Mick Wright.net

This is part four in my series of posts on The National Conference for Media Reform, held in Memphis earlier this month. See also parts one, two and three.

Now that we’ve addressed the highlights, lets finish off with a few more observations on the rest of Bill Moyers’ speech.

But first, you might be asking why this is important. Well, it’s important because media are such an essential part of our democracy (on that much Moyers and I agree), and the public ought to know how these self-appointed “reformers” and activists plan to change it.

It’s important because this speech was the keynote address at the conference, and because people are celebrating Moyers and even considering him, unironically, as a presidential candidate.

The fate of our country will be influenced by what happens in our media, and by what happens in our elections, which in large part are directed, staged and analyzed by media. “Free Press” and its army of 3,000 are on a mission to censor and silence conservatives, to throw more of your tax dollars at Leftist programming, to submit what you see and hear to government approval and the whims of unelected bureaucrats who get to determine what is “fair,” and ultimately to influence elections.

Just take a look at their list of policy goals, and you’ll get a sense of what they have in mind for you.

So it’s important that we examine what they’re doing, that we hear what they’re really saying, and, when necessary, that we expose their deceptions.

There’s a good bit of material in the speech that we need to cover, so I decided it might be easiest to just go page by page through this mess.

Page One: The well-armed lamb

As we noted, Moyers begins with a quote from Ben Franklin. Except, it’s not a Ben Franklin quote. Then he tells a joke about religious people wanting to kill each other.

Page Two: The stolen nomination

Moyers quotes from a Theodore Roosevelt speech (this time it’s a real quote) given as he was “bolting a Republican Party whose bosses had stolen the nomination from him.”

How the nomination was stolen Moyers doesn’t say, so we looked it up.

It turns out Roosevelt’s speech was given during the election of 1912, in which President Taft was nominated for reelection by the Republican Party. That year, for the first time, some of the national convention delegates were elected in primaries. It was a transitional year, with a few states holding primaries and the rest continuing as in years past. Roosevelt lost the nomination, but having won a majority of the states that held primaries, he decided to make it an issue and run on a third-party, “progressive” ticket.

The result in 1912 was a split Republican vote, and a rare victory for the Democrats. But Roosevelt actually had a good point about the primary system, and our democracy is certainly better for it.

Moyers is wrong, however, to categorize the 1912 nomination as having been “stolen.” The states without primaries were simply operating as usual, just as they had when Roosevelt was elected Vice-President in 1900, and President in 1904.

But it’s more sensational to say it was “stolen,” so Moyers goes with that, giving himself an early opportunity to insinuate that the Republican Party has dark, criminal motives.

Page Three: We’re segregated in every meaningful sense

Next, Moyers argues that America is divided and destitute.

Inequality and poverty grow steadily along with risk and debt. Too many working families cannot make ends meet with two people working, let alone if one stays home to care for children or aging parents. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less security for a lifetime’s work.

Poverty is a bad thing; nobody likes poverty.

But inequality can be a very positive word, similar to “diversity.” It is what happens when people strive for something better. Inequality can be a product of freedom.

Risk is what allows people to seek a better life, to start a business, to venture out on their own, to innovate, to try new things, to correct bad situations. Risk is an element of freedom.

Debt is a result of credit, and it’s what allows students to go to school, businesses to expand, farmers to make it through a dry season, families to buy a home or a vehicle. Debt is what provides opportunity, and it can be a tool of freedom.

Moyers lumps these concepts together, and without further explanation, it signifies nothing. It’s just innuendo, designed to tug the heart strings and close the mind.

Even the most cursory look at this rhetoric reveals the shallowness of Moyers’ socialist plea:

• At what point did we go from “just enough” to “too many” working families not making ends meet?
• When have young people without privilege and wealth ever not struggled to get a footing?
• Seniors enjoy “less security”… as compared to what?

Moyers doesn’t say; he simply continues painting a dismal picture of America:

We are racially segregated today in every meaningful sense, except for the letter of the law.

I wish you could have been in the auditorium to hear that line, because you would have heard the joyous celebration in the back of the room, where the colored people were sectioned off.

I mean, come on! That is just too much. I keep reading that line over and over in disbelief.

We are racially segregated today in every meaningful sense, except for the letter of the law.

What the…?

Of course, in some ways, we are segregated. On average, whites are economically better off than blacks, resulting in communities that are mostly white, mostly black, or mostly immigrant populations. We also tend to segregate ourselves at times, because of our interests, our preferences, our entertainment choices, etc.

