A Friday Ritual To Be Required for All Americans

Every Friday evening, every family in the U.S. and around the globe by satellite should gather around the TV set, as a duty to the education of both parents and the children, and focus intensely on the PBS programs, “NOW” and “Bill Moyers Journal”. The family should discuss the content and learn about issues important for making democracy better.

Rev. Jerimiah Wright: Wheat and Chaff

I heard the Rev Wright speech before the NAACP meeting. I heard the Bill Moyers interview. I heard the mostly negative reactions coming from all the reporters. What did I hear?

I taught intercultural communication. I would not grade the reporter-critics very high in their cultural understanding. They roasted Wright for the chaff, but did not show any understanding of the whole grains of wheat he presented. They threw out the wheat with the chaff. Pastor Wright has very personal and selfish gains to make from becoming controversial and without much care for Barack Obama’s campaign. I understand that. But Wright did make some points that teachers of intercultural communication teach, e.g., the principle that difference is not a deficit. He was both funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar in getting across that message, wheat and chaff. Now that his credibility has been lost, he may be one who will not be listened to, to get that crucial message across.

I hope that point does not get lost in the excoriation of Rev. Wright. Good critics might have made the distinction between the constructive parts and the bad parts. WHICH PARTS WERE OUTRAGEOUS, and WHICH PARTS WERE NOT? WAS THE WOLE SPEECH OUTRAGEOUS? Absolutely not! I’ll tell you what’s outrageous. The accusation of guilt by association in many critical comments by commentators takes us back to the Congressman Joe McCarthy era of witch hunts for “fellow travelers”.

I would like to have seen one fully functional deliberative mind operating as a critic, but I heard no one except Bill Moyers in a thoughtful probing of Wright. Wright made some criticisms of the United States government’s actions. Many people have done that. Black people have much cause for many discriminatory actions by governments of the past. Those points of Wright’s speeches were not taken up in anything I heard. All I heard was ad hominem attacks, name calling. That’s outrageous! The nutrition is in the kernels, but all I saw was the vultures feasting on the chaff.

THE DELIBERATIVE MIND IS A WINNOWER OF IDEAS, CAN DISTIGUISH GOOD FROM BAD. Most speakers and writers have a mix and need readers and listeners who do not throw out the good with the bad. Be judicious!

As I have said before, this election season is in the care, almost exclusively, of the ham-handed reporters wannabe pundits. They do not know how to moderate discussions nor listen respectfully as participant-panelists. They steamroller their fellows and blur disgustingly all others on the panel. Gibbity-gibbity, yackety-yack. The McLaughlin group is the worst of the worst. Chris Matthews as a hard-baller presses hard his view onto his selected toadies. But I have heard the soft-baller Matthews (see elsewhere on this blog) where he dropped the ball.

Bill Moyers had the requisite intelligence to manage an interview with Rev. Wright. He got to the wheat and stepped over the chaff. Sound bites were coming from everyone else.

I believe that Obama needs to give a speech on religion in politics as a counterpart to his racism speech. I believe Clinton needs to give a speech on gender in politics. Obama has proven he can hold forth on a critical issue and have a very satisfying result. All that Clinton can do is perform dirty tricks. One sneaky one is the use of a red hot branding iron, burning “elitist” into the hide of Obama, putting her brand on him and now she owns him. Hillary is the master of cliche, the thoroughly mundane as her head bobbles incessantly. Mundanity. Cliche. Ascribing traits, characteristics to her opponent, and then the label hangs there like the tag on Minnie Pearl’s hat.

I believe that it is much easier to get into trouble in the U.S. if you are black than if you are a female.

(I will write later about one basic course of training I would institute for reporters.)

Comments on “Buying the War”, Bill Moyers Journal (3-7-2008)

“The story was there, but the vast majority ignored it.” We had all of the run up to this war on faith alone, faith in the administration’s willingness and competence in telling the truth and having motives of the highest order of responsibility for the best interests of the people. But the journalists just passed on and recycled the administration’s line, in the most prominent and respected journals.

After viewing the proigram, I am startled at the number of great news men and women in print and the broadcast and cable media who have, in my estimation, tarnished their credibility for their role in “buying the war”. Knight-Ridder newspeople and the organization come out as the rare heroes of a special, professional, healthy skepticism that dug deep and found the story and the truth, the Emperor had no clothes on, “bar nekked”. Now there will be lots of waffling among those who suffer from a disease of skepticism. They could not say, “Show me the evidence! The basis of your contention! Who are those who said so? We do not want your shills (Colin Powell, Condi Rice) to give it to us second-hand.”

To see those of my favorites under obvious stress as Moyers questioned them! A spectacle I was disappointed to see. They were all complicit in “truth-squadding” the President’s news conference at that time. Why did the press buy it? How were they flummoxed in a group-think approach to their professional duty? The answer: “Dissent is not only unpatriotic, it’s bad for business”, as Phil Donohue said in the program. They might have been ordered by their “owners” to squelch their better instincts.

Are these klieg-lights of journalistic organizations and expertise now feeling chastened and regenerated by their rough outing in this program? I might ask of the President and his minions, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Powell and all the rest, along with the journalists, don’t you feel the enormous weight of the deaths of our youth and the squandering of vast sums of our treasure in Iraq should rest on your consciences the rest of your lives for having sent them into a war for no reason except your own insane (and under-the-table) motives? You should never again have the ability to smile.

I will watch to see how they confront the candidates (nominees) for President. I will look for questioning abilities that probe for the important underlying issues at stake. On that basis so far, I must conclude that the focus of their questions has generally missed the core of all issues: how will you operate our government and formulate the policies you will submit to the people’s representatives, the policies and program of legislation? How will you present the face of the United States to the world? How? We must watch for the probity of our press corps carefully.