Thompson announces on Leno: GE AGAIN to be kingmaker by abusing control of public airwaves?

[ProgressiveEconomist]

Just as he did with Ahhnold, tonoight Jay Leno gave Fred Thompson an unprecedently big and diverse audience and smarmily "softball" questioning with which to start building his candidacy for high office. Thompson's handlers upstaged a "debate" on Fox "News" tonight and made Thompson look much more "presidential" in contrast.

IMO, Leno and GE/NBC are abusing their broadcasting license in continuation of the same illegal "Boulwarist" GE political manipulations that put Ronald Reagan in office and helped break the power of unions in this country. GE has been doing this for more than six decades but has attracted very little attention (a book that breaks this silence is mentioned in my first reply below). Their apparent political goals are clear-- to minimize GE's tax rate and labor costs, and maximize GE's net income, by promoting public policies that will hamper labor organizing, increase demand for GE's products and shrink expensive government safety nets for the mass of Americans.

I believe it is a threat to democracy when big corporate media can circumvent procedures established over hundreds of years for vetting candidates and can crown candidates of their choice over the public airwaves without equal time requirements.

What do you think?

Here's a smippet from a URL I chose more for its timing and comprehensiveness than for its political stance. I'd never heard of "themoderatevoice" before I googled it. You can use its links to click through to the Washington Post and other more familiar outlets that wrote stories based on pre-announcements by the Thompson non-campaign rather than actual viewing of Leno's September 5th Thompson segment.

From http://themoderatevoice.com/entertainment/television/14955/fred-thompson-announces-candidacy-on-tonight-show

"Television / Politics / 2008 Elections / Republicans / Fred Thompson

Fred Thompson Announces Presidential Candidacy On Tonight Show

By Joe Gandelman

Former Senator and actor Fred Thompson formally announced his candidacy for President on Jay Leno¡s Tonight Show -- following in the footsteps of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger who found the venue a lucky one to announce his own intentions. ... Mr. Thompson's announcement, which has been expected for months, was released to reporters about an hour before the other Republican candidates took part in a Fox News-sponsored debate in the early primary state of New Hampshire. But as if to poke fun at his opponents, he ran an ad, titled 'Debate' that appeared directly before the Republican candidates took their places to face live cameras in a much more traditional political ritual.

In a dark suit with the backdrop of an American flag, Mr. Thompson said in the advertisement: 'On the next president's watch, our country will make decisions that will affect our lives and our families far into the future. We can't allow ourselves to become a weaker, less prosperous and more divided nation.' He then directed viewers to his Web site, Fred08.com, where he will give details of a platform and his reasons for entering the race.

Was it a wise move? Probably. There are now so many debates between the two parties that it¡s coming close to where networks may well simply want to allot time for weekly series. And while debates are watched by many Americans, and scrutinized by the press and webloggers, the impact of an individual debate is not quite what it used to be. So Thompson will take some heat for skipping the debate and be the subject of a few jokes but is unlikely to lose many votes due to it. ... The Tonight Show is a more controlled environment. And running a totally controlled ad is something of a masterstroke."

[TwilightGardener]

1. I've been saying this over and over--the "Law and Order" GE/NBC employee Thompson

is being promoted by GE/NBC. It's absolutely blatant. They run reports on him all day long on MSNBC--they drop his name and discuss him whenever possible. There's no mistaking it.

[Kagemusha]

2. What part of free speech don't you understand? Oh, let's go after Oprah too.

Let's put monetary values on all this corporate support and regulate it as election donations. The courts say money is speech, so if we turn speech into money, then we can ignore the first amendment and regulate speech because it's just money, right? Tell newspapers who they can and can't endorse without going over donation limits. Tell bloggers how much their support to a candidate is worth. It's free ad time, you see, and that means it's an in-kind contribution.

I'm just summing up the arguments I've heard and responded to about this whole mess for just the last 12 hours or so. I regret if I sound frustrated. I am frustrated.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

6. IMO Oprah has no 60-yr history of corrupting the political process with massive propaganda

-- and GE does. See my post #4 below (the one I promised in the leadin), about GE's Lemuel Boulware and how he invented Reaganism and made Ronald Reagan its posterboy. IMO Jack Welch and his handpicked successors have bought themselves a network so they can follow in Boulware's footsteps and foist upon us one new Reagan after another.

[Kagemusha]

8. AFAIK the Bill of Rights has a history longer than 60 years.

And newspapers were huge propaganda machines in the 19th century. Hell, any century they've existed.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

9. IMO the airwaves belong to the American people, and their representatives must set

reasonable guidelines for their use. How does allowing cutthroat corporations to buy up the public airwaves and provide unquestioned unlimited time for their puppet candidates further the public interest?

