Freep Heroes - Summer 2002

Rob Russell and Protect Our Earth’s Treasures 7/20/02 After a two-year picket of the OSU veterinary hospital, Rob Russell and animal rights activists successfully drove Associate Professor Michael Podell from the OSU campus. Podell was responsible for the reprehensible “Cats on Speed” experiments that tortured and killed cats in the name of medicine. Podell’s departure from OSU is in the truest sense, POETic justice. Now if only POET and its allies PETA, the Humane Society, the Association of Veterinarians for Animals Rights and the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine could start organizing to get the OSU administration to quit practicing mind control on student guinea pigs (see Freep Enemies of the People).

The Free Press Salutes

Congressman Pat Tiberi

Can Jeff Gerth Save the White House?

The right is whining. Carl Limbacher and his crew complain on the popular NewsMax site that in the two weeks since the Harken story went critical, "the prestige press" (Limbacher's odd phrase, which presumably means he's excluding The National Enquirer) has given the affair 50 times more coverage than it gave the Whitewater deal after the New York Times broke that story on March 8, 1992.

Limbacher moans that Whitewater showed up only 14 times in the wake of the Times story, while from June 28 to July 12 of this year, there have been over 700 stories on the Harken sale.

C'mon, Carl. The reason Whitewater got off to a slow start was because for months, no one could figure out what the New York Times's Jeff Gerth was writing about. Reading any Gerth story is like bicycling through wet sand, but in the case of Whitewater, he surpassed himself. As readers sank up to their armpits in the sludge of Gerth-prose, interest in Whitewater for that electoral year flickered and died. Gerth saved Clinton's ass. Ultimately, Whitewater did make it into the headlines, but in truth, it always lacked sex appeal. There just wasn't that much meat in the stew. Not

Dissent -- now more than ever

Thirty years ago the Free Press ran an ad for the first Community Festival. We’re two years older than the Festival, but a product of the same cultural and political rebellion against the war in Vietnam and the “plastic” suburban culture of the post-WW II era. The Freep is proud to be honored in this year’s Community Festival program as a worthwhile community organization. In honor of the Community Festival turning 30 this year, and the fact that we still “trust” the event to show us a real good time, we’ve dedicated our cover to the “Commie” fest.

It’s also the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. The bungled burglary revealed a secret world of shadowy former CIA agents bugging the headquarters of the Democratic Party and working fulltime on dirty tricks to rig the 1972 election. President Nixon’s resignation in 1974 left many progressives with false hope of a better America.

Renouncing Sins Against the Corporate Faith

Just about every politician and pundit is eager to denounce wrongdoing in business these days. Sinners have defiled the holy quest for a high rate of return. Damn those who left devoted investors standing bereft at corporate altars!

On the surface, media outlets are filled with condemnations of avarice. The July 15 edition of Newsweek features a story headlined "Going After Greed," complete with a full-page picture of George W. Bush's anguished face. But after multibillion-dollar debacles from Enron to WorldCom, the usual media messages are actually quite equivocal -- wailing about greedy CEOs while piping in a kind of hallelujah chorus to affirm the sanctity of the economic system that empowered them.

At a Wall Street pulpit, Bush declared that America needs business leaders "who know the difference between ambition and destructive greed." Presumably, other types of greed are fine and dandy.

During his much-ballyhooed speech, the president asserted that "all investment is an act of faith." With that spirit, a righteous form of business fundamentalism is firmly in place. The great god of capitalism is

Corporate Malfesance

AUSTIN, Texas -- Well, President Bush made his big speech on corporate reform Tuesday, and the stock market went down by 178 points.

As predicted, Bush proposed stiffer penalties for bad apples, evildoers and perpetrators of "malfee-ance." Unfortunately, that won't fix the system.

Much as one would like to see many corporate executives doing time alongside hard-working stick-up artists, that leaves the systemic problems in place. Among the leading structural factors causing the cascading scandals are conflict of interest on the part of auditors who also get paid by their clients as consultants, conflict of interest on the part of stock analysts and their investment-banker bosses, abuse of stock options encouraged by not having to count their cost against earnings, and lack of oversight on accountants and insider loans -- of the very kind Bush himself got at Harken. Bush addressed none of it.

