A Chapter from the Secret History of Bill Moyers ... On PBS, Moyers promotes the work of the late fascist eugenicist Joseph Campbell, whose work on myth is littered with racist machinations, a vicious anti-Semite who has proposed relocating Jewish people to the moon. Moyers seems to have no problem with that, though - as long as his audience doesn't know and he continues to reap his share of Campbell's book profits UNDER THE TABLE, a massive perk that he has publicly denied ...--------
Bill Moyers is the most visible "liberal" in the national media, and Amy Goodman's icon of progressive journalism. The Schumann Foundation, chaired by Moyers for years, has been busily shaping the mass-market progressive press. Television Quarterly, a journal of The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, ranks Moyers among the ten journalists who have most influenced television news. He has won more than 30 Emmys, a George Peabody award, a Ralph Lowell medal and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel. His documentaries have paid off handsomely in network fund drives. Several of his books have been best-sellers. The avuncular Moyers, a former Baptist minister from Marshall, Texas, has been an Arthur Morse Fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Social Research Institute.
But Moyers does not exactly strike a liberal profile if the lighting is cranked all the way up. Morley Safer of 60 Minutes fame recalls that, as President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, Moyers was responsible for the FBI's bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the leaking of transcripts to the media. Moyers denied the bugging and leaking allegations in a letter to The New Republic in 1991, but did allow that he leaked "information" only to "officials involved in national security." This much was confirmed by a Senate Intelligence Committee staff report released in 1976: "Moyers expressly approved the circulation within the Executive Branch of a secret FBI report on King."1
Moyers was also the instigator of a disgraceful episode at the White House, one that anticipated Nixon's "dirty tricks." His pissing match with Safer began in August, 1965, when CBS News reported that U.S. Marines had torched a village in Vietnam. The story was followed by public indignation and it fed the rising opposition to Johnson's escalation policy. CBS president Frank Stanton was called on the carpet for the exposé at a private meeting with LBJ and his Kennedy-coifed aide. LBJ told Stanton that Moyers had a damaging file on Safer compiled from the records of the FBI, CIA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The extortion "file" was an idle threat - it didn't exist. Unless Safer "cleaned up his act," the administration would "go public" with the CBS reporter's "communist ties." Safer scoffed at the accusation and held his job at CBS. Today, Moyers waves off the episode as "a bluff."2
Public television's premiere "liberal" is as practiced at the art of deception as he is blackmail. In October, 1977, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame reported in Rolling Stone that Bill Moyers ran a "super-secret" CIA task force mustered to study the feasibility of short-waving propaganda to the People's Republic of China. The project was overseen by the CIA's Cord Meyer, McGeorge Bundy, a national security advisor to Johnson, USIA director John Marks and Moyers.3
He certainly wore hawk feathers when taped in the White House by LBJ: "Mr. President, I would like to suggest that you really keep pressure on Bundy and Rusk and McCone and others to press forward on what we can do about Cuba - about subversion, espionage and intelligence. Now there are two reasons for this: One, I think we've got to do it. It's necessary. Cuba has got to be dealt with..."4
"Moyers regards himself as the `catalyst' of the Johnson administration," Current Biography (1966 edition) reported, "and Johnson has described him as my vice-president in charge of anything.'" Vice President Moyers became Hoover's pipeline to Johnson in 1964, after Walter Jenkins, his predecessor, was busted for "disorderly conduct" in a Beltway men's room.5
Moyers dropped from the sinking Johnson administration in 1967 to become publisher of Newsday in Long Island, then owned by millionaire Harry Guggenheim. Two years passed and Guggenheim confided to Moyers his intent in selling the newspaper. In an attempt to save his job, Moyers tried to interest CIA director William Casey, Chase Manhattan Bank, the New York Times and Time-Life in buying it. He moved on to PBS the same year – after Guggenheim reneged on bequeathing him his fortune, as promised – and joined the board of the Rockefeller Foundation where he remained for 17 years. In 1980, Moyers produced The World of David Rockefeller, an unabashed PR whitewash.
In 1976, CBS forgave his White House antics and drafted Moyers to the news division. Employees of the network recall him as "brilliant" ... also "duplicitous," "calculating," "cunning." Gordon Van Sauter, a right-wing CBS executive, recollects "a truly reprehensible human being."6 The multi-faceted news analyst dropped CBS two years later for PBS. In 1981, he bugged out once again when his contract at Bill Moyers' Journal expired and returned to CBS News. He passed through the revolving door, from corporate compromise to public pabulum, for years. "Everybody calls me Hamlet," he explains of his own seeming indecisiveness, "but I call it brilliance."7
Say what you will of Bill Moyers, his Muckrake Lite approach (fascism in government? No mention of the obvious ...) has actually served the public interest on occasion. His October, 1973 "Essay on Watergate," delivered on a program funded by the Ford Foundation, was a dirge that warmed the republic to Nixon's impending political collapse. His documentaries, What Can We Do About Violence?, Minimum Wages, and The Secret Government (it didn't tell the half the story) served the commonweal in their fashion.
