Students
suffer from media bias
Over the last few weeks, the Cal State Long
Beach campus has been bombarded by a Republican-led
campaign to smear student groups and newspapers.
Gerry Wachovsky and Jason Garthoffner, in
their weekly rants, have done everything
they can to dehumanize the anti-war movement,
even going so far as printing an obviously
racist cartoon in the Union newspaper.
Garthoffner has demanded apology after apology
from the On-line Forty-Niner for slamming
the Young Republicans for their “Pro-American
rally,” which in reality was an all out
bigot festival. The guest speaker, David
Horowitz, called anti-war protestors “Stalinist
fascists” and demanded that treason trials
be held for those who oppose war. Many of
those in attendance likely felt immersed
in the McCarthyist era of the 1950s, not
2003.
The Young Republicans have gone on the offensive,
targeting student newspapers and campus
staff as liberal hooligans with the intent
of hijacking the campus. As the Bush administration
and corporate America gear up for war, students
on the CSULB campus are caught in the middle.
The facts point out that the Bush administration
is tied closely with big oil and has already
promised privatized oil fields to Exxon
and other U.S. companies.
The Pentagon has announced that 10 times
the amount of bombs dropped on Iraq in 1991
will be used in the impending attack, and
only 10 percent of these will be smart bombs.
These bombs will most definitely maim and
kill a large portion of the Iraqi civilian
population.
The corporate media, including the Los Angeles
Times and the Press Telegram, have spent
little, if any, time pointing out the hypocrisy
and genocide of this planned war on Iraq.
The corporate media certainly has not demonstrated
characteristics of a free unbiased press.
Investigative and authentic journalism has
suffered drastically by the growing monopolization
in the United States.
Wealth in the United States is increasingly
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The
same corporations dominating government
policy by intense lobbying (i.e. Enron lobbyists
met with Cheney to draft the Bush administration’s
energy policy) are also tied in with the
corporate media.
Media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch have
made millions from creating right-wing slanted
shock media, as seen on local channel Fox
11. Why then should independent and student
newspapers be lambasted by right-wing groups
for presenting the other side every so often?
Community journalists are duty bound to
present views that are censored by the avarice
of the corporate media.
A case in point is the Long Beach Press-Telegram’s
reporting of CSULB’s anti-war and pro-war
rallies on Feb 18. Reporter/photographer
Jeff Gritchen openly called the anti-war
protestors “liars” for claiming the main
victims of a war on Iraq would be the poor.
Gritchen, in an e-mail conversation with
me, said two interesting things. First,
he stated that he believed the United Nations
was anti-Semitic and anti-American for opposing
Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands.
He also claimed that Martin Luther King,
Jr. was a poor role model. Gritchen definitely
has a strange outlook on political events
and figures, yet this is the person the
Press-Telegram has covering CSULB. The Press-Telegram
has shown that it is not interested in being
neutral, non-biased or even informative.
The Press-Telegram article on the rally
featured two photos, both of pro-war demonstrators.
Anybody at the event could see that the
anti-war rally was at least twice as large,
but the Press-Telegram gave little coverage.
The Press-Telegram is owned by a company
that owns seventy-nine newspapers around
the country. Our own local area is lied
to daily by the corporate media that has
its main interest in making money rather
than informing the community.
If students are interested in organizing
the student body to stand up against the
Bush administration’s war drive and the
infinite flow of Young Republican propaganda,
I suggest they join the Campus Progressives.
Since this collective was founded two years
ago, it has been successful in getting the
school to join the workers rights consortium
and has organized various workshops and
rallies to inform students on how to promote
workers rights, human rights and environmentalism
on campus.
Jeb Sprague is a graduate student of history
at Cal State Long Beach. He can be contacted
at pauseclause@yahoo.
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