Chair of Progressive Democrats of America Writes to Washington Post's Dana Milbank

[babylonsister]

:applause: :applause:

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/22399

Chair of Progressive Democrats of America Writes to Washington Post's Dana Milbank
Submitted by davidswanson on Fri, 2007-05-11 18:47. Media

Dear Dana Milbank,

The progressives in the Democratic party who want to end this war have actually made unprecedented, creative coalitions.They are far more united than your reporting suggests. They range a spectrum from long-time Democrats from union families and old-left dissenters to converted Republicans, Greens and Libertarians from red states who recognize that the two-party system must end the right-wing push (abetted by the media) for a one-party government, efficient and controllable, that features a permanently disempowered token opposition for the sake of saleable narrative conflict in the "news."

169 Democrats voted YES last night to James McGovern's (D-MA) amendment for de-funding and Withdrawal. 59 Democrats voted NO and they'll hear from their disappointed constituents. Ending an unjust immoral war is a long process. Many of us remember from Vietnam. Many of us never thought we'd live to see another Administration as arrogant and blood-stained as Nixon's. But you've helped, with reportage that was inexplicably blind to the real deaths it caused. Your reportage, deriding anti-war progressives as dim-witted, inchoate and disorganized, helps empower the one-party rule that undermines the Constitution.

Though Dennis Kucinich is not the only progressive candidate in '08's Democratic primary and though his image may not fit the current -- and unfortunate - image of a U.S. President from Central Casting, he's a detailed historian, a fierce patriot and a canny politican. He's actually more 'conservative', in the sense of seeking to conserve what is good in this country, than those who cover him give him credit for --even Wolfe, one of the few anchors who bothers to give him airtime - or who's been assigned to.

The spectacle of the White House press corps in the Bush-Rove years should be a long-remembered lesson in the triumph of style over substance in journalism. The mostly-male room of reporters who looked like Ken Dolls, who were eager to let a War President relax with jokes about cut of suit and style of tie and reluctant to challenge him with questions about torture, civil liberties, executive mismanagement, deaths in a war based on cooked intellgience and a politicized White House that made Clinton's auctioned overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom look amateurish --helped turn this Administration into a governmental picture of Dorian Gray. Its corrupt and blood-stained image mouldered in the closet while the media promoted a spun image of patriotism, moral certainty and stubborn "Courage". We as a country are on the verge of seeing the real picture, and it won't be pretty.

Please don't contribute to the mess with continued buffoon journalism. That's how you come across, using your voice to deride individuals and groups who, safely powerless in the past seven years, are now creating news. Talking points manufactured to perpetuate that derision (one imagines memos delivered now in a pleading tone -- please work a few of these in, please don't kick a party while it's down) never should have been allowed to direct a free country's media in the first place, though it's well-documented that they did (Jeff Cohen's Cable News Confidential, Norman Solomon's War Made Easy.) To continue such derision,and avoid inconvenient but factual news of the changes taking place in Congress and the country, reveals a habitual bias that make your reporting seem irrelevant, oddly restricted, and embarrassing to watch. I'm not asking you to cheerlead for progressives or Democrats. But end the knee-jerk bullying that Americans are sick of. Grant people the dignity of their views, as long as they're not based on annihilating anyone else's.

Mimi Kennedy
Chair, Progressive Democrats of America


Related post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3260480&mesg_id=3260480

[cosmicdot]

1. wonder what is taught them at the Hoover Institution

Dana was a Media Fellow at the right-wing Hoover Institution

Dana Milbank Washington Post March 7–11, 2005

http://www.hoover.org/bios/mediafellows?year=0000&c=y

wonder if there's any relation to

Jeremiah Milbank
New York, New York
Jeremiah Milbank III
New York, New York

2 of Hoover's 'Oversseers'
http://www.hoover.org/about/report/3231131.html


thanks Mimi

[Gabi Hayes]

2. great thread! get rid of Dana, Keith. he diminishes you

how I loathe that smirking weaselworm

[loudsue]

3. The voting machines & the press: The two CRITICAL ELEMENTS of a Democracy

And we have to fight as hard as we can, at every turn, to get them back on track.

Great letter! K & R

:kick::kick::kick:

[annabanana]

4. k&r. . . . . . n/t

[puebloknot]

5. K&R Mimi Kennedy: The Queen of Smart and Ethical nt

[mmonk]

6. Wonderful.

To the point of media complicity.