Was the Fairness Doctrine inherently unconstitutional? Most analysts believe the Fairness Doctrine served the public well and should be brought back. If GE wants to provide Thompson with a platform for thumbing his nose at public vetting of Republican presidential candidates, IMO there should be laws and regulations that will force that corporation to surrender its broadcast licenses.

[Kagemusha]

10. The fairness doctrine is irrelevant here because you'd go so much further than it.

Your dream is to turn speech into money and then regulate it as money, oblivious to how that is government regulation of the content of the speech, and oblivious to how odious and un-American going that far would be. But if you don't get it, I'm not going to push the matter any further. You're entitled to your opinion, too.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

11. ???? The Fairness Doctrine is precisely what I'm advocating. I've mentioned "equal

time" several times, but have said nothing about "turning speech into money".

If Leno wants to have candidates visit with him on the air, that's fine in my opinion. But he should treat all candidates equally, not allow declarations of candidacy only for GE's handpicked corporate puppets, and not use his TV variety show to upstage and circumvent open debates that make candidates accountable to the electorate.

[Kagemusha]

12. So you're fine with Leno having speech as long as you're regulating it.

They have that in some countries.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

14. URL on the legal limbo in which Reagan's FCC placed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20030820.html

So far, apparently there has been no definitive USSC decision ruling out a return to a variant of the Fairness Doctrine, abandoned in a 3-2 FCC decision during Reagan's second term. When Ahhnold ran in the undemocratic gubernatorial recall "election" a few years ago, most stations voluntarily avoided giving the appearance of favoritism by eliminating Schwarzenegger films etc from their pre-election schedules. For decades before that, the Fairness Doctrine generally kept one-sided radio and TV exposure of candidates from becoming an issue at electiontime.

From your apparently uninformed statements equating the Fairness Doctrine with prior censorship, this URL could be an eye-opener for you and at least give you fodder for googling that might help you resolve your moral dilemmas.

[Kagemusha]

15. Since when have late night comedy shows been subject to that!?!

And you're ignoring what I said about treating money as speech and speech as money while unwittingly preaching the principle back to me in different guises. Come on. Enough of this.

And just because you're not proposing prior censorship doesn't mean you aren't proposing a "liberal" helping of post censorship, which is not something that reassures me, sorry. And even if you could find some legal technicality to make it legal, that does not make it right.

[blogslut]

3. Meh

Fred Thompson is not going to win the presidency. He can make all the talk show appearances he wants. Ain't gonna happen.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

5. That's what millions of Democrats said about Ahhnold--and about Ronald Reagan

IMO there's something about television that makes many viewers forget about their own experiences and life struggles and enter fully into whatever fantasy world the broadcasters are trying to create.

And IMO if no Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich is given equal time to deflate these fantasies, millions of viewers will succumb to them. And even after they have suffered decades of real-world harm to their personal situations, they will remember fondly the TV characters (like Ronbo) who destroyed their lives with "war" for corporate profit, huge payroll taxes ostensibly for "Social Security" but actually to fund income tax cuts for the top 5 percent, offshoring of their good jobs by deliberate public policy, etc.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. A John Fund WSJ op-ed/book review praises GE's uncanny propagandist Lemuel Boulware

for giving Reaganism to the world--and to Ronald Reagan himself! IMO, all of this rich history of GE's mass anti-union anti-tax propaganda should have been debated before GE was allowed to take control of NBC and the public airwaves, apparently in large part for manipulation of the political process to GE's corporate advantage.

From http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009499

"BOOKSHELF: What GE Brought to His Life; The education of Ronald Reagan. BY JOHN H. FUND Tuesday, January 9, 2007

"... historians have debated exactly how Reagan went from a self-described "hemophiliac liberal" to America's leading small-government conservative in little more than a decade. The answer has a lot to do with the years 1954 to 1962, when Reagan worked as the host of CBS's top-rated "General Electric Theater" and served as GE's spokesman. For weeks at a time he would tour GE's 139 plants, eventually meeting most of the 250,000 employees in them. Reagan himself estimated that he spent 4,000 hours before GE microphones giving talks that started out with Hollywood patter but ended up as full-throated warnings about Big Government. "GE tours became almost a post-graduate course in political science for me . . .," he later wrote. "By 1960 I had completed the process of self-conversion."