But it is the larceny in his heart that TV Guide does not probe. Nowhere was his dark side more apparent than in his series of highly-publicized interviews with famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). A book based on the series was an immediate best-seller. Ruppert Murdoch's New York Post found it "provocative and inspirational."8 Truth to tell. The Power of Myth was an inspirational but deceitful promotion of a Nazi occultist, written by a vicious anti-Semite with ties to the American neo-Nazi underground. Promotion of the book was an unconscionable display of greed that would put a blush on the face of a fugitive financier.
After the series aired, the September 28, 1989 number of New York Review of Books published an article by Brendan Gill, a long-time friend of Campbell's at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Gill reports that in December 1941, three days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Campbell delivered a talk discouraging students from supporting American entrance into the war with Nazi Germany. Campbell soiled German author Thomas Mann, an exile in the States who had "lost altitude" as a writer by criticizing the Nazi Party. Mann, in a letter to Campbell, responded that he found this rebuke "strange," and pointed out that his books were "forbidden in Germany and in all countries that Germany rules, and whoever reads them or even should sell them, and whoever would so much as praise my name publicly would be put into a concentration camp and his teeth would be bashed in and his kidneys split in two. You teach that we must not get upset about that ... once again, this is strange."
Not necessarily, considering Campbell's unswerving anti-Semitism. Ms Carol Wallace recalled in a letter to NYRB: "In the early 1970s, I worked with Joe Campbell on his Mythic Image at Princeton University Press. It was amazing to me that this man of cosmic vision could harbor such mean-spirited and seemingly unexamined biases against much of humankind. In addition to anti-Semitism, I remember in particular his vexation over blacks' being admitted to Sarah Lawrence."9"When the astronauts landed on the moon," Gill recalled, "Joe made the repellent jest to a member of my family, who was a student of his at the time, that the moon would be a good place to put the Jews..."
A correspondent, Carol Luther of San Anselmo, California, wrote Gill to say that she once "attended a lecture in which Campbell recounted what he called a popular Indian fable (a favorite of Campbell's in old age), the gist of which was that we are not all mere mild grass-eating goats but, instead, are blood-thirsty, carnivorous tigers, who do well to prey upon whatever lower species of animal makes up our natural diet." Incited, Luther "rose shaking from my chair and shouted, 'What about the six million [Jews] who were gassed during World War II?'" In response, Campbell simply shrugged and spat, "That's your problem."
Joseph Campbell not only shrugged off the Holocaust – he was a major force in the racial eugenics movement until his death in 1997. For many years he sat on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly, the notorious "race journal" subsidized by the notorious Pioneer Fund. The Quarterly's founder, Robert Gayre, held that African-Americans are "worthless." The Quarterly was long published by Roger Pearson, an official of the pro-fascist Northern League, an organization that included among its ranks a number of veterans of Himmler's SS. Other prominent academics who contributed to the journal: Henry Garrett of the White Citizens Council, Ottmar von Verschuer, Josef Mengele's mentor, and Corrado Gini, an Italian biologist under Mussolini, author of The Scientific Basis of Fascism.10
But here he was on the "public" airwaves, discussing Buddha and the Burmese Snake Goddess and following his bliss with an obsequious, doe-eyed Bill Moyers.
Even the Campbell approach to myth recalled Nazi Germany – handed down from Carl Jung, editor of the ranking psychiatric journal of the National Socialist Party, whose books, translated in the United States with funding from Edith Rockefeller, reek of proto-Nazi occultism.11
The Power of Myth still reaps a windfall in donations to the network and its affiliates. A book based on the series was co-authored and edited with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by a consultant to the series, Betty-Sue Flowers, a former English professor at the University of Texas and director of the LBJ Library. John Trimble, a UT English professor who has known her for 30 years, calls Flowers "the female Bill Moyers." Like the original, she is comfortable in the boardroom and knows her way around Washington. The Austin American Statesman observed on April 7, 2002 that Flowers travels "in the world of multinational corporations – and once spent a couple of weeks in the Pentagon as a special advisor to the secretary of the Navy. "
The "female Bill Moyers" sits on the boards of Breckenridge Petroleum Co.12 Also the Arlington Institute, a research center in Virginia with blue-chip corporate and federal clients, a distinction Flowers shares with former CIA director James Woolsey, Gerald Ford appointee George H. Kuper, and Colin Crook, former chief technologist at Citicorp.13 The institute was founded in 1989 by John Peterson, formerly an official of the Institute for National Security Studies, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council.14
Like Joseph Campbell, Ms. Flowers is enrolled in the Jung school of comparative religion. Besides The Power of Myth, she edited Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (1996), a Jungian romp for corporate executives by tin-horn visionary Joseph Jaworski, son of the Watergate prosecutor appointed by then Attorney General Robert Bork, Leon Jaworski.15
Fascination with Nazis is apparently imprinted on the Jaworski phenotype. A repugnant hallmark of Leon Jaworski's career was his release of Nazis to the American intelligence services as a Nuremberg war crimes trial prosecutor. He also worked with the Red Cross International Rescue Division to relocate SS officers around the world. In exchange, he was made chairman of Houston's Red Cross chapter in 1954.16 Other blots on the old man's résumé include his legal work for the Warren Commission. Despite a career of collaboration with fascists, he was endowed with every honor the legal profession has to offer.17 He was "very close" friend of George H.W. Bush, and supported his fellow Houstonian in his 1980 bid for president.18
"The constant act of being true to oneself – authentic in thought, work and deed – is what carves the path in front of you, a path you can't predict," Flowers says. Who could predict that the bubbly former beauty pageant contestant, feminist, poet and Jungian from Austin would make a splash promoting the work of a Nazi mystic for PBS, and pouring on a lubricious New Age veneer?