Stiffer penalties for what is already illegal are not helpful when the problem is what is legal. Bush's effort to treat this as though it were simply a law 'n' order problem is not going to be effective.

Terror by Rail: Senate Okays Yucca Mountain Dump

It's an all-too-rare pleasure to see the nuclear industry sweat, but in the run-down to the wire, there were clear signs of panic in the campaign to push through the U.S. senate a plan to ship the nation's commercial nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain outside Las Vegas.

When Bush came to power, the nuke lobby thought they had it made. The days of competition between the oil industry and the nuclear lobby are long gone. Now they all belong to the same conglomerate. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, perhaps the only member of the cabinet who requires a more simplified briefing book than Bush, was an old industry pal, long since bought and paid for.

Bush himself called for more subsidies to nuclear power and reversed his election-eve opposition to the nuke industry's most fervent dream: the Yucca Mountain dump for nuclear waste from around the country, hauled in by rail. September 11 changed all that. Not immediately, mind you. But as the patriotic hysteria, in which it was deemed un-American to question any Bush proposal, began to subside, people began to conclude that the scheme to truck 77,000 tons of radioactive waste through their

Yucca Mountain Comes Down to the Wire

It's a rare day that you see these guys sweat, but the nuclear industry is getting frantic. You can tell by the desperate nature of their recent campaign to push through the U.S. senate the plan to ship the nation's commercial nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, outside Las Vegas.

When Bush came to power, the nuke lobby thought they had it made. The days of competition between the oil industry and the nuclear lobby are long gone. Now, they all belong to the same conglomerate. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, perhaps the only member of the cabinet who requires a more simplified briefing book than Bush, was an old pal, long bought and sold. Bush himself called for more subsidies to nuclear power and reversed his election-eve opposition to the nuke industries most fervent aspiration: the Yucca Mountain dump.

September 11 changed all that. Not immediately, mind you. But as the patriotic hysteria, in which it was deemed un-American to question any Bush proposal, began to recede, people began to conclude that the scheme to truck 77,000 tons of radioactive waste through their communities wasn't

'Monomedia' and the First Amendment

Speaking with grace and ease, a pensive network anchor compared the America of today with the one of a year ago. His script had the ring of media truth at the start of a new season. "How different the summer is going to be for all of us," CNN's Aaron Brown told viewers. A minute later, he added: "Summer life is going on. It's just different. Everything is."

Such assertions have repeated endlessly in media circles. They make sense if dictionaries are now obsolete and words don't really need to mean anything in particular. "Everything" is "different" for "all of us" only when the preposterous can be rendered plausible.

As a practical matter, virtually closed loops often dominate major news outlets. The result is what we could call "monomedia." When similar noises keep filling echo chambers, they tend to drown out other sounds.

July Fourth gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect. This holiday commemorates a revolution that made possible the extraordinarily important First Amendment. These days, in theory, just about everyone in the country has freedom to speak. But freedom to be heard is another matter.

A Modest Proposal for Media Reform

Many Americans feel under siege from advertising that insults intelligence and helps to degrade the nation's cultural environment. While serving the interests of advertisers, the daily ad-mania makes us sick -- sometimes quite literally. What can we do about it?

No easy solution is in sight. The ad craziness has gotten extreme in a context of greatly centralized economic power afflicting nearly the entire media landscape. "The bottom line is that fewer and fewer huge conglomerates are controlling virtually everything that the ordinary American sees, hears and reads," independent Rep. Bernie Sanders wrote recently in The Hill newspaper. With probably undue optimism, he added: "This is an issue that Congress can no longer ignore."

Such matters are way too important to be left up to politicians -- or the hotshots in the executive suites of gargantuan media firms. What's at stake could hardly be more basic. For instance, Sanders noted: "Despite 41 million people with no health insurance and millions more underinsured, we spend far more per capita on health care than any other nation. Maybe the reason is that we are seeing no

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