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.

Page 4: The ideological noise machine

Moyers continues on about those “unaccountable executives.”

More insidiously, this small group of elites determines what ordinary people do not see or hear. In-depth coverage of anything, let alone the problems real people face day-to-day, is as scarce as sex, violence and voyeurism are pervasive.

Though he doesn’t seem to realize it, Moyers’ beef (and it’s a good one, to be sure) is actually with a viewing audience that craves such base programming, not with the insidious elites who provide it to them. In typical socialist fashion, Moyers proposes that we give the people more of what they don’t want in the first place, rather than find more effective ways to present better material.

Next, Moyers claims that public policy is being driven by those who infiltrate media with buzzwords:

The pioneering communications scholar Murray Edelman wrote that opinions about public policy do not spring immaculately or automatically into people’s minds. They are always placed there by the interpretations of those who most consistently get their claims and manufactured cues publicized widely.

And who enjoys all this publicity? Why, conservatives, of course.

For years, the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological “noise machine,” to use David Brock’s term.

Let’s see… highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological… yep, that pretty well describes The National Conference for Media Reform itself.

For his part, Moyers names no fewer than 20 of his co-conspirators (David Brock among them) in this one speech. They are networked, they are organized, and as I noted in Part 1, they are very successful in creating media “noise.”

In total, Moyers speaks of “ideology” and “ideological forces” no fewer than seven times in this speech. And by “ideology,” he means conservative ideology, as he no doubt considers his own Leftist ideas as being simply natural or normal — people who follow ideas other than his are the “other,” the close-minded folks who aren’t part of the “reality-based community.”

Moyers isn’t the only one who uses “ideological” as an insult. Bill Clinton is fond of calling conservatives “ideologues,” a word he adopted for a series of speeches in the last campaign season. Ideology is apparently what separates conservatives from right-thinking people (or, should I say, left-thinking).

It also hearkens back to a quote by Dan Rather, who complained about the “partisan political ideological forces” that exposed the fraud that was his national guard memo story in 2004.

To prove the success of the ideological noise machine, Moyers provides a list of slogans:

Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed the meaning of American values. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people’s lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers, who speak of the “death tax,” “the ownership society,” “the culture of life,” “the liberal assault on God and family,” “compassionate conservatism,” “weak on terrorism,” “the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” “no child left behind.” 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.

We’ve already tackled the “surge” line.

As for these other so-called “manufactured cues,” you won’t be surprised to learn that few were actually “concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries,” as Moyers claims.

• “Death tax” is certainly a political slogan. It’s been around for decades.
• “Ownership society” is a phrase from a relatively recent Bush speech.
• “The culture of life” came from Pope John Paul II in 1993 and was later used by Bush.
• “The liberal assault on God and family” is not a slogan.
• “Compassionate conservatism” has been around a while but was popularized by Bush.
• “Weak on terrorism” is not a slogan.
• “The end of history” is part of the title of a 1993 book by Francis Fukuyama, and it really has no place in this list.
• “The clash of civilizations” is from an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1990. I’m beginning to think Moyers stopped paying attention in the mid-’90s.
• “No child left behind” is the cute name for a bill sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), and this is certainly not the only legislation bearing such a name. It really doesn’t belong on the list, either.

Of these, I would say only two or three could realistically fit the profile of an infectious soundbite that might influence public policy.

Meanwhile, is the Left without its own buzzwords? If slogans, phrases, book titles and bill names are all fair game, most of us could scribble out such a list:

• escalation
• global test
• no blood for oil
• lockbox
• global warming
• social security
• safe, legal and rare
• strategic redeployment
• affirmative action
• vast right-wing conspiracy
• ideological noise machine
• I feel your pain
• a woman’s right to choose
• it takes a village
• the audacity of hope
• living wage
• tax cuts for the rich
• progressive
• don’t ask, don’t tell
• I will fight for you
• hope is on the way
• just about everything Bill Moyers says, etc.

I also think it would be fun to hold a contest and see who can come up with the most audacious Moyersism, using his “surge” template. Here are a couple examples:

They speak of “hanging chad” as if it were a piece of dog-eared stationary instead of a man swinging lifeless from the gallows of democracy.

They speak of “choice” as if it were the menu at Burger King instead of brains being vacuumed through the nose of an unborn child.

Back to Moyers.

It’s what happens when an interlocking media system filters through commercial values or ideology, the information and moral viewpoints people consume in their daily lives. And by no stretch of the imagination can we say today that the dominant institutions of our media are guardians of democracy.

