Global

“Yeah, they got us listed as subversive. We expect a police helicopter to follow the march,” James Moss, President of Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER) assured me as we lined up to march to the Stand Up For Justice Rally. At first I thought he was joking. What was so subversive about a bunch of black people marching for civil rights on the predominantly black Near East side from an attorney’s office to a church?

Marching from Hamilton Park toward East Broad Street with a black police helicopter hovering overhead seemed a bit odd in everyone’s all-American city, Columbus, Ohio. It did stimulate a quick flashback to my stint as an election observer and journalist in Suchitoto, El Salvador. But hell, I’d expected military and police helicopters to intimidate people in a repressive Third World sham-democracy undergoing its first real democratic elections. After we crossed Broad Street, we were treated to Soviet-era police state tactics: undercover cops in church parking lots, plainclothes officers lurking in alleys with videocameras and a massive display of squad cars on a street where crack houses usually operate openly.

My interest grew, and I took a couple of classes and learned how to operate a camera. Finally I was worthy of getting hit on the head with the bars and tone tape, making me an official ACTV volunteer. (Now maybe that was just done special for me, but the atmosphere was spontaneous and whimsical at that time.) Whenever I could make time, I would gladly volunteer to run a camera or the cranky chyron graphics generator for anyone who needed help and was willing to put up with a beginner. To my delight there were a number of producers who welcomed me.

A year or so later, some friends suggested that a group of us do our own show, and for over 10 years, Vast Wasteland was central Ohio’s (insert tongue in cheek here) video guide to pop culture. But in the fall of last year (1999), we made the decision to stop production despite the warm positive response we were still receiving from the majority of the viewing community. Anyone who has every participated in a public access production knows that the reward comes from learning that you have reached your audience and they have responded as you had hoped. Over the years we were well rewarded.

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush — the son of former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush — found himself in trouble and faltering after his New Hampshire defeat to Senator John McCain. A shadowy, secretive and spooky network centered around right wing religious organizations and causes rushed to his rescue in South Carolina.

At the crux of this network is the Council for National Policy (CNP) founded in 1981 by the Rev. Tim LaHaye and T. Cullen Davis, members of the ultra-right John Birch Society with financial backing from Nelson Bunker Hunt. Currently, the clandestine CNP has over 500 members and serves as the Who’s Who network of the United States’ right wing. At the center of the CNP, with a seemingly endless supply of questionable cash, is self-proclaimed Messiah and mind control cult leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Nearly five years after its purchase of ABC, the Disney Company made history in late March by subjecting a confused 6-year-old boy to a preposterous "interview." For ABC News superstar Diane Sawyer, it was all in a day's work. But former viewers of the Mickey Mouse Club had good reason to cringe. Whatever his failings, Mickey never engaged in such flagrant child abuse on national television.

For three days, "Good Morning America" featured excerpts from Sawyer's visit with Elian Gonzalez, a traumatized child whose departure from Cuba several months ago ended with a shipwreck that killed his mother. Sawyer sat on the floor with little Elian and eased into questions about whether he'd rather live in Cuba or Florida. The footage, repackaged for ABC's "20/20" show, was all grist for the ABC/Disney profit mill.

"Judge Hiller assigns Lindsay the repugnant task of defending nun-killer Michael Kingston. Lindsay discovers the police search that found the body was unconstitutional, and against all her morals, moves that Kingston be released. Helen delivers an impassioned argument, stating that the Constitution was designed to protect the innocent, a category that doesn't include Kingston. In the end, Judge Hiller has no choice but to strike the body from evidence, and dismiss the charges." What's this? Episode 53 of ABC's "The Practice," as synopsized on epguides.com, is what it is, first broadcast on March 28, 1999, and recently repeated. "The Practice," about a law firm, is produced by David Kelley, formerly a writer out of the Steve Bochco stable. The show is regarded as a cultural provender of rare quality, basking in the soft glow of liberal approval.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Those of you old enough to remember the Vietnam War will recall the early years, when the majority of Americans couldn't find the place on a map and practically nobody could tell the difference between the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Well, it's time to look up Colombia on the map of South America and learn what FARC is.

