The Liberal Media

The republican talk radio shows (you know, with the Rush Limbaughs and the Shawn Hannitys of the world) always talk about the “liberal media.” I know Scars Publications is a part of the media (so to speak), and I don’t think Children, Churches and Daddies is really “liberal.” But when it comes to broadcast journalism, television in particular, we need to objectively ask: is the media liberal, and if so — why?
Before the election, CBS media got in trouble for not checking its sources about the legitimacy of President Bush’s past military experience. They were even documented as saying that they may not have had the guarantees for the legitimacy of their story, but they went with it anyway, because if it wasn’t right, there were other problems with Bush, because, well, they thought he was wrong for the country.
And on election day, they would poll people leaving the booths to see how they voted, and their returns indicated that Kerry was in the lead.
When they saw that their post-voting polling wasn’t accurate, they found that the people looking for results asked mostly women, which may have slanted the vote toward Kerry.
I mean Hell, even fake news shows like the Daily Show seem to revel in their hatred of the Republican Party, and every audience member there praises anything to do with Democrats like Kerry. They would interview conservative politicians, and they would occasionally even get boos form the audience during their interviews.
And I was thinking about this, and I thought about the fact that Bush won a good majority of the states, so I started to think that maybe the media is “liberal.” So the next question I have to ask is, why.
Well, the first reason I’d guess for the media touting liberal ideas would be that they were appealing to what people wanted to hear. Makes sense, because in order to keep people listening, they will report the news — and they’ll also report what people want to hear.
That make sense to me, but...
But if more people voted for Bush, then I would think that more people wouldn’t want to hear all of these views of how wonderful Kerry was.
So then I pulled back to think about this.
Then, I pulled way back. All the way back to looking at the entire country. I looked at the states that had a strong pull for Kerry, versus a strong pull for Bush.

And the thing I noticed was that the Democratic states were states with major cities. Illinois (holding Chicago) went to Kerry. And yeah, living in the Chicago area, I’d go to regular poetry open mics and hear people talk about their utter hatred for Bush. And yeah, the other bigger city players were Democratic states — New York and California both went to Kerry.
Hmm. Okay, so what can that tell me? Keep looking, Janet, and think about what these urban areas have in common and how they effect the government.
Hmm.
Wait, an idea is growing in my head. Let me think this through: Democrats want to expand government programs, and helping to poor, which usually mean more taxes. But who can afford that? Maybe the people who make more money, in the cities, who have to contend with more poor people around and want to give them some sort of relief so... So these poor people aren’t in the way of the rich city-dwellers, working and making money.
No, that can’t be it.
I know this is my editorial, but stop being so opinionated, Janet.
Hmm.
Okay. I’ll get back to thinking more objectively here. Sorry.

I think I’ve got it, but bear with me on this one.
Consider that people in the major cities (like Chicago, or New York, or L.A.) contend with poor people and want to see something done to help them. It may mean more taxes, but this will help these people, and they are willing to pay something extra to help these people out. And heck, if everyone is willing to pitch in just a little, we’d all help and make things better for people in need.
Wow. For a second I felt like I was talking for some relief fund for the starving Ethiopians (or Ethernopians, as Stan Marsh of South Park calls them), and not for people in the United States. (Did I sound like I was from the Red Cross or something when I wrote that last paragraph?)
But that might be a good argument. If people can give money to help people in trouble for other things (poor people in Third World countries, or peole caught in Florida hurricanes who lost their homes), people could be willing to help the needy poor people of this country. And the Democratic Party has become quite the altruistic party, wanting people to give to help other people.
The comforting thing, however, is that the majority of this country doesn’t like giving up their belongings without getting anything in return. The majority of people in this country know that just handing money to people does not help them get out of their problems, because government-granted money should only be a temporary solution to people’s problems, to help them get on their feet and start creating and producing on their own again.

You know, I don’t really know if that’s what the majority of people think. I know that’s what I think, and I just hope that many other people think that way too.
And of the two arguments I posed for why the big city states are liberal, I really prefer to think that the second reason is more accurate.

But then that leaves me with the question I had at the beginning of this editorial: if we’ve inferred that the media is liberal, then we have to ask why.
Hmm. Let me think.
Let me think of where the media comes from.
California. And New York.
Two liberal states.
Do you think the media, stemming from liberal states, could be so objective that it would ignore what it sees all around it — like homeless people trying to get a meal while these broadcast journalists are trying to commute to work at the television station? Like seeing people resorting to drugs and alcohol because they’ve got nothing else, and what little cash they can get is not enough for a new suit for an interview they can’t get for their dream job?
Do you think these people, who commute (possibly in a gas-guzzling expensive SUV) from their nice city flat to their nice city job, see these destitute people daily and want to help them?
You know, to make this world a better place?
Do you think these people would see the squalor and see that there is a political option that would help these people out, through the Democratic Party?
Hmm. Now that I’m thinking about this line of thinking for the media being more liberal, the more I’m getting this idea.

