Newspaper logo  
 
 
Bookmark and Share
Local News & Opinion

Ref. : Local Newsbriefs

Travel
Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Open Letters:

03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak

Health & Environment

Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries

03.18 Pressure Drop: Brave Sir Dennis Ran Away

03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim

03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare!

03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm

Media Watching

03.17 CNN Scrapes Bottom of Right-Wing Barrel With Erickson Hire

03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel

03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia

03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion

03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax

03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq

03.03 It's Snow News

03.03 The Woeful Washington Post

Ref. : The Daily Howler

Legal Matters

02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution

US Politics, Policy & Culture

03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives"

03.09 Thinking About Countings

03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism

02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium

“High Crimes?”

03.19 Israel's Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid

03.18 The Lawfare Project's Anti-Democratic Agenda

03.17 Expecting Gen. McChrystal to Reduce Afghan Civilian Casualties is Like Asking Ted Bundy to Cut Sex Harassment in the Workplace

03.16 America's Secret Prisons

03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem

03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue

03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children

03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session

03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid

03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda

02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery

Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance

03.19 The Growing Movement For Publicly-Owned Banks

03.19 America's "Houdini Recovery" under IMF-Type Austerity

03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network

03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource

03.05 Is the Recovery Real?

03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You

03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"

03.02 Obama's Budget Revealed: Money for Wars and Weapons, While More Americans Face Joblessness and Hunger

03.01 Thinking About Fees

International

03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception

03.03 Muslim Disunity

03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation

02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist

We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
Google
This site Web
  Blacked Out by the Corporate Media, Impeachment Advances
Newspaper logo

MEDIA CRITICISM:

Blacked Out by the Corporate Media, Impeachment Advances

by Dave Lindorff
When will the corporate media finally begin to honestly report on the impeachment story? And how will news organizations explain impeachment's seemingly magical appearance as a full-blown campaign in Congress?
The corporate media are disgracing themselves even further, if that is possible, on the impeachment story.

On Thursday, three more members of Congress signed on to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney (H Res 333), bringing the total number of co-sponsors of the bill to 10. That in itself would be national news, but there is more to it than simple numbers. The new sponsors include two freshman, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, who ran for office calling for impeachment, and Hank Johnson, who took over the seat of pro-impeachment Rep. Cynthia McKinney (McKinney filed her own bill of impeachment against President Bush in the waning days of the last Congress), but the group also includes Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA).

What makes McDermott significant is that he is a senior member of the Washington state delegation to Congress, a 9th-term legislator with considerable clout in Congress who sits on the House Ways and Means and Judiciary Committees, who chairs the subcommittee on income security and family support, and who has, in the past, said he was opposed to impeachment. While most of the other nine co-sponsors of H Res 333 were also among the group of 39 representatives who last year had signed on to Rep. John Conyers’ bill in the last Congress calling for creation of a special committee to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the administration, McDermott was never a backer.

In a related development, Kucinich’s bill, which was filed back on April 24, amid an almost complete news blackout, and which has languished for over two months, with the House Judiciary Committee, headed by Conyers (D-MI) taking no action on it, suddenly was referred this week to a Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, chaired by US Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)—a sign that it will be taken up by the full Judiciary Committee.

Despite all these breaking developments in the impeachment story, Friday’s and Saturday’s news reports around the nation had little or nothing on impeachment. The New York Times, whose front pages and national pages influence the news decisions of editors across the country, has ignored the story completely, as has the Washington Post, which is supposed to be covering Washington—both astonishing examples of corporate media censorship. Even in Washington, Minnesota and Georgia, the main local papers only ran short briefs on the actions of their local Congress members.

But despite this journalistic lockdown, it is clear that the national grassroots impeachment is gaining power and momentum by the day.

Washington impeachment activists had long been pressing McDermott to join the impeachment campaign, but had been unsuccessful until this week.

His switch on the issue seems to have been the result of that pressure from his constituents, as well as from the latest actions of and revelations about the vice president. A powerful series of news articles that ran in late June in the Washington Post has disclosed that the vice president was the driving force behind President Bush’s decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and to illegally deny international protections to captives in what he has called the War on Terror, including captives from Afghanistan and Iraq, and to establish a program of torture of captives. Cheney also made the ludicrous assertion this week that he did not have to respond to Congressional subpoenas and requests for information about the activities of his office because as vice president, he is president of the Senate, and thus is not a part of the executive branch, (It is a claim that is contradicted by his own earlier assertions of “executive authority” in refusing to respond to Congressional requests for information.)

The Post's silence about McDermott and about impeachment developments is particularly peculiar, given that the latest developments are in part due to the paper's articles on Cheney's actions. Normally, newspapers are quick to point to or even grab credit for the results of their scoops and investigative reports.

While other representatives who have signed on the H Res 333 have done so relatively quietly, or in Rep. Maxine Waters’ case, in a press conference, McDermott made his move with a public speech in the House.

In that Thursday evening address, he said the vice president should “resign or face impeachment,” saying, “The vice president holds himself above the law, and it is time for the Congress to enforce the law.”

In addition to citing Cheney’s role in deceiving Americans and Congress into supporting an invasion of Iraq, and threatening war with Iran, which are the charges in Kucinich’s impeachment bill, McDermott cited Cheney’s claim to be exempt from Congressional investigation and his refusal to comply with rules for the handling of classified information as grounds for his impeachment. It is not clear whether he intends to file his own impeachment bill on those issues, or to have them added to Kucinich’s bill.

Johnson also cited the vice president’s refusal to submit materials in his office to control by the Information Oversight Security Office as a reason for his decision to back impeachment.

So far, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), has not changed her position that “impeachment is off the table.” Rep. Conyers, for his part, has not spoken in favor of the Kucinich bill either.

But with seven members of Congress signing on to the Cheney impeachment bill over the past month, and more likely to do so in coming days and weeks, and with polls showing that the public both wants impeachment and is losing patience with the timidity and inaction of the Democratic Congress, it seems increasingly likely that their hands will be forced.

An interesting question will be when the corporate media will finally begin to honestly report on the impeachment story, and how news organizations will explain its seemingly magical appearance as a full-blown campaign in Congress.


Lindorff speakingAbout the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.


Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on July 2, 2007.
 

Public Service Ads:
Verifiable Voting in Maryland