Thomas W. Evans, a lawyer who served in the Reagan administration, has composed an elegant history of Reagan's "studies" with General Electric. Much of "The Education of Ronald Reagan" is devoted to rediscovering Lemuel Boulware, Reagan's mentor at GE and the dynamo behind both the company's PR efforts and its labor-negotiation policy. ... Boulware's efforts included an elaborate campaign to educate both GE's workers and the public on the moral and economic benefits of free enterprise. ... Mr. Boulware's free-market message so penetrated GE's work force that Reagan, his traveling ambassador, quickly saw how important it was for him to become familiar with what the workers were reading. Over time, his own reading and his conversations with GE workers had an effect. ...

Historian Rick Perlstein has concluded that "Reagan was an integral component in the Boulwarite system." The alliance lasted until 1961, when Boulware was eased into retirement after his methods came under growing legal attack from unions backed by the new Kennedy administration appointees on the National Labor Relations Board. ... But the lessons Reagan had learned during his GE barnstorming stuck with him. Several passages in The Speech of 1964 came directly from his GE talks. ("There is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order; or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.")

The influence of those years lasted well into Reagan's presidency. The Time magazine journalist Hugh Sidey recalled admiring some of Reagan's White House speeches so much that he asked a speechwriter who had written them. "Reagan," he was told. "They were actually pretty much the speeches he had given when he worked for General Electric." And for the GE talks, Reagan was his own speechwriter. It was in these forgotten GE years, brought to life so vividly by Mr. Evans, that Reagan developed into "The Great Communicator"...

[ProgressiveEconomist]

13. More on GE's grooming of Ronald Reagan as its corporate political spokesman, by

Thomas Evans, author of "The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism"

According to Evans's astonishing and chilling corporate history, in the 50s and 60s GE apparently employed 3,000 paid political organizers to influence local and statewide elections for corporate benefit. Ronald Reagan apparently became the centerpoint of a massive, near-fascist corporate political organizing effort, in large part focused on Reagan's weekly appearance on the long-running CBS TV series, "GE Theater".

From http://hnn.us/articles/32681.html :

"History News Network, 1-08-07

The GE Years: What Made Reagan Reagan, By Thomas W. Evans

In my book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism , I trace Reagan�s evolution from liberal to conservative, from actor to politician. ... When he joined GE in 1954, Reagan was a Democrat and a self-described 'New Dealer to the core.' One of the early photos in the book shows him at the White House -- the Truman White House -- where he was thanked by the president for his strong support in the 1948 election. ...

However, on October 27, 1964, two years after he had left GE, Reagan delivered a nationally-televised speech in support of conservative Barry Goldwater. ... Supporters and critics alike thereafter referred to Reagan�s remarks as 'The Speech.' The dean of the Washington press corps referred to it as 'the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan�s �Cross of Gold� speech in 1896.' In 1966, Reagan was elected governor of California. As Reagan later commented, he had been giving The Speech for years, in a variety of versions, in his role as GE�s 'Traveling Ambassador.' ...

GE vice president Boulware .... was placed in charge of all of GE�s labor, public and community relations. ... Boulware believed in 'going over the heads of the union leaders' directly to the employees. He ... created a new position, Employee Relations Manager, and 3,000 of them joined with 12,000 supervisors to bring the company�s message home. The ERMs used skills that the company had developed in the manufacture and sale of its products to win the hearts and minds of its workers. Boulware called this 'job marketing.' Two of the publications that emanated from Boulware�s operation were distributed weekly: one ... was a newsletter to GE supervisors and to local 'thought leaders,' who could influence municipal and state elections. A slick monthly magazine often tied Reagan�s GE Theater news to ideological messages. And a defense quarterly, featuring GE�s efforts in the field, was enhanced by commentary from leading experts (e.g. well-known academics and occasional Cabinet officials) on military and geopolitical matters. ... An article in the defense quarterly presaged the Reagan Doctrine and contains the earliest mention of what later became the strategic defense initiative.

In time, Lemuel Boulware and GE CEO Ralph Cordiner mounted a national grass roots campaign, recruiting major corporate allies, creating schools where GE employees and others could learn the fundamental political skills to win elections, developing shareholder lists for political mailings, and turning GE workers into 'communicators' and 'mass communicators' (Boulware�s words) who could spread the message ... to a decisive number of local voters. In the course of this Ronald Reagan was taken out of the plants and put on what he called 'the mashed potato circuit' of civic forums largely in the south and smaller states, often towns where GE dominated the economy. ... In due course, the 'great communicator' was born. In today�s parlance, most of these states turned from blue to red. Ronald Reagan developed a vision of America during his GE years. He learned to reduce his views to a few simple precepts and, as he entered politics, he went over the heads of party leaders, using the banquet circuit and television to present his powerful message. ...

[eagler]

7. Because black box voting will still be here in '08, Thompson

will be the next president