But I guess the thing that bothers me about the notion of the “liberal media” is that a select few locations can decide the way all major (or network) television news leans (instead of being even and just news). And yeah, we’ve also got newspapers and magazines to get news from, but the other problem is that we’re a bunch of Stupid Americans, and it’s a Hell of a lot easier for us to get the news from turning on the free news from our television instead of paying for print media and actually having to read it.
‘Cause reading the news, is, like, work.
So the thing that bugs me is that most people get their news from the liberal news, and people assume it’s not biased, and people almost accept it as the world of God. Do we want people assuming these slanted views are affects of true reporting? Do we want people drawing their conclusions about our world form these slanted views?
Can anyone make an informed decision about anything when they don’t receive all if the information objectively?

Janet Kuypers
Editor in Chief

photograph by Brian Hosey

Main Street-American Congregation

When I asked Erskine Caldwell, author of over fifty novels, at one time most read American author in Russia, where he was born he said: “Well, I was born, let me put it that way”. At the time of my interview, he was author in residence at Dartmouth. Not long after that he passed away, but I never forgot how his discussions were usually about regular people in small towns.
There was something about what he said that carried me back to my birth, in a border town, on the Main Street of ten thousand citizens between Minnesota and North Dakota. My Grandfather, brought up there as a child, owned businesses, worked all his life, and never took a vacation from Main Street. My uncles lived on the Minnesota Main Street eulogized by Sinclair Lewis in his novel Main Street.
I never gave much thought about the idea of Main Street until coming back, from military service overseas, attending colleges, working from west to east coast and then trying to find a place I could call home. Memories of working as a teenager, shining shoes and selling popcorn, are gone now, fadded like memories of my high school classmates. Not much memory remains of the dozen states I lived in but one thing stays.
In the Midwest, the south, north country or the east coast, I have always lived on Main Street. My place, my home is where everything is “going on” all the time. Main Street, USA, is window of the world. I feel close to Caldwell, Lewis and others who have a sense of place. And I understand why people need to demonstrate their feelings, here, where all Americans need to go when they congregate.

Yeah, art by Joel McGregor

Homeland Or Self-Security?

Periodically we might ask ourselves: where are we going?
What is actually different from the life around us half a century ago? How does that difference affect the way we live and, should we be concerned to the point where we decide to do something about it? When I was approaching teenage, we never thought about boundaries From sun up to sun down, in Northern Minnesota, outside our small town area, we explored the forests and rivers. The single-shot 22, birthday present my dad gave me at 12, never killed anything I remember.
Much later, where I taught school in West Virginia, boys of 12 knew the woods as “home”. Keith Roberts killed his own deer, with his grandfather's rifle and brought it out of the woods. That self-reliance does something for a boy nothing else can. It gets at the heart of the difference between man and woman. One hunts, brings home the “bacon”. Now, in Vermont, it gets to a point where parents are paranoid about their youngsters, especially a girl, going for a walk in the “woods”. The mystery of a young girl killed, jogging in Heartland, has never been solved. Yearly, something similar happens in Vermont. Self-protection is never guaranteed.
You are out for a stroll, alone or with your significant other. An angry dog, frightened, sees you as too close to his “property”. Before he has his teeth in you, mace or pepper spray, directed near him, has him going the other way. Postman or walker, you are your own homeland security. Anything else is fictional. As an American, Vermonter or anyone else, only you are responsible for your safety and survival. My rifle made me feel secure as a boy; boxing in the service, learning martial arts, all gave me a sense of security but not total security. Even more important is avoiding places, or people, of unnecessary risk. Despite movies or TV, the choice is up to me.

Sky, art by Brian Hosey

Letting Free Speech Slide

Okay, I’d like to take a little poll. Who out there values the fact that we have freedom of speech in the United States?
Okay, we probably all like that, or else we wouldn’t get together as a bunch of artists and poets and writers. So I’ll ask the next question in our poll: Do you like the fact that the U.S. Government is so involved with newspaper stories that it approves all newspaper articles published?