But in every meaningful sense? That ignores every advance we’ve made in the last 40 years. We are not segregated at work, at school, at worship, on the bus, at the water fountain, in the restaurant, in the arena, on the screen, or on the radio. And we haven’t been in my lifetime.

I don’t know about Bill Moyers, but I live in an America where Barak Obama, J.C. Watts or Condoleezza Rice have as great an opportunity to become President as Hillary Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry.

Ok, just kidding about John Kerry; he has little to no chance. My bad.

But I do know that we’re racially segregated when our city awards contracts based on skin color rather than quality of service or value of product; when our schools award scholarships and grant admission based on skin color rather than academic achievement, drive or potential; when our state demands that we select judges based on skin color rather than judicial experience and a proven track record.

And I’m not sure how the letter of the law can remain free from segregation, since our lawmakers have segregated themselves.

Back to the socialist rant:

[N]early all the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20 percent of households…

So the people who created the wealth captured the wealth?

I, for one, am outraged.

[T]he historic vision of the American dream is that continuing economic growth and political stability can be achieved by supporting income growth and economic security of middle-class families, without restricting the ability of successful business men to gain wealth.

As if the two were ever mutually exclusive? As if one isn’t related to the next?

Moyers quotes someone, it doesn’t really matter who, since they probably didn’t say it anyway:

“[W]hen the nation’s economy has difficulty producing secure jobs, or enough jobs of any kind, something is amiss.”

Yeah, except no job is secure in a free society.

You want a secure job? Move to Cuba. Ask for Fidel.

And here’s another winner:

As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR…

Shorter Moyers: the only survivors of the marketplace are those who don’t actually participate in it.

He’s kidding, right?

Apparently not.

More socialism:

[V]irtually everything the average person sees or hears, outside of her own personal communications, is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary goal is increasing profits and raising the share prices.

…which would be the definition of accountable.

You give people the media they want, they consume it, you make money. You give people media they don’t want, they don’t consume it, you lose money. In this way, the executives are directly accountable to the public, more accountable than Bill Moyers ever will be. (more…)

“[I]n April, I will be back with a new weekly series called Bill Moyer’s Journal, thanks to some of the funders in this room. We’ll take no money from public broadcasting because it compromises you even when you don’t intend it to — or they don’t intend it to.”

Bill Moyers’ startling admission that taking government money “compromises” journalism came at the close of his lengthy (12 printed pages) and highly-acclaimed keynote speech last Friday, and it invalidated nearly everything he had been saying over the previous hour. But you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone at the Media Reform Conference who would stop applauding long enough to consider the implications.

I happened to meet Moyers, the host of several PBS shows and former White House Press Secretary under President Johnson, the night before his speech. He exchanged a few brief words with us before posing for a photo (detail above) with one of my colleagues. After that, he excused himself to go write his speech. If I had known its contents in advance, I would have had plenty more to say. But since he bolted right after delivering it the next day, I didn’t get a second chance.

Some reviews: “great speaker,” “very impressive and inspiring,” “witty, smart and well-spoken,” “powerful,” “the runaway rock star of the day,” “the fluidity of a presidential candidate.”

The audience rewarded Moyers with several rousing, standing ovations.

Not bad for a speech short on facts but full of innuendo; riddled with inaccuracies, faulty statistics, silly accusations, and contradictory statements; seasoned with props to numerous Marxists; containing lines that may well have been plagiarized (”borrowed” or “sampled,” if you prefer); and constructed around a central conceit that even some of his supporters consider “borderline offensive.”

In Part 4 of this series, we will take a closer look at the speech and go line-by-line through most of it (read Part 1 and Part 2). But, for now, let’s just hit two of the most memorable lines.

There’s no better place to start than at the beginning. Moyers opened his speech by quoting one of the Founders, who happens to be a personal favorite of mine (as some of you know):

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.”

“Liberty,” he said, “is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote.”

Now, I have to give a quick shout out to Mary Mancini of Liberadio, a Leftist radio host in Nashville who was kind enough to dedicate her last broadcast to your’s truly.

Mancini comments on the beginning of the speech, between a few “Moyers ‘08″ doodles: “He entered to a standing ovation and cited Ben Franklin, always a safe bet when you want a zinger of a quote.”

Always a safe bet, hmm… not so much.

Or maybe it would be if you went ahead and, um, made sure it was actually a quote by Franklin and not a misattribution.

