[Corporations] The Double Censorship of TV

[George Mokray]

from http://www.juancole.com/

CBS Cancels Reagan Miniseries

For further proof that the First Amendment only protects free speech 
from the US government (mostly), but not from the large corporations, 
CBS has caved to rightwing pressure to shelve their miniseries on 
Ronald Reagan.  It was a relatively negative portrayal.  But the 
presidents don't belong to the right wing, they belong to all 
Americans, and we can all be critical of any of them when we choose.

In fact, of course, Ronald Reagan bears substantial responsibility 
for September 11.  He and his administration were so gung ho to roll 
back Communism that they funneled billions of dollars to scruffy far 
rightwing radical Muslim mujahidin in Pakistan and Afghanistan to 
fight the Soviets.  Orrin Hatch even flew to Beijing for Reagan in 
1985 to ask the Chinese to pressure Pakistan to allow the US to 
provide the Mujahidin with ever more sophisticated weaponry.  Even 
the Pakistani military had initially balked at this crazy idea, 
knowing who the Gulbuddin Hikmatyars and Usama Bin Ladens really were 
(unlike clueless Reagan, who called them freedom fighters).  But the 
US twisted the Pakistanis' arms, and they gave in.  Likewise, Reagan 
forced the timid Saudis to match US contributions to the Mujahidin. 
(And then after Sept. 11 the former Reagan officials who had twisted 
the arms of the Saudis, like Richard Perle, turned around and blamed 
Riyadh for spreading radical Muslim ideas!!)  It was the CIA that 
first established terrorist training camps in Pakistan and 
Afghanistan, to hit the leftist government in Kabul.  I wouldn't be 
surprised if some of the camps used by al-Qaeda had been built 
originally by the Reagan administration.

Then after the Reagan administration contributed to the destruction 
of Afghanistan with this proxy war, its successor, the Bush 
administration, made a deal with the Soviets for a US withdrawal from 
Afghanistan once the Soviets were gone.  The US just walked away, 
leaving the country in chaos.  The right often tries to blame Clinton 
for this, but it was Bush senior that agreed to the deal and walked 
away, before Clinton ever got in.

The Christian Coalition and other rightwing religious groups 
supporting Reagan even had a "biblical checklist" by which they 
wanted all senators and congressmen to be judged.  And one of the 
items in the "biblical checklist" was "support for the Afghan 
'freedom fighters.'  The rightwing Christians were saying in the 
1980s that if you didn't support al-Qaeda and its Mujahidin allies, 
you didn't deserve to be in Congress!  They wanted representatives 
tossed out for this crime.  And now the same groups are droning on 
about how the Prophet Muhammad was a terrorist, cashing in on Sept. 
11 to spread religious bigotry.  But the Prophet Muhammad opposed 
terrorism.  Who promoted al-Qaeda and kindred groups?  Jerry Falwell 
and Ronald Reagan.

Why did CBS cave?  Maybe some advertisers threatened to pull out, in 
the face of threatened boycotts by special interest advocacy groups. 
The US has the oddest system.  Technically, the airwaves belong to 
the US public.  But the unelected Federal Communications Commission 
gives away the right to broadcast on them virtually for free to large 
corporations.  Initially the corporations were supposed to broadcast 
some socially useful programs in return, and were supposed to 
maintain some sort of political balance.  But now they don't do 
either.  (People who watched CBS news were as likely as people who 
watched Fox Cable News to believe falsehoods such as that Saddam was 
mixed up in 9/11 or that Iraq was close to having a nuke.)

Then once the people's airwaves have been given away to the 
corporations, they rent them to other corporations to sell us their 
products, thus paying for the programs we see.  Programming is 
subsidiary to the advertisements that pay for it.  If advertisers 
won't support programming, it gets pulled, so that they have a veto 
on what the people can watch.  Of course, there is a double corporate 
veto, since the networks themselves censor what can be seen to begin 
with.  Television execs active in the 1960s remember being told to 
avoid showing labor activists in their programs, e.g.  When's the 
last time you saw a character on t.v. who was explicitly active in a 
union?

Michael Powell (Colin's son who is far more rightwing than his 
father) was even going to let a handful of corporations control all 
programming, but that was too much even for Congress.

So the US is becoming Berlusconi-ized, with a few fabulously wealthy 
men deciding what appears in our media, and with Bush's tax giveaways 
to the super-rich giving them the wherewithal to buy up even more of 
the country's media.

And we can't even point out on television, with the people's 
airwaves, that Reagan went off the deep end on Afghanistan, or that 
he shredded the Constitution with Iran-Contra.