Well wait, that doesn’t happen. Especially when people have deduced how “liberal” the media is, when the government oozes so much Republicanism. So I guess that freedom of speech thing adheres to newspapers as well, and that’s probably a good thing, because people can read a variety of viewpoints and come to their own conclusions.
Um, good thing teens don’t read the newspaper often. Because only half of our teens believe (according to the the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the University of Connecticut’s $1 million, two year-long survey) that newspapers should be able to publish stories that did not have the government’s approval.
Yes, we need big brother to approve our stories before we publish them in newspapers, to make sure they ... to make sure they what? Make sure they don’t cause a panic, or a riot? Or to make sure they don’t make people think?
The BBC news reported that according to this survey “a significant number of US high-school students regard their constitutional right to freedom of speech as excessive.” And “Over a third ... felt the First Amendment went ‘too far’ in guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, worship and assembly.”
This survey even concluded that a lot of teens (falsely) believed the Government had the right to censor the internet — and about two thirds of the teens polled falsely believed that burning the U.S. flag was illegal
MSNBC reported via an AP article that teens seem to even have a more censorial and restrictive in their views than elders, as only 87% of teens polled, versus 99% of adults polled, felt that people should be allowed to express unpopular views.
Wow, that 13% of teens better not get in our way, we might express something they don’t like.
But that’s okay, we let them have the right to voice their opinions. That’s the American Way.
The survey results reflected an indifference to the First Amendment, as teens seems to think it was “no big deal.” The director of the Journalism Education Association, said in the report that “this all comes at a time when there is decreasing passion for much of anything.”

And you know, they may be right. People do seem to be dispassionate nowadays. Teens have become detached after being a product of the MTV generation, and after playing so many video games for so many hours of the day instead of caring about the news. or what happens around them.
I mean Hell, if they don’t have anything to say, maybe they don’t mind losing their rights.

The sad thing is that teens seem to take free speech for granted, which seems to reflect the way the Republican party has taught everyone to think after 9/11. Consider that after Bin Laden taught people who hated American to learn to fly airplanes to the could hijack them and drive them into economic and governmental buildings (iconic representations of the United States). After the morning of September 11th, President George Bush was determined to find a way to stop this from happening again — which, for him, included the Patriot Act, which expands the ability of states and the Federal Government to conduct surveillance of American citizens, and isn’t limited to terrorism. Greg Downing wrote in A Historical Argument Against the Patriot Act, that “under the Patriot Act anyone suspected of terrorist affiliations can be arrested and detained without solid evidence to prove their affiliations.” It even allows foreign and domestic intelligence agencies to more easily spy on Americans. The Patriot Act authorizes the use of “sneak and peek” search warrants. According to The Nation, “The Patriot Act was so named to imply that those who question its sweeping new powers of surveillance, detention and prosecution are traitors.” But PBS’ Frontline even noted that since it’s inception, the Patriot Act “has come under harsh criticism from both the political left and the right as a threat to Americans’ rights as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

I know I’m going on. I’ll stop. But I could name more...
Either way, Americans all felt the need to fly and continue their work on their own terms after 9/11, despite the threat of terrorist takeover of their airplanes. Americans were willing to take longer at airports for security reasons, even though some have found that women get their body physically checked more often. I mean, I had to lose a pair of cuticle clippers because I was nearsighted enough to not realize that they could be used as a violent weapon on a flight back from Hawaii. But we’ll deal with these things, to ensure our safety.
I think I’ve said this before, but people have claimed that they were willing to relinquish their freedoms to ensure their safety.
Which leads me to the Benjamin Franklin quote:
“The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.”

So where does that lead us? To hope for our rights that people keep taking away from us? To continue to write, to voice our opinions, to be heard? We’ve been letting free speech slide, like we’re on a toboggan ride on a snowy hillside in the dead of a February winter. Can we put our feet out to the sides, to try to stop this ride before it gets too fast and we hit the bottom?

Janet Kuypers Editor in Chief

How about ‘spreading more freedom’ in the USA?

