Breaking: Corporate Media Actually Report Some Real News!

Breaking: Corporate Media Actually Report Some Real News!
12/29/2007
Dave Lindorff

It was good to see reports in the national media, including the New York Times and my own local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer http://tinyurl.com/3a893s, on an effort by the town council in Brattleboro, VT, to have the town’s district attorney draw up a war crimes indictment against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

But the publication of news about this noble effort, which while thoroughly appropriate is unlikely to go anywhere even if the town council does pass the resolution, raises the question of why such a story would pass editorial muster, while the much bigger, and more significant, story about a growing national campaign to impeach these two criminals in the White House (on charges including war crimes) continues to be virtually blacked out.

A few weeks ago, three members of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), all senior, respected members of Congress, wrote an op-ed calling for an immediate start of hearings into possible impeachable crimes against the Constitution by Cheney. All of the major publications to which they offered this important article (which reported on their plans to call on the Judiciary Committee to act), including the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and other leading publications—all of them—turned it down.

Wexler went one further, setting up a website http://www.wexlerwantshearings.com/ on which people could sign their names calling for a start to impeachment hearings. In one week, over 100,000 had signed it (there are 160,000 signatures now).

So far there has been no news report in the corporate media about this campaign, which cites Rep. Dennis Kucinich's (D-OH) H Res. 799 charging Cheney with lying about Iraqi nuclear weapons and ties to Al Qaeda, and lying about Iran, and also adds the charge of conspiring to expose an undercover CIA operative, and obstructing the investigation into that conspiracy. Nor does that broader impeachment movement, which has seen over 100 towns and cities across the country, as well as the Vermont state senate, pass resolutions calling for impeachment, rate much or any coverage in print or in the electronic news media.

In their “wisdom,” the nation’s editors have apparently decided that impeachment is a non-issue.

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