|
Banned
|
Thanks, "P"...! I spotted it after I posted the thread, but I did not know that it was possible to edit a title....and, there was no room for the word "She", anyway. After reading your post, I tried to edit it, and I deleted 2008 so I could fit the edit in....
Here is more grist for the mill:
Quote:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/0...lice-in-court/
Cynthia McKinney Confronts Corporate Media Malice in Court
by Glen Ford / August 1st, 2007
“McKinney is putting their crimes against truth on the record, and we salute her.”
....McKinney has long been targeted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), possibly the nation’s most powerful lobby and attack dog group, for her failure to tow the Israeli line in Congress. Although McKinney’s father, a former Atlanta police officer and state lawmaker, has indeed made indiscreet comments, no one has ever claimed Rep. McKinney has uttered anything that could remotely be deemed anti-Semitic. “The attempted attribution was false, defamatory and libelous,” states her legal brief.
McKinney labels as “malicious” Tucker’s repetitive assertions that “She suggested that President Bush had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks but did nothing to stop them so his friends could profit from the ensuing war.” That’s not what McKinney said, back in the Spring of 2002, and her questioning of the conduct and motives of the Bush regime have since proved prescient.
Cox Enterprises’ Atlanta radio outlet, WSB, piled on in racist frenzy. McKinney looks like a “ghetto slut,” shrieked talk show personality Neal Boortz — a “slander,” according to McKinney’s suit.
Cox did nothing to rein in their radio personality, and Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for her columns, including the one that savaged McKinney. A Cox spokesman called McKinney’s suit “preposterous.” (For further details on the legal action, see Atlanta Progressive News, July 27)
Newspaper as Serial Liar
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution worked in tandem with corporate money and AIPAC to first unseat Cynthia McKinney in the 2002 Democratic primary election. The paper, like its corporate siblings across the nation, was anxious to prove that a political sea change had occurred in Black America. Gone were the days of “civil rights-style” rhetoric and confrontation - or so the theory went. Middle class African Americans like those in McKinney’s district, centered in Dekalb County, the second most affluent Black majority county in the nation, were becoming more conservative, it was said. According to the new paradigm, hatched in rightwing think tanks and universally adopted by corporate media, the Cynthia McKinneys of Black America are out of date, passé, and no longer appealed to an upwardly mobile class of African American voters. Dekalb County would tell the tale.
“According to the new paradigm, hatched in rightwing think tanks and universally adopted by corporate media, the Cynthia McKinneys of Black America are out of date, passé.”
While AIPAC and corporate donors stuffed the coffers of Black challenger Denise Majette - a former Republican and protégé of pro-Republican Democratic Senator Zell Miller — the Atlanta Journal- Constitution provided Majette with millions of dollars in free publicity and attack-dog services. Cynthia Tucker growled and sneered at the head of the local and national corporate media pack, intent on making a fait accompli of their own analysis, that Blacks were sliding to the Right. Tens of thousands of white Republicans prepared to cross over to vote as Democrats in the “open primary,” eager to put the uppity McKinney in her place. The Designated Negro, Majette, outspent the McKinney by 40 percent.
Majette won. Corporate media rejoiced, nationwide. As their local representative, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claimed to conduct a study that showed Majette had assembled a “biracial coalition of voters” to win victory, ushering in a new age of “centrist” Black politics. The prophecy had been fulfilled.
Bruce Dixon, now Black Agenda Report’s managing editor, did his own study of the election data and found that Majette could not have won more than 19 percent of the Black vote. The key to Majette’s victory was an abnormally high white turnout, 90 percent of which she won. Majette was not the Great Black Centrist Hope - she was the white candidate, and the Black community had overwhelmingly supported McKinney. There was no history-shaking “split” among Blacks in relatively affluent Dekalb County; it was a fiction.
More than half a year after Dixon proved that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “study” was bogus, the paper’s own favorite political scientist and quote-man, University of Georgia Prof. Charles Bullock, declared Majette’s “bi-racial coalition” a myth. His research showed Majette garnered no more than 17 percent of the Black vote. (See Bruce Dixon, <a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/46_commentary_pr.html">June 12, 2003</a>.) “What Majette needs to be doing is getting out, courting in the Black community, trying to broaden her coalition because she did so poorly in her community,” wrote Prof. Bullock.
What Majette did was get out of the district, embarking on a Quixotic, hopeless quest for Zell Miller’s vacating Senate seat. With no time for AIPAC, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and corporate capital to vet a Designated Negro of their own, Cynthia McKinney won her seat back in 2004.
Malice Aforethought
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found defamatory manna from heaven in the last year of McKinney’s term, when a Capitol Hill policeman confronted her as she attempted to do the people’s work. Editor Cynthia Tucker revved up her defamation machine, recycling old lies and libels with the new. We commend Cynthia McKinney for challenging Tucker and the Cox corporate giant that is Tucker’s only backbone, in court, while fully understanding that the chances of judicial success are slim, to say the least. If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars or bankrupted. McKinney is putting their crimes against truth on the record, and we salute her.
“Editor Cynthia Tucker revved up her defamation machine, recycling old lies and libels with the new.”
The assaults against McKinney’s character and seven-term career are but one skirmish in a nationwide corporate offensive that was sketched out by rightwing strategists in the mid-’90s and fully implemented in the early years of the Bush regime. For the first time, corporate American would make a concerted and coordinated effort to cleanse the African American polity of what remained of the Black Freedom Movement. The year 2002 was their D-Day for invasion of Black politics. They came strapped with millions in cash, and the supporting artillery of corporate media. AIPAC acted as cavalry, ranging across the country and terrorizing Black politicians into submission....
|
Last edited by host; 01-05-2008 at 09:29 PM..
|