Why Don't the MSM Tackle The Socialists?
Commenting on my recent post on the late Maori Marxist, Tom Poata, anon asked...
Why aren't the mainstream newspapers and TV giving us this background?
In my opinion there are several reasons.
Firstly there is a terror of "McCarthyism" among journalists. They see any hint of that unpardonable sin as a sure career killer. To be fair also, most people have little idea of the covert influence the left exerts, so journalists can cite little public interest in their activities as a reason for not investigating them.
Secondly a lot of younger journalists are pretty ignorant of history and politics.
Thirdly, many journalists are socialists, who see their role to help shape society in the correct direction. Most journalists are now university or Polytech graduates, who have absorbed the socialist culture prevalent in those institutions. They are understandably very loathe to expose their mates.
I am a big supporter of the the traditional apprenticeship system and would love to see the old system of journalist cadetships revived.
Journalists who start at the bottom covering A&P Shows, charity events, the local courts, school prizegivings and the like tend to be a bit more realistic and objective than some of the self important little "change agents" popped out by the polytechs and journalism schools.
Why aren't the mainstream newspapers and TV giving us this background?
In my opinion there are several reasons.
Firstly there is a terror of "McCarthyism" among journalists. They see any hint of that unpardonable sin as a sure career killer. To be fair also, most people have little idea of the covert influence the left exerts, so journalists can cite little public interest in their activities as a reason for not investigating them.
Secondly a lot of younger journalists are pretty ignorant of history and politics.
Thirdly, many journalists are socialists, who see their role to help shape society in the correct direction. Most journalists are now university or Polytech graduates, who have absorbed the socialist culture prevalent in those institutions. They are understandably very loathe to expose their mates.
I am a big supporter of the the traditional apprenticeship system and would love to see the old system of journalist cadetships revived.
Journalists who start at the bottom covering A&P Shows, charity events, the local courts, school prizegivings and the like tend to be a bit more realistic and objective than some of the self important little "change agents" popped out by the polytechs and journalism schools.
posted by Trevor Loudon at
10/23/2006 11:16:00 AM
6 Comments:
Thank you for your visit. :-)
There's a lot journo's don't cover, that's why we have blogs!
And thanks a lot for all the effort here Trevor, these backgrounds are quite fascinating.
McCarthy correctly identified the fact that by the 1950s the upper echelons of US government, academia, the motion picture industry etc had been infiltrated by Communist subversives (see article below).
The same thing happened in every Western country, including New Zealand.
Communism - McCarthy Was Right
By Jon Basil Utley
Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information -- including half-century-old FBI recordings of Soviet embassy conversations -- are showing that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations. "With Joe McCarthy it was the losers who've written the history which condemns him," said Dan Flynn.
Using new information obtained from studies of old Soviet files in Moscow and now the famous Vanona Intercepts -- FBI recordings of Soviet embassy communications between 1944-48 -- the record is showing that McCarthy was essentially right. He had many weaknesses, but almost every case he charged has now been proven correct. Whether it was stealing atomic secrets or influencing U.S. foreign policy, communist victories in the 1940s were fed by an incredibly vast spy and influence network.
The conference, a gathering of old McCarthyites and younger scholars, commemorated the senator's first speech, in Wheeling, West Virginia 50 years ago, when he first held up a list of names of employees of the State Department whom, he said, were major security risks. McCarthy questioned how, in six short years after America's winning of World War II, the communist world was triumphant and had expanded to include 800 million people.
Of the lists, a key one consisted of 108 names from a House Appropriations Committee report, of persons declared as "security risks" in the State Department -- the Lee List. The House committee chairman had complained that State wasn't bothering to do anything about the suspects. Details of the list and its accusations were presented at the conference.
Speakers detailed many of the cover-ups used to smear McCarthy. Veteran journalist and teacher Stan Evans, director of National Journalism Center, told of the Tydings Committee, which had investigated McCarthy's charges of communists in government. Its report had exonerated everybody. Among the accused it stated categorically that there was no evidence against Owen Lattimore, a man McCarthy said was a major figure in the communist conspiracy. Lattimore had been Roosevelt's key advisor on China policy. Yet Evans showed evidence from 5,000 pages of FBI files on him -- files released only a few years ago to the public, although the White House had access to them. However, evidence before the committee showed that Lattimore had supported Soviet policy at every turn, even declaring that the Stalin purge trials in Russia, "sound like democracy to me." With then-Vice President Henry Wallace in Russia, Lattimore compared concentration camps to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later urged Washington to abandon China to communism and to withdraw from Japan and Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who had fed information to McCarthy, broke with him afterwards, fearing McCarthy would prejudice FBI sources of information for its criminal prosecutions.