I would agree to a point, but of course I’m talking about the way our media have given us Ra^thergate, Green Helmet Guy, Bilal Hussein, Jamil Hussein, Eason Jordan, Reutergate, Jayson Blair, national security leaks in the NY Times, and the famous admission of media’s Democratic bias by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, just to name a few.

Page 5: Only 3% Skeptical

While you read this next line, keep in mind that Bill Moyers is calling for more government intervention in media, not less.

The suppression of parliamentary dissent during Charles I’s 11 years of tyranny in England rested largely on government censorship, operating through strict licensing laws for the publication of books.

And check out what’s upsetting him here, same caveat applies:

Beyond what is officially labeled “Secret” or “privileged” information, there hovers on the plantation a culture of selective official news implementation, working through favored media insiders to advance political agendas by leak and innuendo and spin, by outright propaganda mechanisms, such as the misnamed public information offices that churn out blizzards of factually selective releases on a daily basis, and even by directly paying pundits and journalists to write on subjects of mutual interest.

So we’re agreed, no more government funding of pundits and journalists… such as yourself.

You know, if Fox News were to receive government support, as do NPR and PBS, we can be sure that the Leftist viewpoint would change in a heartbeat. We’d never hear the end of it.

Next, Moyers claims that only one viewpoint was heard “in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.” To prove his point, Moyers cites a media study by one of those think tanks he loves so much:

The watchdog group FAIR found that during the three weeks leading up to the invasion, only 3 percent of U.S. sources on the evening news of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and PBS expressed skeptical opinions of the impending war, even though a quarter of the American people were against it.

The FAIR study Moyers introduces was released on March 18, 2003. It covers the broadcast networks, but not Fox and CNN. And the applicable figure is actually 6% skeptical, not 3 percent.

But we need to be aware of the care Moyers took in wording it that way — “U.S. sources.” Moyers is only talking about a subset (U.S. sources only) of the studied group, which is itself a subset (sources “who appeared in nightly news stories”).

FAIR reports that, “Overall 68 sources, or 17 percent of the total on-camera sources, represented skeptical or critical positions.”

So we’ve gone from 3% to 6%, and now 17%.

But wait, there’s more. FAIR actually performs its own manipulation of the data, purging critical sources who happened to be members of the U.N.: “[B]ecause of their official position of neutrality on the question of war they were not counted as skeptics.”

Add the U.N. sources, and the figure becomes 26%.

And, again, that’s counting only sources “who appeared,” and says nothing about what the anchors and journalists themselves expressed, reporting which is often “skeptical,” to say the least.

I’d say whatever shred of dignity Moyers still has is wearing awfully thin at this point.

Page 6: the Poo-Bahs of punditry

Launching into a rant against free trade, which he says has “hovered over the political system like a biblical commandment striking down anything… that gets in the way of unbridled greed,” Moyers finally locates a journalist to pick on.

He finds a target in Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat.

The degree to which this has become a purely ideological debate, devoid of any factual basis that people can weigh the gains and losses is reflected in Thomas Friedman’s astonishing claim, stated not long ago in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it. That is simply because it stood for “free trade.” We have reached the stage when the Poo-Bahs of punditry have only to declare that “the world is flat,” for everyone to agree it is, without going to the edge and looking over themselves.

Though Friedman raises an interesting and sobering point about America’s readiness to compete in the global economy, he has been roundly criticized, and for good reason, by both the right and the left. And after reading this scathing review, I’m convinced his book is a joke.

To say everyone blindly agrees with Friedman, or to suggest that free trade is some all-powerful media force, is a total and complete farce. And now that Friedman is behind the TimesSelect wall, nobody’s listening anyway.

If this is what he thinks passes for media criticism, Moyers is a pathetic case, indeed.

Also on this page, a slap at “intelligent design” and this innuendo:

I can’t tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?

Can’t because they are too many to name, or can’t because they don’t exist? My money is on the latter.

Page 7: Commercial radio

This part of the speech is fairly benign, or at least uninteresting, but I am humored by his paranoia in this line:

And soon, the public largely forgot about radio’s promise, as we accepted the entertainment produced and controlled by Jell-O, Maxwell House and Camel cigarettes.

And soon, the public was brainwashed by the Jell-O lobby, and America has remained in its rubbery, neon grip ever since. The best part of waking up is Maxwell House and trickle-down economics in my cup, followed by a good smoke with my old friend Joe.

Page 8: Put there by George W. Bush

Next, Moyers spends a good deal of time demonizing former FCC Commissioner Michael Powell (a Clinton appointee). For an alternative view, you might read Powell’s Wikipedia bio, which makes Moyers’ comments seem rather distasteful.

