The Supreme Court bestowed the presidency on George W. Bush in 2000 and now faithfully does most of his bidding. The Republican majority in Congress obliges every executive whim. The highest offices in this land are filled by men and women who have no qualms about lying, cheating and manipulating the public to serve their narrow neo-conservative agenda. And where is the once proud press? Why isn’t the media reporting these abuses of power? Because there has been a total failure of our vaunted system of “checks and balances.” We were all taught that “Separation of Powers,” a system devised by our Founding Fathers to prevent the rise of totalitarian rule, guarantees that each branch of government checks the power of the other branches. The executive branch (the president) is limited by the legislative branch (congress) and the judicial branch (the courts), with a free and open press making sure there is no hanky panky being committed by any of them… Unfortunately for us, it seems that today, hanky panky is the primary occupation of all of the branches of government. Remember Watergate? Remember Woodword and Bernstein of the Washington Post? Their uncovering of Nixon’s ‘dirty tricks” brought down his presidency.

That could never happen today. However, I, along with most Americans, didn’t realize this. I actually believed what I saw on TV and read in the newspapers. The utter naiveté of my faith in a free and unbiased press became blatantly clear last October 26, as I celebrated the joy of democratic fellowship with 100,000 others in San Francisco at a peaceful demonstration protesting the Bush administration’s obsession with Hussein and his so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” Did you read about the demonstration? I didn’t think so. Because the press didn’t bother covering it. (Actually, the Los Angles Times did devote 180 words to all of the October 26 demonstrations, with 31 words reserved for the San Francisco march. That same issue of the L.A. Times published a story of almost 400 words about how Bush told some visiting dignitaries at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, that his wife, Laura, was “sweeping the porch.”

It has long been an assumption of the media that low-income people victimizing each other is not news. The deaths of 30,000 American citizens since 1963 in gun-related crimes, most of whom were poor and of color, barely makes a ripple in white, middle-class consciousness. Why? Because the media, be it print or broadcast, is owned by big corporations whose primary interest is making money, lots and lots of money for their rich shareholders who demand continually expanding profits. To safeguard the bottom line, corporate media doesn’t want to offend either advertisers or government honchos (white and upper class) hence stories that “stir the pot” are ignored or mis-reported. Some egregious examples of this are the mainstream media failure to report the “purge lists” (see atrocious shit) that disenfranchised up to 90,000 African-American voters in the Florida presidential election in 2000. Another example of obvious media bias is most news organization’s failure to report the chummy connection the Bush family enjoys with the bin Ladens, all forty-nine other brothers (OK, a few have died). According to a Boston Globe report of September 2001, more than two dozen bin Ladens were secretly flown out of the U.S. on private jets right after September 11, WHEN ALL OTHER PLANES WERE GROUNDED and before they could be interviewed by the CIA. Since fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi, it seems the press should have covered such an obvious defiance of national security procedures.

Despite these frequent lapses, articles will occasionally run in the mainstream press that are informative, fair, and unbiased, albeit they are often buried in back pages. This isn’t so with the major broadcasters, whose failure to provide news and views that differ from those of the Bush administration has led the American public badly astray. And no broadcaster misleads the public with more cunning than Fox News. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, who acquired Fox News in 1997 through his global media empire News Corporation, has consistently supported far-right candidates for public office and has championed right-wing causes. According to the Colombia Journalism Review, “Murdoch uses his diverse holdings …to promote his own financial interests at the expense of real news gathering…. He wields his media as instruments of influence with politicians who can aid him.”

There has been no counter to this one-sided reporting since the Federal Trade Commission’s (FCC) overturning of The Fairness Doctrine in 1997. Formerly broadcasters had to provide “equal time” to alternative points of view, a requirement based on the self-evident truth that the airwaves can not be owned. THE AIRWAVES BELONG TO ALL OF US. Hence, those who lease them from the public must serve our needs. Since the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, the dissemination of unbiased information has taken a deathblow. According to KPFK’s Ian Masters, “TV's Fox could not get away with its shameless shilling for the White House if the Fairness Doctrine were still in place, and radio's Clear Channel monopoly would not be able to impose wall-to-wall Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage, etc., on the public if broadcasters were accountable to public opinion rather than the dictates of plutocrats.”

Clearly Fox, but indeed all of the media, proves that when fewer and fewer companies control the news, diversity is lost, truth is sacrificed and the public is no longer informed. Through constant fear mongering and the demonization of first, Afghanistan, and then Iraq, Murdoch’s organization has convinced American viewers that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda, was somehow partly responsible for 9/11 and that he was trying to acquire uranium to build nuclear weapons. In other words, when THEY have almost exclusive access to what we read, see and hear, we end up thinking, feeling and acting in their interests, not our own. The Supreme Court wrote that “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” (1945) The press, indeed all of the information media, must be forced to abide by the court’s wisdom. For without those “checks and balances”on the government, we don’t have a democracy.