Although most of McCarthy's cases involved actual spies and "security risks," the really important issue was that of communist influence over American foreign policy, argued Evans. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest advisor who lived in the White House, had regular contacts with Soviet intelligence. He helped bring about the disastrous Yalta and Pottsdam agreements. The Morganthau Plan, to prevent German reconstruction and starve the Germans to make them desperate enough to go communist, was the product of Laughlin Currie and Harry Dexter White at the Treasury Department. The abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek by denying military support was the product of "China Hands" led by John Stewart Service, John Patton Davies, and Lattimore. Evans described other major spy networks -- in England, the Burgess Maclean group which infiltrated Washington as well as London.
Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, told how he himself had been a leftist in his early career. He had been against McCarthy, but McCarthy's speeches had made him think and start to read "evidence that I had avoided." He described how all during his military career as a Marine officer and later in Japan with the U.S. occupation he had never hidden his leftist views and later had even been offered a job at the CIA. Irvine argued that real communists were only in the hundreds, but that thousands of leftists, such as he, all feared McCarthy and had wanted him discredited.
Pulling all the latest evidence together was luncheon speaker Professor Arthur Herman. His new book, "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator," and featured in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shows the vindication of most of McCarthy's charges. Herman, who is also coordinator of the Smithsonian's Western Heritage Program, said that the accuracy of McCarthy's charges "was no longer a matter of debate," that they are "now accepted as fact." However, the term "McCarthyism" still remains in the language.
Asked whether McCarthy had understood all the forces arrayed against him, Herman said no, that McCarthy hadn't realized he'd be fighting against much of the Washington establishment. President Truman was fearful that exposures would reflect on key Democrat officials, he said, and big media and the academic world were very leftist, a heritage of the Depression and World War II. High government officials also feared investigations of their past appointments and associations with people who turned out to be communists or sympathizers.
That was the reason McCarthy was so demonized, he said. Joe McCarthy had been a Marine air gunner, an amateur boxer, a county judge and towards his end, under constant attack, he began to drink heavily. Herman said he certainly was over his head and his fall came about after sweeping attacks on General Marshall and the Army. Senator Taft and other key supporters began to draw away from him.
If Robert Kennedy, his competent and well-connected co-counsel, had stayed on, McCarthy might have behaved more carefully, said Herman. An argument with other co-counsel Roy Cohn left Cohn in charge, but Cohn and staffer David Schine were disastrous for McCarthy. Still, McCarthy's original charges helped bring about Eisenhower's electoral victory and the defeat of the Democrats and key leftist Democratic senators such as Tydings of Maryland. Four years after his original charges, Joe McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died shortly thereafter.
There is more evidence to come. Herb Rome Stein, another speaker, who started out with the old House Un-American Activities Committee, is writing a book about the Vanona FBI intercepts and their links to other evidence from his comprehensive study in Russia of Soviet archives, made available to Westerners since the fall of communism. His book, The Venona Secrets, will be released by Regnery Gateway this fall.
Thanks for that article anon. Very interesting. NZ is well behind the US and even Australia in an objective assessment of the effects of communist infiltration on our society.
Hopefully we will start to catch up soon.
It also should not be lost sight of that this is an ongoing rather than purely an historical problem.
Trevor --
You are right that cadetships would help give a broader perspective to our media.
Media organisations once were also more open to people from other occupations becoming journalists when they were mature -- in their late 20s, 30s and 40s.
This brought in a leavening - and no more than that - of lawyers, farmers, small business people, teachers, sales reps,printers, policemen, merchant seafarers, soldiers, and so on. Some came in through the old reading rooms, which required less initial skill. Computerisation eliminated these.
But the result was a broader and less left-wing craft.
Thanks for the back up anon.
The same pattern is observable in nursing and teaching. Take the kids off the shop floor and put them into an academic course where they are more easily brainwashed.
Will Blogging break the leftist stranglehold on the MSM, do you think?
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