Where is the anti-war movement?

[Longhornliz]

I dont know if any of you watch the show "boston leagal" on abc, they recently had an episode where a family of a fallen soldier sued the government for wrongfull death. Their argument was that he wasnt trained to be in the position he was in, and that despite the fact he joined the reserves on a one year trial period they extended his tour to 2026! I'm not sure if thats realistic, but many of my friends who joined the reserves after graduating from high school had to put college on hold because they keep getting called up to active duty. Several of them even went over seas where they acted as mps despite the fact they were never trained to work in such capacities.

 

[JOHIO2]

Liz, the Boston Legal story does have a basis in reality. Every contract promise made is broken these days and most "soldiers" are trained in support capacity and never really expected to actually have to shoot those rifles and throw those grenades. Dodging bullets and crawling around in the dirt were just memories from boot camp for many "soldiers." Remember the story of Jessica Lynch and her convoy? Congress may think women and support units, like mechanics and truck drivers and such aren't front line, but the definition has certainly changed and also remember that young women your age have also been killed or maimed or traumatized in a war with no front lines.

I've heard of retiring soldiers being offered those one year contracts and now seem to be just plain stuck as the courts aren't about to enforce the original enlistment terms which the government seems to change at will and whim. Part of the Abu Ghraib problem was troops not trained for police type duties and totally clueless and under confused condiditions and rules didn't even KNOW what orders they should have obeyed and what they should have protested or refused.

At least my Vietnam era brothers and cousins knew what to expect. Unless you were infirm or in a deferment category (or you had a Daddy with money or political power and could manage to evade the draft without being labeled a draft evader -- think George W. and Dick Cheney) you were going to put in two years as a draftee. And during Vietnam, you also expected to be sent for a year long "tour" of Southeast Asia. If you were smart and motivated and enlisted for a longer term, you MIGHT luck out and get trained in something like nuclear missiles and expect to spend your time in Europe or a base somewhere noone was shooting at you.

Injustice of any kind gets to me and I never thought I'd be revisiting the Vietnam era protests. But since George W. now has popularity polls approaching Lyndon Johnson's -- well................

 

[dorispulaski]

One reason you don't see as many protests is that when they occur, they aren't covered much on TV.

Did any of you see the some 1 million protesters in NYC during the Republican convention, which was primarily an anti war protest? Chances are you never saw any of it, unless you watch CSPAN. And it was a heckof a spectacle.

Did you watch any of Cindy Sheehan's antiwar protests, still going on in Washington, and previously at Camp Casey in TX? You probably didn't see anything but Sheehan herself, but there were a lot of people, many college students, there, too.

Did you follow the prochoice march in Washington recently?

How about the rerun of the Million Man March in DC?

Unless you're a news junkie (and I am), you probably saw none of it.

That's because the news you get is very, very heavily edited in this country. Why? Because there are very few relatively independent news outlets of any kind. You have Disney (ABC), Fox, Time-Warner, and whom ever owns CBS (Qualcomm? I forget). As we speak, a consortium of Republicans are trying to break up and purchase Knight-Ridder publications, one of the last holdouts.

Frankly, unless you are one of the protesters, you probably don't know about it.
Or unless you follow foreign newspaper coverage on line.

Another thing that's going on is that politically active younger people are tending to blog rather than protesting. This is primarily progressives (dailykos, etc), but there are conservative blogs like redstate and littlegreenfootballs, too.

 

[JOHIO2]

Doris, the weird part of this lack of coverage -- the conservatives are always bitching about how LIBERAL the press is!!!! Excuse me, but if the mainstream media is that LIBERAL, why are they ignoring the anti-war movement and other social change movements????

Seems to me the conservatives are the ones who most benefit from the way news is covered in this country and yet they are constantly harping about how liberal media is. And then, they have all the Rush Limbaughs, Pat Buchanons, Sean Hannitys, Tucker Carlsons, Robert Novaks, and even Bill O'Reillys (Billy always claims he is not conservative, but how often does he take any liberal stands? and how often does he vilify the ACLU? OK, they often don't make logical sense to the rest of us, but their interior logic is consistant.)