But the part that caught my ear was Moyers’ inflection in saying this:

It’s also true that even as we speak, Michael Powell’s successor, Kevin Martin, put there by George W. Bush, is ready to take up where Powell left off and give the green light to more conglomeration.

Moyers says “put there by George W. Bush” as if it were some shady scheme, rather than a natural duty of the President. This part earned a “hisssss” from the audience. But, again, if what you want is more government regulation, you’ve got to be prepared for politicians you don’t like putting people on those boards. That’s how it works. Are you really that stupid?

Page 9: Gramsci

Moyers mentions the bi-partisan support for Net Neutrality and some of the groups on the Left and Right that fought the FCC. What he doesn’t mention is that Michael Powell also supported net neutrality.

I’m not convinced, however, that Moyers and friends picked the right case to complain about. From what I understand, the issue was how internet companies were going to handle the increased traffic and requirements placed on the lines by cable phones, streaming video, and online gaming, and they wanted to set up a two-tiered system in order to handle the load and provide better service.

Though the net neutrality crowd claimed it was a much bigger fight about access to content, from what I’ve read, that was never really the point. It wasn’t about AT&T telling you which sites you could or couldn’t visit on the internet, but rather about how they were going to provide service to a vast array of consumers with different needs. But to the extent that the neutrality folks were right, that companies wanted to restrict consumers’ access to content, I’m probably right there with you. But all this paranoia about companies blocking access to your precious DailyKos is just a bit too much. Since you can always pick a better service provider in a free market, we should be much more concerned with the ability of big government to censor, regulate, restrict access and enforce a “fairness doctrine” online, as this idiotic crowd suggests for radio.

One more thing on this page I wanted to point out:

Here is a man who practices what the Italian philosopher Gramsci called the “pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.” He sees the world as it is, without rose-colored glasses and tries to change it, despite what he knows.

The Italian philosopher Gramsci?

Oh, you mean Antonio Gramsci, Marxist and founder of the Italian Communist Party?

Oh, right, him. I’m really glad you’re up to speed on your Gramsci, there, Bill.

Yeah, he really sees the world as it is, for crying out loud.

Page 10: Progressivism not = penury

Another mention of ideology, a couple pleas for more public broadcasting dollars, and some “fantasies” about some Leftist radio host named Amy Goodman. Whatever. Here’s the fun part:

[W]e have to find other ways to ensure the public has access to diverse, independent, and credible sources of information… That means going to the market to find support for stronger independent media. Michael Moore and others have proven that progressivism doesn’t have to equal penury. It means helping protect news-gathering from predatory forces. It means fighting for more participatory media, hospitable to a full range of expression… [I]t means reclaiming public broadcasting and restoring it to its original feisty, robust, fearless mission as an alternative to the dominant media, offering journalism you can afford and can trust, public affairs of which you are a part, and a wide range of civic and cultural discourse that leaves no one out.

I love how Moyers segues from “independent media,” to “Michael Moore,” to “progressivism,” and then to “reclaiming public broadcasting.”

I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Progressive = not ideological?

Michael Moore = credible sources of information?

Independent = public broadcasting controlled by government?

And after all this talk about funding PBS, he drops the bomb we mentioned last time…

Page 11: Public broadcasting compromises you

It’s such an amazing quote, I simply can’t help but include it again:

Well, in 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. I hope to complement the fine work of colleagues like David Brancaccio of NOW and David Fanning of Frontline, who also go for the truth behind the news.

How exactly all that complementary broadcasting adds up to “a wide range of civic and cultural discourse that leaves no one out,” or “diverse, independent, and credible sources of information,” we may never understand.

Perhaps it leaves out no one except non-Marxists.

Speaking of which, guess who he quotes next:

The armies of the Lord are up against mighty hosts. But as the spiritual sojourner Thomas Merton wrote to an activist grown weary and discouraged protesting the Vietnam War, “Do not depend on the hope of results. Concentrate on the value and the truth of the work itself.”

Would you be very surprised if I told you this Merton fellow studied communism in college and joined the Young Communist League?

You shouldn’t be.

Bill Moyers concludes his speech by reciting a free verse poem written by a radical feminist. It’s all about being paranoid that conservative shock troops might burst through the door and “bust you / …break your fingers / …burn your brain with electricity, / blur you with drugs till you / can’t walk, can’t remember / …take your child, wall up / your lover,” but that they should take courage in their solidarity with each other.

Kum ba yah, etc.

UPDATE: Read Cliff Kincaid’s excellent review of the conference.