At this year’s Media Reform Conference, Bill Moyers was invited to open his hole again. Since he’s still showing his face in public, I can only assume Moyers never got around to reading my exhaustive four-part rebuttal to his speech in Memphis last year. Freepress expects to have this year’s transcript available early next week; I think I’ll hold off for that rather than suffer through the 40 minute video multiple times. It humors me that they posted a segment from Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show at the top of the “conference videos” page. Not to mention the fact that, you know, the whole point of the conference is patently absurd… that’s a little funny, too.

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

Dr. Willie W. Herenton, the mayor of Memphis, is often referred to as “King Willie,” and not just because of the strong likelihood that after holding the office for an astonishing 16 years, he will be reelected in 2007 and will add another four years to his reign.

Memphians don’t use the term just because of Herenton’s nonchalance in the face of rampant crime and poverty rates, our status as the infant death capital of the world, some of the highest sales and property tax rates in the state and nation, failing schools, public works mismanagement on a massive scale, a growing number of elected officials under indictment for bribery and other criminal behavior, and a city that among similar metro areas consistently ranks last in terms of healthiness.

Herenton didn’t earn that moniker just because of his apparent penchant for cronyism, because of the way he seems to exploit the city’s racial divisions for personal gain, because he spends more time promoting boxing matches than he does actually managing the city, or because he claims to have been appointed mayor by God himself.

Our mayor isn’t “King Willie” just because of his special ability to jolt the city with audacious ideas such as consolidation (which could place the controls of both Memphis and Shelby County in the hands of one person — hmm, d’ya wonder who?), or the more recent one: “hey, guys, let’s build a new $100 million football stadium to replace the perfectly fine, and perfectly empty, one to which we just committed $15 million for upgrades!”

And “King Willie” did not receive this honor just because the city has prepared an elaborate, and well-deserved burial place for him, finding no better use for the Memphis Pyramid.

No, Willie is “King” because of the way he lords over the city like a mafia boss and keeps the public, and the media, at several arms’ length (keeping in mind, of course, that Herenton has the wingspan of an amateur boxing champion).

So it was with incredible irony (and my own personal delight), that Mayor Herenton would be invited to give the opening speech of the Media Reform Conference last weekend.

No single person I can imagine (with the possible exception of Vice President Cheney, perhaps) could be less suited to the task. Herenton has turned secrecy and media combativeness into its own sport.

It’s with my sincere pleasure that I bring you the remarks (see video starting around 4:39) of one John Nichols of the Nation magazine, who introduced Herenton thusly:

You know, in this country, it is not easy to be a mayor of a big city. The media does not cover big cities well. The media is not generous to mayors; if it was, if it was, the mayor of Memphis would be a serious contender, not merely for reelection, but for the presidency of the United States. Because big city mayors know how to handle big problems, and sometimes, despite the challenges they face from big media, they know how to succeed. Please welcome, the mayor of Memphis, Dr. Willie Herenton.

There was an audible gasp in the audience after that beautiful comment, and I certainly wasn’t the only one there from Memphis who, right then, considered making a break for the nearest exit.

Consider, for example, Richard Thompson of Mediaverse, a Democrat and journalist who has described the moment well:

“Clearly, the out-of-towners were clueless. They don’t know [Herenton] like we do. If they did, they would understand that he often demands a respect that he doesn’t always bestow. Nevertheless, they clapped blindly and that kind of thing disturbs me. No one questioned him.”

Thompson later added some context, describing the whole thing far better than I could. Excuse the long quote, but this is just priceless:

I’ve been on edge since Friday, the precise moment occurring when Free Press co-founder John Nichols said Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton could have had strong consideration to be President of the United States if not for the media attacking him all these years. No, he wasn’t laughing at all.

Granted, Nichols backtracked a little later, but the damage was done. His kotowing [sic] to a mayor with self-inflicted media scars is no different than the much levied accusations from reformers that Big Media tends to overlook the faults of POTUS and others in the power structure in order to advance their own agendas. And despite the Pepto of successful independent media models, acknowledgement of the erosion of diversity from newsrooms, the caution of media consolidation and more, I still felt uneasy by the star-gazing and double talk. The NCMR says its [sic] non-partisan but it isn’t.

This conference has been a pseudo-Democratic convention, complete with a party presidential hopeful dropping in for a “surprise” appearance. (Do you think I’m that gullible?) I’m a lifelong Democrat, but as a journalist I can step outside of that allegiance because at times it’s necessary for the sake of credibility.

Saturday’s spoof of Bush, while funny, really showed that “media reform” is really just a code word for Democrats to control their own message — one disguised as being for the people, but it’s really not and it can’t be as long as the media is supposed to exist separate of the political paradigm. Media reform, in my mind, is supposed to ensure that separation.