They can sneer all they want about groups like MoveOn and TrueMajority and other liberals, but can they explain why, even with minimal press coverage, are President Bush's popularity polls plumeting?

 

[Tonichelle]

Did any of you see the some 1 million protesters in NYC during the Republican convention, which was primarily an anti war protest? Chances are you never saw any of it, unless you watch CSPAN. And it was a heckof a spectacle.

actually that's ALL I saw during that while in classes

I was being taught the "evils" of my beliefs...

Universities are the LEAST open-minded areas... or at least the ones I'm familiar with... (and for the record I'm saying on both sides... go to South Eastern in Wake Forest, NC and you better like republicans... go to Berkley or UAA and you better be a die-hard democrat)


as for Sheehan, she's gotten more and more press, and you can't tell me that the press she gets isn't biased in her FAVOR... I haven't seen much if any of a balanced report from that story, save for newsweek's thing a few weeks back (and normally they don't impress me at all)



I don't protest or show my support for my party on campus because last semester I DID and ended up getting on a prof's bad side for voting "incorrectly" (and it reflected in my grades. I went to the head of my department and all he did was give me an incomplete and told me to take from a different prof :scowl: )

:sheesh: Ever tried protesting a protest? LOL


JO - liberal media is the mainstream networks and CNN... Dan Rather was so overly biased he allowed it to cloud his professional judgement several times through the years (not just talking about his last bit that got him fired)... Jennings had his moments...

I'm not a fan of news period. the more I learn in journalism class the more I hate it. FOXNews whines as much as anyone about how liberal the media is and that they are the only conservative network... I think both sides need to quit taking sides and just report the news WITH LITTLE TO NO OPINION.

The news forums bring in experts, but rarely are they balanced... it's frustrating...

and I see protest news all the time...

you want liberal media, with ANWR passing the senate you'll see the news go into overdrive showing all of the wildlife that will shrivel and die in ANWR -- forgetting to mention that where the drilling is going to take place it is actually barren and that the native pop that lives in that area would love to have the revenue it brings.... Dan Rather--WITHOUT COMING UP HERE--went on his own little trip on how it would be gross and barbaric to come up here. He NEVER interviewed ANYONE up here. He interviewed the protestors from other states... there are Alaskans that are anti-ANWR, but he didn't come looking for THEM. Why? because there are SO FEW. He didn't want to show the Alaskan side to it because heaven forbid WE want to do something with OUR land.


sorry I didn't mean to rant and ramble... but ANWR was the one thing that I actually know about so I used it for an example and got off topic... bad me... I KNEW I should have stayed out of this lol

 

[dorispulaski]

I'm not a fan of news period. the more I learn in journalism class the more I hate it. FOXNews whines as much as anyone about how liberal the media is and that they are the only conservative network... I think both sides need to quit taking sides and just report the news WITH LITTLE TO NO OPINION.

Tonichelle, I certainly agree with you about that! I am particularly fed up with the idea that if you line up 2 partisan hacks of opposite stripes, and let them spew whatever their party lines are, that somewhere in there will be the truth. Not so. Two lies do not make the truth, yes?

Somewhere we've lost the notion in the media that people can actually cooperate on things they agree on, while having major disagreements in other areas.

I would agree with JOHIO2. There are no liberal media. Well, except Air America Radio, which does not count, because it's partisan, and tiny. It's just the anti-Limbaugh, equally slanted but in the other direction. I

I'm sorry to hear that college is proving to be an unpleasant experience, in some ways. Giving you a bad grade for your political opinions is just plain wrong. Which college did you end up attending?

As to ANWR, to me, that's not either a liberal or a conservative issue. To me, that's the corporations vs the environmentalists. And the really annoying thing about the environmentalists in that fight is that I swear they don't realize how huge an area they are talking about. That said, drilling in ANWR is such a long term project that it's specious to suggest that it will do something about gas prices in the immediate future.