WASHINGTON, DC (January 21, 2005) -- If President Bush really wants to “spread freedom around the world,” as he said in his inaugural address, he should start by setting an example right here in the United States, Libertarians say. Bush used the words “free,” “freedom” or “liberty” 49 times in his 21-minute speech on Thursday as he laid out an ambitious agenda that includes spreading democracy and freedom “with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
“Freedom, like charity, begins at home,” said Joseph Seehusen, executive director of the Libertarian Party. “Unfortunately George Bush has given America a lot more government -- and a lot less freedom -- over the past four years. We’re challenging him to change course in his second term and set Americans free.”
Though Bush refrained from targeting particular governments, six “outposts of tyranny” named earlier by secretary of state nominee Condoleezza Rice include Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe.
“Yes, setting people in other nations free from dictators is a laudable goal,” Seehusen said. “But George Bush wasn’t elected President of the World, he was elected president of the United States, and his first obligation is to improve the lives of the American people.”
Unfortunately, Americans are less free economically than when Bush was elected in 2000, Libertarians point out. Over the past four years Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have teamed up to pass the largest expansion of Medicare in U.S. history, authored the most expensive education bill ever, squandered more than $300 billion on an unnecessary war in Iraq; increased the federal budget to a mind-boggling $2.2 trillion and propelled the national debt to $7.3 trillion, Seehusen noted.
“Every dollar confiscated by politicians is a dollar that Americans can’t spend to pay medical bills, to send their child to college or to plan their retirement,” he said. “While military security is vital, economic security is important as well -- and the president can protect it by reducing the crushing burden of government.”
Besides, as Iraq demonstrates, toppling a tyrant and establishing democracy in even one nation is extremely difficult, while bringing more freedom to the United States is relatively easy, he noted.
“On November 2, Republicans increased their majority in both the House and Senate, which means Mr. Bush has a huge opportunity to impose his agenda,” Seehusen said.
With that in mind, Libertarians are issuing a modest challenge for the “pro-freedom” president’s second term: Eliminate just one major federal program; submit a no-growth budget for the next fiscal year; sell off one piece of federal property and use the money to reduce the national debt; or tear just 100 pages out of the 70,000-page Federal Register.
“Mr. Bush, taking any of those actions would prove to the American people that your passionate inaugural address wasn’t just empty rhetoric,” Seehusen said. “After all, if freedom is good enough for people in Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe, it’s good enough for people right here in the USA.”

Who Controls Freedom of Speech?

IRVINE, CA (Monday, December 20, 2004_ —Recent manipulations by conservative groups have demonstrated with unique clarity that the FCC’s power stands in opposition to freedom of speech, said Dr. Robert Garmong, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.
“The FCC establishes federal censorship over the airwaves, via its standards of ‘decency,’” argues Dr. Garmong. “Those judged to violate standards of ‘decency’ can be slapped with multi-million-dollar fines, and potentially even lose their broadcasting licenses.” The FCC has responded that it does not impose its own standards, but merely responds to complaints from the “public.”
But the to-be-expected result is that any and every pressure group will clamor for the title of “the public”—so that it can ram its views down the throats of the rest of us. News that 99.8 percent of recent complaints to the FCC comes from a single conservative activist group, the Parents Television Council, should come as no surprise.
“Free speech means the right to say what one believes, to any audience that is willing to hear it. It is not the right to say only that which is popular with the government, with any particular interest group, or with the majority of the public. But as long as there is a federal agency with the ultimate power over what is on the broadcast media, free speech is at the mercy of the most vociferous political groups. This means, in practice, that the FCC stands in stark opposition to Americans’ first amendment right to free speech.
“Freedom of speech may be a reality in this country only when we abolish the FCC, with its dictatorial power over the media.”
Dr. Robert Garmong, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, is available for interviews on this topic.

(down the drain)
Russian translation by Aeon Logan

um fósforo

“I ajustou uma vez o fogo a minha unha. Eu quis meu dedo ser uma vela humana.” Deixou cair um outro fósforo em seu vidro. A flama sizzled nas gotas da bebida no fundo. Golpeou um outro fósforo no lado da caixa. Fósforos da cozinha. Seis ou sete colocam no napkin do cocktail, dez mais no fundo do vidro. Em uma cabine de canto, neste clube pequeno a flama que despertou olhado como toda a outra luz da tabela. Mas o clube era dela. Possuiu-a os pés no banco, joelhos dobrados. Tudo lá focalizou nela e na parte pequena de energia que prendeu. Tudo lá era dela a abusar. E ela struch um outro fósforo. “uma flama velha usou-se dizer que todos é um pyro no coraç#227;o.” E blushed. “yeah, eu ajustei minha unha no fogo enquanto eu estava falando a alguém. Era um prego falsificado. O plástico ardente cheirou. Mas eu não realizei o que eu tinha feito até que eu senti o calor em minha pele.” Apenas então você poderia ver a flama dançr em seu fingertip. Agitou o fósforo. Deixou-o cair em seu vidro.

from State of Desire State of Being, art by Stephen Mead

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