The Exception to the Rulers - Excerpt

It was stories like Errol's, in New York and around the world, that my WBAI colleague Bernard White and I took on each day for a decade on the morning show Wake Up Call. We heard people speak for themselves, instead of hearing them defined by officialdom. Bernard, a former New York City schoolteacher, has deep roots in the community. Whether in the classroom, on air, or as Samori's successor as WBAI program director, Bernard's idea of education is to have people tell their own stories, document their own lives.

I began hosting Democracy Now! in 1996, when it was launched as the only daily election show in public broadcasting. Listener response was enormous. Suddenly the daily struggles of ordinary people -- workers, immigrants, artists, the employed and the unemployed, those with homes and those without, dissidents, soldiers, people of color -- were dignified as news. I call it trickle-up journalism. These are the voices that shape movements -- movements that make history. These are people who change the world just as much as generals, bankers, and politicians. They are the mainstream, yet they are ignored by the mainstream media.

After the 1996 election, we decided to continue the show as a daily grassroots political newshour. When the media began beating the drums of war after September 11, 2001, Democracy Now! expanded to television and became the largest public media collaboration in the country. We now broadcast on hundreds of community radio and public access TV stations. We beam out over satellite television and stream on the Internet at www.democracynow.org.

Why has Democracy Now! grown so quickly? Because of the deafening silence in the mainstream media around the issues -- and the people -- that matter most. People are now confronting the most important issues of the millennium: war and peace, life and death. Yet who is shaping the discourse? Generals, corporate executives, and government officials.

In a media landscape where there are more channels than ever, the lack of any diversity of opinion is breathtaking -- and boring. As my colleague Juan Gonzalez often says, "You can surf through hundreds of channels before you realize there is nothing on TV."

In a society where freedom of the press is enshrined in the Constitution, our media largely acts as a megaphone for those in power.

That's why people are so hungry for independent media -- and are starting to make their own.

Muzzling Dissent

Vibrant debate and dissent exist in this country, but you are not reading or hearing about this in the mainstream press.

If you are opposed to war, you are not a fringe minority. You are not a silent majority. You are part of a silenced majority. Silenced by the mainstream media.

After 9/11 the media personalities on television -- you can't call many of them journalists -- kept saying that 90 percent of Americans were for war.

Were you ever called and asked your views? And if you were, what were you asked? Because if someone called and asked, "Do you believe the killing of innocent civilians should be avenged by the killing of innocent civilians?" I'm sure that 90 percent of Americans would say no. We are a compassionate people. But people cannot take action if they don't have accurate information.

Politicians who never met a war they didn't like (and in the case of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, never fought in any of them) began to beat the drums of war after 9/11. Corporations chimed in, knowing they could make a killing off of killing. And then came the mainstream media to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky puts it.

To understand how the media shape the message, look at who the messengers are. The media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did a study of the "experts" who appeared on-camera on the major network news shows during the critical week before and week after February 5, 2003 -- the day Secretary of State Colin Powell made his case to the UN Security Council for invading Iraq. This was at a time when 61 percent of Americans supported more time for diplomacy and inspections. The FAIR study found only 3 of 393 sources -- fewer than 1 percent -- were affiliated with antiwar activism.

Three out of almost 400 interviews. And that was on the "respectable" evening news shows of CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS.

So if you ran to the bathroom while watching TV during that critical two-week period -- sorry! You might have missed the only dissenting viewpoint the network news offered.

This is not a media that is serving a democratic society, where a diversity of views is vital to shaping informed opinions. This is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is repackaging government spin and passing it off as journalism.

Why does it matter? Well, consider the alternative: Imagine if instead of 3 voices against the war, the networks allowed 200 war skeptics on the air -- roughly the proportion of the public opposed to war.