What I was getting at about Sheehan, is that the news paints her like the Lone Ranger-a single person, etc. They never pan back to show the huge number of people with her. (JOHIO2 was asking about where are the protestors-and in many cases, they're there, but offscreen)

 

[Ptichka]

Sheehan reporting

I mainly listen to NPR news, and I did know that Sheehan was far from being a lone ranger.

Toni, of course media will be sympathetic to Sheehan. By the same token, media is just as sympathetic to the parents of soldiers who died in Iraq who are protesting against Sheehan. Media always likes the "little guy". Back when Israel was the underdog, media was all pro-Israel and anit-Palestinian. Now that Palestinians are the underdogs much of the media turned anti-Israel. Serbs were always vilified over Croats. Bad Ethiopia against poor little Eritrea. The list goes on. It just comes with the territory. hwell:

 

[dorispulaski]

Efforts made to keep NPR nonpartisan bear some fruit

NPR does indeed try to keep you well informed, and succeeds more than other news outlets in the US do. Here's the results of a University of MD study from 2003. They tested whether media users had any of three misperceptions about the Iraq war:

1. That there was an Iraq / al Qaeda link prior to the war
2. That WMD had been found in Iraq
3. That World opinion was in favor of the Iraq war

Here's the results by news outlet:

Link to the U of MD Iraq/Media Study

Respondents with one or more misperception:
Fox 80%
CBS 71%
ABC 61%
NBC 55%
CNN 55%
Print Media 47%
PBS/NPR 23%

As you can see, none of the mainstream media was doing a very good job of informing the public, including the print media. Judy Miller (edited to correct) of the NY Times was particularly heinous in this regard.

An excerpted version, tarted up for general publication, was published in the Atlantic for Jan/Feb 2004:

'After discovering that Saddam Hussein was both actively supporting Al Qaeda and deploying WMDs, the United States, with the full support of the international community, invaded Iraq in March, 2003.' This largely inaccurate statement was not torn from a premature draft of the official Bush history of the Iraq War. Rather, it was what roughly 60 percent of Americans believed in sum or in part in the aftermath of the war. According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, during and immediately following the Iraq War more than half of Americans believed that Saddam was a major supporter of al-Qaeda. Roughly a third believed that Iraq had deployable or deployed WMD and that most of the world supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The first and the third statements are known to be false; the second is widely accepted to be. So how did so many people get so much wrong? Part of the answer, obviously, is politics: Bush backers, according to the study, were much more likely to believe at least one of the three points than Bush bashers. But the media and in particular one well-known 'fair and balanced' news outlet seem to have played a part in promoting false beliefs. Whereas only 23 percent of those who relied on NPR or PBS for information about public affairs believed one or more of the propositions, 55 percent of those who relied on CNN did and 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News did. One might speculate that Bush supporters are more likely to watch (and believe) Rupert Murdoch's news outlets than either Ted Turner's or public broadcasting's. But viewers' preconceived political notions are clearly not the whole story: the Maryland researchers found that whereas 78 percent of Bush supporters who watched Fox were misinformed, only 50 percent of Bush supporters who got their news from PBS and NPR were."

The Atlantic, January/February 2004 "Al Franken Was Right"

 

[sk8m8]

Doris, exremely interesting post... just a thought, though. I think you mean the horrible "Judy Miller"; Judy Woodruff is a former sub anchor and reporter for the PBS News Hour and then CNN political reporter. Though Ms. Woodruff is not a heavy hitter in news journalism. I would defend her as not having sat in on White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which Ms. Miller did as pre Iraq war intelligence decisions were taking place. This is not conjucture, this is verifiable from the NY Times, Ms. Millers (soon to be ex-) employer.

The reason there is no PERCIEVED anti-war movement is that it is not a rating's bonanza story. "if it bleeds, it leads" is generally the attitude at most news outlets. CNN sits in my figuative back yard...WMDs and their non-/existence was not a sexy story, nor was outing a ultra-classified CIA operative. "Too complicated, Too obtuse for the average viewer with no attention span" is the thought of most news directors.

