Rummy Boy in Iraq, speaking to the troops: “We’re on the side of freedom. You’re on the side of freedom. And that’s the side to be on.” Golly gee willikers. emailFacebookTwitterReddit
Archives for 2004
DEPARTING WORDS
I should have said, “Back in ’05, if not sooner.” Sooner because I wanted to link to the video of all 50-plus minutes of Bill Moyers’s keynote speech to the National Conference on Media Reform. It was posted on the Web this morning by Democracy Now!, the best daily TV-radio-Internet news broadcast we’ve got. A […]
BRRRR!
FINE TUNING
Reflecting on last week’s farewell to Bill Moyers, a reader let me know what he thought. Larry Lippman writes: Hey Jan, I can understand (sometimes) that in the battle of ideas, well-meaning and even bright people can have a different idea of what ought to be. But adulation for the sanctimonious, sans clerical collar Bill […]
THE HAUNTED HOTEL
Guess who’s joined the conservationists fighting to preserve the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy was gunned down. According to Preservation Online, it’s none other than Sirhan Shirhan. In a lawsuit to keep the structure from being demolished to make way for a school, he claims that evidence lodged in the hotel walls shows […]
LOVING LITTLE BROTHER
Talking the other day about Orwell’s portrait of the future, I should have mentioned that it’s not only hatred and fear which serve as the twin engines of misrule. It’s also love and worship. As Orwell’s doomed hero Winston Smith learns to his everlasting degradation, it is so important in the scheme of things to […]
HANGING IN WITH GEORGE
When 1984 came around smack in the middle of the rose-tinted Reagan era, many in the commentariat had a field day noting that George Orwell, for all his genius, had overstated his case. The future he’d warned of in “1984” simply hadn’t come to pass. Yeah, right. Thinking of Bill Moyers this morning, it occurred […]
SUMMARY JUDGMENT
MOYERS MOVES ON
The departure of Bill Moyers from “Now” — tonight will be his last broadcast — is a huge loss for mainstream television journalism and the nation. His views on truth and journalism, as noted in June, are more striking than ever: In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt […]
OLD FOLKS GET IT
BACKING OFF
Six weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi had sued the U.S. Treasury Department for denying her right to free speech by ruling that she could not publish her memoir in this country, the government has backed off. It has now dropped restrictions on writers from Cuba, Iran […]
L.A. TIMES SMEARS GARY WEBB
By JAN HERMAN If proof were needed that the Los Angeles Times is still covering its ass when it comes to Gary Webb, the investigative reporter who was found dead on Dec. 10 (an apparent suicide), the paper provided it Sunday with an obituary that is nothing less than character assassination. It’s a bloody hatchet […]
GARY WEBB, R.I.P.
“Just one more example,” a friend writes, “of why I have so little respect for American journalism. Much of the work done does not even deserve the name of journalism. But the real blame rests on the American public. It gets the government and journalism it deserves.” Here’s what he’s talking about: In 1996, journalist […]
RADIO BUZZ
REARVIEW MIRROR
Have a look at “Slow-Rolling Democracy in Ohio” by Robert Parry, who broke many Iran-Contra stories for AP and Newsweek. He writes: “George W. Bush’s political allies appear to be slow-rolling a requested recount in Ohio, leaving so little time that even if widespread voting fraud is discovered, the finding will come too late to […]
NOT CLIT LIT
The (London) Guardian reports that “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s “salty-tongued commentary on the plight of women in the 19th century, perhaps best known today for providing Colin Firth with the opportunity to pose in a wet shirt in front of many grateful viewers,” has won the Women’s Watershed Fiction poll. Although Austen’s novel was […]
DRUNKEN SAILORS AND A JEWISH BIRTHDAY BOY
Couldn’t help noticing that PC has reached a new height. A New York City councilman is demanding an apology from the mayor for his aide’s use of the term “drunken sailor,” because it denigrates the men and women in the Navy. After the aide accused the council of “spending money like a drunken sailor” earlier […]