The Media's Fourth Column

Heroes and Heels of 2001
By Nicholas Stix

January 16, 2002
Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer

If the media is the "fourth estate," as it has been dubbed, today's anti-American, racial socialist, mainstream media, comprise a fourth column, working to peacefully destroy America from within. I can only offer a brief glimpse at the past year's media treachery; a full reckoning would fill a very large, tedious book. Fortunately, such a reckoning is available in the archives of Brent Bozell III's Media Research Center, Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, and the Citizen's Coalition for Responsible Media maintained by the indefatigable "Peacerose" of Jim Robinson's Free Republic. The aforementioned folks have done yeoman's work at a thankless task, but hey, somebody's gotta do it.

The Everything is Political Award: To producers Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), Steven Bochco (NYPD Blue), and Dick Wolf (Law & Order). All three were caught basing story lines on imaginary "hate crimes" or non-existent shooting deaths caused by licensed, gun owning Christians, in order to further their common political agenda. The producers' shows may be fictional dramas, but their history of basing story lines on cases "ripped from the headlines" misleads their viewers into thinking episodes are based on real crimes. Besides, the criterion of realistic drama -- verisimilitude -- requires that story lines resemble real crimes. Instead, while telling stories that resemble no real crimes, the producers in question increasingly shy away from dramatizing real but politically incorrect crimes.

The Mick Jagger Every Cop is a Criminal, and All the Sinners Saints Award: A tie between Steven Jukes and Peter Jennings.

Reuters news director Steven Jukes declared, "We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field, however tragic it's been and however awful and cataclysmic for the American people . . ." and "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word 'terrorist' . . ." Jukes' sudden attack of "principle" came after PLO "activists" threatened to ventilate his reporters in the Mideast, if Reuters didn't provide more terrorist-friendly coverage.

ABC's Peter Jennings instructed us that the U.S. military is no more believable than the Taliban. As shown by the dogged research of "Peacerose" and the Citizens Coalition for Responsible Media, Jennings consistently portrayed America's prosecution of the war in the harshest possible light.

The See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil Award: To CBS' Dan Rather, for his refusal to cover the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy story.

The Polymorphous Political Perversity Award: To Lew Rockwell, proprietor of L.com, I mean, lewrockwell.com, and his band of libertarian suicide bombers, who have argued that 9/11 was payback for American arrogance.

The Increasing Irrelevance Award: To Lucianne Goldberg, proprietor of lucianne.com (aka L.com), who not too long ago, had the most popular media site on the Web. Under the pretext of running a "news site" (while running any sort of hack commentary from her favored sites, and banning hard news scoops from underfinanced sites), Goldberg has obsessively censored and blacklisted all sites and e-zines that are not well-financed and who fail to tow the mainstream conservative/neo-conservative (read: GOP) line. For Lucianne Goldberg, politics is a middle-brow, rich man's game; all others need not apply. The whole attraction of a news web site was the populist project of refusing to be told by one's "betters" what to read and think, and to that end, to reprint and link to alternative media. Thus has Goldberg's censoring of her site managed to defeat any discernible purpose -- beyond possibly her own self-esteem and repression-lust -- of maintaining it.

Dishonorable Mentions: If I had space, I would name all the journalists and editors who have kept the 2000 Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax on life support.