This all goes to a single point. News turned to info-tainment when it was forced into the competitive money making arena. It's much easier to maintain journalistic standards when ratings and money aren't involved. Suddenly News was a cheap alternative than having to produce all that pesky broacasting content. Subsequently, we got non-stop, around the clock stories about the "Runaway Bride" and gripping, world changing events like the Trial of Michael Jackson.

We used to have a country where News was sacrosanct. News was considered part of a Pulbic Service and responsibility that networks had provide in order to justify their licences. When cable came along, the decision was made at the networks that ALL resources, including the newsrooms, had to be part of turning a profit and becoming competitive in the marketplace. Hard News and Journalism took another heavy hit when deregulation hit and large media conglomerates begain to form.

The idea of a "Liberal Media" is so absurd as to be laughable. There are 5 major players in the media World ...Time Warner, Inc (and it's laughable ugly step sibling AOL), GE NBC's owner (a major supplier of defense equiptment), Vevendi/Universal CBS' owner and owner of media around the globe, Fox (the uber-con Murdoch who gained american citizenship only to find out it wasn't neccessary because the FCC raised the ban on foriegn entities owning American media outlets. Murdock also owns all Austrailian and a large percentage of European media markets & Disney, a huge media giant that owns ABC as well as many other news and media outlets. These companies control information flow by owning many stations as well as the content that appears on them.

Other large media conglomerates such as Cox Communicatons and Gannett are competing to be one of the big boys and their outlook and approach to News is basically "me too, me too" as they jockey for the size and power to sit around the table of corporate influence.

One last thought, this country became a much more dangerous place to be when people begin to lose interest in what the government is doing. ALL politics is local is not just a chestnut, it's trusim. If you don't think that decisions and policies made on Wall Street or in DC don't affect your life, just ask one of the thousands of residents in neighborhoods where crystal meth is ruining the fabric of the community or a rural area with a disproportionate number of body bags coming home from a foreign war (justified or not). And hey, you won't see that on TV either.

Though I consider myself a moderate democrat who sees the two major parties in denial because they've sold our soul to the devil to keep the gravy train running, I will vote for whoever starts making sense. You just can't let corporations own everything with no regulations and then keep on borrowing from the Chinese, the Saudi Arabians and the Japanese (these 3 countires own the majority of US Government Debt.) That being said, "the revolution will not be televised", to quote the old saying. Washington may burn, LA may smolder, however I Love Lucy will play while it happens and people will be GLUED to it.

Thank god for the internet and foreign press who, in some cases, cover the News as it used to be...."Just the facts, ma'me"

 

[dorispulaski]

sk8m8, You're absolutely right; I meant Judy Miller. Major brainfailure there.

Another contribution to the decline of news was the repeal of the Fairness standard, which I mistily remember happened either during the Reagan or Bush I presidency. The idea was that we no longer needed a Fairness or Equal Time standard when there were so many cable outlets. However, as you have correctly pointed out, there are only 5 media empires, despite the fact that they are running multiple channels. We need a fairness doctrine again.

Thank heaven for overseas coverage.

I found the Valerie Plame coverage to be some of the most egregiously and obviously just plain wrong.

Even more wrong was the outing of Brewster-Jennings to Novak. I would estimate that there were at least 20 other covert people outed when it was announced that Brewster-Jennings was a CIA front. They were probably running at least 50 or 60 foreign sources in addition. I keep wondering whether the extra star for that time frame on the CIA Wall of honor was a covert agent in that operation. And I wonder how many foreign sources were killed.

The idea that anyone covert in the CIA would tell all their neighbors is beyond ludicrous.

And the "I didn't know she was covert excuse is also ludicrous". Anyone who has ever held a security clearance knows that YOU are responsible for knowing what is classified and for knowing whether the person you are telling has a need to know before telling other people. The fact that neither Libby's nor Rove's security clearance was revoked is hugely telling of a level of staggering indifference to national security in this administration.
And the outing of Plame and Brewster-Jennings shows a criminal indifference to lives of all the agents and foreign sources with connections to Brewster-Jennings.

This is why you even have arch-conservatives like William F. Buckley writing that the outing of Plame was a dreadful thing. He once worked for CIA.