When the history of this one is written, what will amaze everyone once again is how hopelessly clueless we all are -- the Clinton administration, Congress, the media. The media keep reporting "a $9 billion spending bill to help Colombia combat drug traffickers" as though it were just that simple.

(Actually, only $1.6 billion of the spending bill is for the "counter drug aid package for Colombia." There is $2.6 billion to pay for our military costs in Kosovo, $2 billion for disaster relief and then, somehow, amazingly, the thing came out of the House Appropriations Committee with the total price tag doubled by pure pork barrel.)

Does America have a military-industrial-media complex?

Whether you consider the question in terms of psychology or economics, some grim answers are available from the National Association of Broadcasters, a powerful industry group that just held its radio convention in San Francisco.

When a recent Federal Trade Commission report faulted media companies for marketing violence to children, various politicians expressed outrage. But we've heard little about the NAB -- a trade association with a fitting acronym. The NAB has a notable record of nabbing the public airwaves for private gain.

Nearly 40 years ago, a farewell speech by President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry." He said: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." That potential has been realized, with major help from media.

The media summer of 2000 is now history. As leaves begin to fall, let's consider a few key dynamics of the political season that has just passed.

Despite complaints about smarmy orchestration and chronic pandering, the Republican and Democratic conventions resulted in gobs of deferential coverage. Some journalists rolled their eyes or even shed a bit of light on the big money bags behind the Oz-like curtains, but each party got what its backers paid for -- a week of mostly upbeat publicity.

Meanwhile, Americans saw very little news about the iron-fist tactics that police used in the host cities to suppress thousands of social-justice demonstrators. Evidently, several days of militarizing a downtown area is the latest new thing for laying down the political law.

In Philadelphia, while the Grand Old Party partied, police raided a protest headquarters. The gendarmes proceeded to confiscate and destroy large numbers of handmade puppets being readied for deployment in the streets. The crackdown was understandable, since art can be subversive. Better to be on the safe side!

Despite all the emphasis on new media, photography has never lost the power to move us. Some recent photo essays in major American magazines, focusing on the poor and dispossessed, are efforts to break through abstraction and indifference. They tell us a lot about the potential impacts -- and common limitations -- of photojournalism.

The March 27 edition of Time devoted six pages to the haunting black-and-white work of renowned photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Bleak images evoke humanity struggling for survival and hope: Rwandans at refugee camps, women holding pictures of men abducted from a Kurdish village in Iraq, toddlers -- abandoned by destitute parents -- crawling at a care center in urban Brazil.

Meanwhile, two other magazines showed that color photos can also be stark. If we don't turn the pages too quickly, the pictures are heart-wrenching. The New York Times Magazine published a March 19 cover story, "In the Shadow of Wealth," featuring photographs of "the invisible poor" from the East Coast to California. And the March issue of Life offered 10 vivid photos of Americans living in poverty, from Manhattan to rural areas of the Northeast, South and West.

AUSTIN -- Watching our homeboy George Dubya as he wends his way -- somewhat unsteadily -- toward the presidency is a nerve-racking procedure. Face it, our reputation is on the line along with the governor's. All of us know that 20 million Texans can't be brought to agree on anything, including whether the guys who died at the Alamo were heroes or fools. Nevertheless, we are all being painted with the Bush brush, so whenever he makes a cake of himself, all of us get the blame ("Those Texans, so ignorant.'')

Relatively speaking, Bush is one of our better representatives on the national scene. In Washington, which seems to have been deeply scarred by LBJ's occasional lack of couth, we are still regarded as a tribe of Visigoths. ("And then, he lifted his shirt and showed us the scar!'') Every time Gov. Preston Smith, who had a terminal West Texas accent, went on television, I used to wince: "Our biggest problem after this hurricane is all the day-brees we got lyin' around.'' So, Dubya Bush doesn't seem like anyone we'd have to blush for.