What the story of Richard Jewell means to me.

[Bjorn Against]

Today we learned that Richard Jewell has passed on. Jewell was a hero whose name was dragged on the mud and stomped on by our media, he is a man who symbolizes both what is great about the American people and what is wrong with the people who are feeding us our news.

I have a confession to make, when I first heard that Jewell was the bomber I believed it. It was back in the days in which I was a right-wing Libertarian, thinking I knew everything in the world while I was in reality blindly following a crazy ideology. When they told me that we needed to privative Social Security I believed them. When they told me that we need to embrace "free trade" I believed them. And when they told me that Richard Jewell was guilty I believed them.

Then I learned something. I learned that Jewell was innocent. I learned that the media had destroyed this man's life without having any real evidence of his guilt. This man was a hero, and yet I was wrongly led to believe he was a criminal.

It was a moment in which I realized that sometimes I need to be careful trusting the images that I see flashing across the television set. It was a time when I realized that I could be misled and that I could end up viewing a hero as a villain.

It would be a few years before I would leave the right-wing completely, but that was a moment when I for moment realized that I was wrong. I realized that no matter how much I want to believe that I was independent in my beliefs that I could be easily misled.

It was an early dent in my right-wing armor, and after a few more dents were made in that armor over the following years I eventually decided to ditch the right-wing ideology completely and recognize that the truth lied on the left end of the political spectrum.

It was not too long after my switch to the left that 9/11 happened, and this time I was not about to let the corporate media lie to me again about who was to blame. We were suddenly hearing stories of hundreds of arrested in terrorism related cases, yet there was no evidence presented which actually linked those people to terrorism. We were told to just take the Bush Administration at it's word that these were bad people. They weren't all bad people though it turns out, they were a crowd of people just like Richard Jewell who were unjustly fingered for crimes they did not commit.

Sadly the media has not learned the lesson taught by Richard Jewell. When it comes to coverage of terrorism they are far too willing to repeat propaganda, rumors, and flat out lies. While the media may have forgotten the lessons of Richard Jewell however we must never forget those lessons. We must make sure there is never another innocent person who we allow to be treated the way Richard Jewell was treated.

[TahitiNut]

1. The same FBI who hounded Jewell for about 6 moonths (before they id'd Eric Rudolph) ...

... is the FBI that identified and produced resumes on all 19 hijackers within 48 hours of 9/11.

Fancy that.

Not that they had any inkling what those 19 people were planning. Nope. Perish the thought.

:grr:

[AwakeAtLast]

9. I think you need to make this info its own separate post

I find that to be tooooo coincidental!

[TahitiNut]

10. I've mentioned this several times as my main reason for being a LIHOPer.

"The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" in the Jewell goose chase ... got far, far too 'efficient' on 9/11 for me to believe they didn't already have the information.

[AwakeAtLast]

12. Somehow in all my years here at DU, I've never read that tidbit

Glad I did now! Thanks!

[calimary]

17. Just the expression on America's "Pet Goat" was enough to convince

me of that. On top of the fact later revealed that he sat on his ass for seven minutes in that classroom and did nothing after being informed of what had happened, and then hung out in the cafeteria for a photo-op for some 20 minutes before dragging his sorry ass back onto Air Force One to go do something about it - like run and hide. I knew something stunk to high heaven there and then.

[Booster]

11. Agreed. I said way back then that if they knew who the 19 people

were on the 12th, then they knew who the 19 people were on the 10th.

[TahitiNut]

13. Hell, yes. It takes those bozos that long to prepare a press release.

It seemed to me to be the most obvious :wtf: of the whole debacle. When the various reports came out about field offices getting stymied with regards to looking at those characters, it became obvious they were deliberately looking the other way.

at the very least

[OneBlueSky]

16. no only resumes, but photos as well . . . of ALL of them . . .

I still have the New York Times editions from 9/11 and the week that followed, and there's this big chart of all the terrorists, WITH PHOTOS, like two days after the event . . . that always struck me as just TOO much information TOO fast . . . in other words, information they had ready to release BEFORE the attacks took place . . . wonder why . . .

[malaise]

19. They even found a perfect passport in the new York rubble

9/11 never made sense to me - not from day one.

[NanceGreggs]

2. Beautifully said, MN.

K and R ...

[TomInTib]

4. We posted at exactly the same time, Nance.

Good Dog A'mighty.

And said pretty much the same thing.

By the way, did you get that Day by Day thing?

[TomInTib]

3. So very well put, MN a B.

Very succinct and illustrative.

Glad you stepped on thru.

[AZBlue]

5. I thought of him when I saw the movie "Death of a President"

The FBI wanted a fast answer and the media wanted blood. That's a SCARY combination.

[jobycom]

6. Interesting, excellent post. I hadn't heard he had passed. RIP. nt

[SharonAnn]

7. And as I think back, it was similar for me, too. I just hadn't connected it.

It was one of the things that really made me aware of how I could be gullible, believing the easy answer that everyone gave me and how I failed to ask enough questions, failed to be skeptical enough, failed to look further.

I'd like to think I'm invulnerable to that now, but I'm still human so I'll always have to be on the watch for this kind of thing. It's easy to be misled, especially if we don't want to work at finding the answers.

[Lint Head]

8. Law enforcement is lazy. The media is lazy

It's easier to go for the shiny object next to the incident than to pull out a shovel and get dirty while digging for the truth. :dem:

[cigsandcoffee]

14. You learned he was innocent in the media, though.

While the media feeding frenzy around the event was over-the-top, they do at least correct their mistakes - in public.

Politicians rarely do that.

[Bjorn Against]

15. The media rarely does it either...

This was a situation when they had no choice but to admit they were wrong, but there are volumes upon volumes of false stories which have been run in the media which have not gotten corrected. How many times did they put the Swift Boaters on the air after their stories were thoroughly discredited?

[cigsandcoffee]

18. You're focusing on cheesy talking-head shows.

Serious print-media journalists were among those that debunked the Swiftboaters in a very public way.

I'm not arguing that the media is great or anything, but if you pick and choose, you can get a pretty wide selection of reliable news and fair reporting.

[Bjorn Against]

20. "If you pick and choose"

And how do we know what to pick and choose? The fact is that NONE of the conglomerates that own the major media outlets have our best interests at heart, their ultimate goal is not to make us more informed it is about making themselves more profits. There may be some good journalists working for these major conglomerates but when the owners do not hold as much interest in the facts as they do in profits then we get false reporting regularly.

You are right that there were some serious print journalists who debunked the swift boaters right away, but the rest of the media kept reporting on them and giving them credibility long after they had been debunked. That says something that the media would give credibility to a group they knew was lying.

[cigsandcoffee]

21. You can't view them as a monolithic block.

They're too huge and diverse for that. And this isn't entirely a bad thing, really.

[Bjorn Against]

22. Huge yes, diverse no.

There are only about five big corporations that control the vast majority of what we read see and hear. All of these companies have pretty much the same interests at heart, pleasing their advertisers. They continually report falsehoods to sell their agenda.

Remember the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad? That was filmed using close up shots so people didn't realize how few Iraqis were actually there for it, if you saw a shot of the whole square you could see it was almost empty. It was a complete non-event, yet every one of the major media outlets treated it like a major turning point. Even though they knew the reality they decided to report the propaganda instead.

There are some good journalists out there, but when the conglomerates are all too willing to report stories which they know are nothing more than propaganda those conglomerates are not to be trusted.