 

[ranjake]

Doris, the weird part of this lack of coverage -- the conservatives are always bitching about how LIBERAL the press is!!!! Excuse me, but if the mainstream media is that LIBERAL, why are they ignoring the anti-war movement and other social change movements????

Seems to me the conservatives are the ones who most benefit from the way news is covered in this country and yet they are constantly harping about how liberal media is. And then, they have all the Rush Limbaughs, Pat Buchanons, Sean Hannitys, Tucker Carlsons, Robert Novaks, and even Bill O'Reillys (Billy always claims he is not conservative, but how often does he take any liberal stands? and how often does he vilify the ACLU? OK, they often don't make logical sense to the rest of us, but their interior logic is consistant.)

They can sneer all they want about groups like MoveOn and TrueMajority and other liberals, but can they explain why, even with minimal press coverage, are President Bush's popularity polls plumeting?

i just have to tell you how GREAT i think your posts in this thread are! SO well said! i wish i had written them!!!!the "elite liberal media" is a total myth...

 

[Aloft04]

Here's a good article that speaks to the issue.

Published on Monday, November 7, 2005 by the Boston Globe
Antiwar Activists, Where Are You?
by Victoria A. Bonney

My fellow young Americans, the evidence is mounting that this war we are fighting in Iraq is not a ''just" war. No, this is a dirty fight, and we're in it for the long haul. But I guess that's the problem -- ''we" are not in it at all.

''We" are here in our land of iPods and cellphones, luxuriating in our apathetic comas while our soldiers are over there.

I know what you're thinking. You have that magnetic yellow ribbon on your SUV, and, boy, if that is not uber-effective I do not know what is. But let me ask you, if you'd just put your Podcast on pause and cellphone on silence for a moment, is this all enough?

Two wars ago, during the Vietnam disaster, there was Generation Activist. The youth of America rallied against ''the man." How did they do it? They didn't have e-boards or e-mail for that matter.

Yet somehow, this archaic mob of longhairs and peaceniks managed to mobilize. They marched on the National Mall. They protested everywhere, even in bed (refer to your hippie handbook, under John Lennon and Yoko Ono's ''bed-in"). Their methods were not always nonviolent, but they were creative and incorrigible.

Why is Generation Apathetic unable to have the same resounding roar?

For starters we have a woman from Generation Activist doing our dirty work. Former flower child Cindy Sheehan is out on the front lines with a pack of her patchouli-wearing alliances. What is the youth of America doing in the meantime?

We are watching it on our car television sets thinking about the jerk in front of us who is not driving fast enough.

It's not our fault that we all have Attention Deficit Disorder. We are conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to jump at the sound of ''You've got mail!" But we are in dereliction of our duty as a thorn in the side of authority. Our parents shouldn't have to bail us out of everything. So while we appreciate the help of Cindy and her comrades, this is our fight.

It's not only apathy that is killing the spirit of our generation, it's the execution of our dissidence. For some reason the youth of America think that violence is the most effective method of rebellion (albeit something we learned from our Playstations).

That brings us to another nifty way that the young inactivists of America are making life easier for our elected warmongers -- E-Marches.

Yes, E-Marches are the newest way to protest your government. All it takes is a double click and you will be part of a simulated march on Washington.

Oh, dear, sweet, well-intentioned youth, don't you see? Just as easily as you signed up to electronically protest your senators, they can delete you from their inbox. The Internet is a resource for sports scores, CliffsNotes, and porn -- not a venue for modern dissent.

We are a generation with potential coming out of our ears. We could move mountains if only we'd turn off our televisions. They only tell us we are powerless and to just give up.

So this is what you have to do. Tomorrow when you stop into Starbucks for your venti latte and the person behind the counter gives you your change, look at it. Look closely. There, written on your bills is our American mantra in a defunct language.

It says, ''E Pluribus Unum," which means, out of many, one. Let this be your daily reminder. Generation Apathetic, we are in this boat together.

It's up to us to chart a course. We cannot live our lives on cruise control.

Victoria A. Bonney is a senior at Endicott College.

© 2005 Boston Globe