This conference was about elections, not newspapers and TV stations.

Read the whole thing.

As for Nichols, with that sycophantic, ignorant introduction, he inadvertently summed up the entire Media Reform conference before it even began. Instead of calling for serious reform, he opened with a plea for the local media to turn a blind eye to the Mayor’s failures, and to be “more generous” and less challenging — exactly the opposite of the intended plea for a media that is an untiring watchdog and public advocate. For his part, Herenton followed with a few of his standard jabs at his media critics, and little else.

Read part 3.

If you believed the speakers at the Media Reform Conference this weekend, you would have discovered that our media are dominated by conservatives, and that alternative viewpoints (here referred to simply as “the truth”) never get heard or printed.

It’s an alternative America (the other of John Edwards’ “two Americas,” perhaps) wherein the only news media available are the Fox News Channel, conservative talk radio, and right-wing blogs, while all the other major outlets cater only to the whims of big business and are somehow beholden to the White House and its neo-conservative cabal. With this scenario firmly in place, the American public is spoon-fed lies and led into the wars of blood-thirsty tyrants — the dictators of a democracy gone bad. Meanwhile, as their mantra goes, unemployment is rising, our free market economy is a conspiracy to keep the poor man down, and nobody has any access to healthcare. Oh, and God forbid you’re black, gay or female — in which case you have no rights, no voice, and no vote, whatsoever.

Fighting against these sinister forces of neo-slavery, a band of 3,000 converged in Memphis. They are the few, the proud, the “nut-roots.” These brave souls risked life and limb by meeting together in public, in broad daylight, in a red state like Tennessee. At any moment, conservative shock troops might have stormed through the doors to arrest everyone on site.

With tremendous courage they assembled a crack team of actors, pundits, celebrities, socialists, Leftist think tank activists and media critics to combat the problems of media bias and journalistic malpractice: Danny Glover, Phil Donahue, Bill Moyers, David Brock, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, Geena Davis, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, just to name a few.

In short, they were just the right people for the task at hand, the perfect team to reform media. How better to illustrate the complete liberal voicelessness in media than to invite an obscure figure such as Jesse Jackson, someone who is rarely seen or heard on television? And who best to explain the conservative stranglehold on media than Bill Moyers, whose long career of taxpayer funded public tele-journalism can only represent the exception to the rule?

Free Press, the group behind the conference, put its grievances on the table: our media are too conservative, too consolidated, too private, too profitable, too white, and too free.

Its proposed solutions were just as clear. Rephrased for brevity, they include:

1. More government funding for public stations like NPR and PBS
2. More government funding for other media
3. More government intervention in the media business
4. More government-enforced racial quotas
5. More government oversight of media
6. More government involvement at the local level
7. More government-enforced giveaways to political candidates
8. More government funding for community broadcasts
9. More government intervention on an international scale
10. More government oversight of the internet

And so, with any luck, the conference would accomplish one thing: media would stop being a whore to big business and would start being a whore to big government, instead.

Of course, to do so, they would first need to break through the news media filter, and somehow bypass the big business conservatives who run the show. In Memphis, the results were mixed, as expected. While the Memphis Flyer, an alternative newsweekly, had given the conference prominent ad space for the last couple months, as well as a cover story the week of the conference, plus a handful of front-page website updates, the coverage at the major daily was a bit lacking; The Commercial Appeal ran only 13 or so stories over four days, in addition to a column by the editor in chief, a staff editorial, a video spot on AppealTV, and coverage by the staff blogs. Other than that, and up-to-the-minute coverage on talk radio and the daily TV broadcasts, the conference was hardly covered at all.

See Part 2

A first brush with celebrity came quickly tonight after picking up my Media Reform Conference registration. We spotted him in the Marriott hotel bar across the street from the Cook Convention Center. Moyers was kind enough to pose for a photo with a coworker of mine who adores him, which I may be able to post or link to later.

So far, the conference hosts seem nice, but the well-positioned exhibit hall is a little on the kooky side. Up front and center, of course, is MoveOn.org’s booth. Then there’s the usual mix of Leftist propaganda vendors, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, race-based and gender-based independent media outlets, and peddlers of single-issue bumper stickers: pro-abortion, church-state separation, Bush hate, Rightwingers are stupid, Americans are arrogant, Who Would Jesus Bomb, etc. Most of the people milling about are either unshaven, grizzly young Marxists who could seriously use a bath, aged hippies wearing cowboy hats covered with a dozen anti-Bush buttons and other flair, balding, brooding Alan Ginsberg clones with black-rimmed glasses to match their all-black wardrobe, or cyper punks with orange goatees, knit hats, trench coats and “free our media” bumper stickers affixed to their laptops. Likeable people, really, and I think I should be able to blend in fairly well.