf, such as New York Post contributor Debbie Schlussel, who found "poetic justice" in the 2005 death of activist Marla Ruzicka by suicide bomber.

"The swath of sorrow left by BushCo is deeply cutting and immeasurable," declares Cindy Sheehan. Is there any simpler truth? No wonder the media warriors, so unfeeling in their blowhard patriotism, despise her so. There are rivers of sorrow coursing now through this war and this world. In my lifetime, this river flows back to the era of another immoral war, and to the memory of a man on a rural highway who one spring morning revealed his quiet grief to a stranger. I don't know what the future brought that man and his wife, but hopefully they found a way, like Cindy Sheehan, to channel the grief of losing a son to war into something redemptive.

As for the right-wing media, redemption is not likely. With the war now in its fourth year, the media's pro-war voices have devolved into not much more than death's public relations handlers. But even as they clamor for more bloodshed, they continue to revise their raison d'être for the Iraq war, from the WMD threat to "bringing democracy" to the now decidedly less lofty goal of establishing stability and governability. Ironically, the aspirations of the war propagandists now aim not much higher than achieving what Saddam Hussein once imposed upon the country.

And for this so many are dying.



www.Mark-T-Harris.com

Mark T. Harris is a freelance writer living in Bloomington, Illinois. He has written for Utne, Z magazine, Dissent, and other publications.

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