I mean, give it about five seconds of thought and you might consider that the supposed source of the quote was, you know, instrumental in setting up the very institution this quote criticizes.

You really think Franklin said “Liberty is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote”?

Really?

The quote is attributed to a journalist named James Bovard who wrote it in 1994, about 200 years after Franklin’s death.

Next up we have the now-famous “surge” line. Being in the audience after he said that, it was as if the messiah had returned to Earth to gather up his flock. The clouds separated, the hallelujah chorus revealed itself, and a big white halo formed around his head. They loved that line like their own child. To quote my brother, they loved it so much they wanted to marry it, except this audience doesn’t believe in marriage, so what can you say?

Moyers was trying to make a point about the Bush administration’s “Orwellian” relationship with media, allowing it to insert HALLIBURTON carefully crafted political slogans into the mainstream consciousness NO BLOOD FOR OIL, and thereby AFFIRMATIVE ACTION tilt public opinion into their favor LOCKBOX.

They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a “surge,” as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.

Now that’s absurd. Without digging any further, it’s just outright absurd. There’s no better word to describe what he’s done there.

If the point is to define a term absent some manipulative suggestion, you can’t criticize the spin and then immediately stretch it into an even more nonsensical shape of your own liking.

Can’t you see it now?

President Bush: “Today I’d like to announce that I’m calling for a surge, and by that I mean blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier. Now, I’ll be happy to take your questions.”

In reality, Bush’s so-called “surge” address… didn’t include the word surge. It’s hard for the White House to manipulate and spin a term if they don’t use it.

Meanwhile, it was being used by another Media Reform Conference attendee, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who included this line in his very first U.S. House speech, “Mr. Speaker, by the way: I’ve noticed in my office — I think we need a surge protector. Can you get one up there?”

Heh, heh, heh… I can’t stop laughing, really. That Cohen is a laugh factory, I tell you what.

But White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was hit with several questions about the term in a press briefing prior to the speech. Here’s the exchange:

Q Well, what’s the difference between an escalation and a surge?

MR. SNOW: Well, why don’t we talk about characterizations once we have a plan?

Q Because I think it’s part of a conversation that’s going on right now.

MR. SNOW: I understand that, and, guess what — it’s a conversation, as I’ve said before, that is a bit in a vacuum and I’m not going to get into the business of preemptively characterizing something that we have not released in full detail.

Q But, somehow, “escalation” has become this Democratic word — the Democratic Party language.

MR. SNOW: Well, ask the guys who do their focus groups. They’re going to have an answer for it. Look, the President is talking about a way forward, and rather than getting involved in trying to assess a description of a plan that has yet to be released publicly and, therefore, about which I am not in a position to characterize publicly, it seems a little silly for me to start quibbling about adjectives without discussing what they purportedly describe, don’t you think?

Q Well, the President apparently told Gordon Smith and others yesterday that the 20,000 troop increase/surge/escalation is part of the deal. So that’s why I’m asking specifically about — we are going to see some kind of increase.

MR. SNOW: Rather than looking for a one-word handle, look at the policy. And, actually, this is your challenge — you guys do words for a living; figure out — rather than trying to ask Democratic or even Republican lawmakers what the proper descriptive term is, you figure it out.

The reporter says “escalation” has “somehow” become the favored term of the Democratic Party. That somehow was unveiled by the Washington Post:

By releasing the sternly worded letter, Democratic leaders hoped to jump ahead of Bush and set the agenda for the weekend talk shows. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said the party wants to address even the terminology of the White House plan, defining it not as a “surge” but as an “escalation.”

So it turns out the Orwellian masterminds were actually the Democrats. Now revisit what Moyers says and admire his ironic use of the preferred Democratic term by way of accusing Republicans of that very behavior: “They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war…”

The nerve.

The Commercial Appeal includes a slightly-altered form of Moyers’ surge quote in an article characterizing the presentation as a “fiery speech.”

Fiery, yes, and a total failure.

Because not only was the line absurd, ironic and ridiculous… it was likely stolen (borrowed, sampled, plagiarized).

Baltimore Sun, January 4, 2007, Garrison Keillor: “The word “surge” keeps cropping up, as if we were fighting the war with electricity and not human beings.”

It looks like Moyers took the line from his fellow conspirator in public broadcasting, without attribution.

But, hey, at least he gave credit to Benjamin Franklin! Oh, wait…

To be continued.

UPDATE: Go to part four