Perdido magazine had it in a review of Synchronicity: "Jaworski begins by telling the story of his father, Leon Jaworski, a nationally prominent litigator, and his role as special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal. 'The Colonel,' as Jaworski called his father, related the dimensions of the conspiracy to his son one day, before the details of the Watergate tapes became public. Watergate marked a significant revelation in Joe Jaworski's life, the realization that a crisis in leadership existed in this country. With an immensely personal style, Jaworski examines the experiences of his life that seemed to transcend the moment, that were guided by some unseen hand." In 1990, Jasworski was hired by Royal Dutch/Shell Oil in London to direct a multinational panel on future "global scenarios."
Jung defined synchronicity as "a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved."
Synchronicity
Every turn in this story leaves chance begging for something to do. The main beneficiary in the pimping of Joseph Campbell was the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) when presided over by Robert Coonrod. Coonrod was executive VP and chief operating officer of Voice of America for five years. In 1992 ,VOA director Richard Carlson moved to CPB and Coonrod followed. When Carlson set sail in April, 1997 to run King World Public Television, Coonrod was promoted to head up CPB.19
Under President George W. Bush, the CPB was overseen for one year by CEO Kathleen Cox. Executive vice president and CEO Ken Ferree succeeded her as interim president in April 2005. Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told Media Week that Cox’s departure was integral to a plan to bring public television and radio into line with right-wing policies. "The ideologically driven majority on the board is pursuing a zealous campaign to promote conservative/GOP-approved public broadcasting programming,” Chester said. Ferree, who hailed from Michael Powell's FCC, joined the CPB one month before his the promotion was announced. At the FCC, Ferree served as chief of the media division, where he paved the way for greater corporate control of the airwaves.20
Also in April 2005, CPB announced the appointment of two "ombudsmen" to monitor "public" programming:
FIRST OMBUDSMEN NAMED
TO CRITIQUE PUBLIC TV, RADIO
PBS Online Newshour
Feb. 18, 2005
CPB, a nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967 to distribute federal funds to public broadcasters, appointed former NBC newsman Ken Bode and former Reader's Digest editor William Schulz to the new positions of CPB ombudsmen.
The two ombudsmen will choose which programs to review after they air. Bode and Schultz will initiate their own reports about the journalistic impartiality, balance and accuracy in such programming, and respond to issues raised by the public and government officials, according to CPB's ombudsman charter.
The appointments come amid long-running criticism that public broadcasting programs regularly present a liberal bias. In February, PBS found itself the latest target of criticism, including from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, over its plans to air a children's show, Postcards from Buster, in which Buster the Bunny visits a lesbian couple living on a farm in Vermont. …
Corporate conservatives and political careerists with intelligence ties hold a clear majority on the CPB board:
Kenneth Tomlinson, who served two years as director of Voice of America under President Reagan, is chair.
Frank Cruz, founder of Gulf-Atlantic Life Insurance Co., is vice-chairman.
Ernest J. Wilson III, a CPB director, has, according to the CPB web site, "served in senior positions in the White House, the U.S. Information Agency, the private sector and in the academy. Formerly the Director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, Dr. Wilson is a Professor of Government and Politics and Afro-American Studies." He is a senior advisor to the Global Information Infrastructure Commission. Wilson was first appointed by President Clinton to the CPB Board in September 2000, and re-appointed by President George W. Bush in November 2004.
Gay Hart Gaines, a 2003 Bush appointee, is a member of the Ultracon American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. She is also a former board member of the Hudson Institute. Gaines chaired GOPAC (1993-97) and the National Review Institute (1991-93). She is a trustee of the Palm Beach Co., Florida Republican Party.
Beth Courtney, appointed to the CPB board by George W. Bush in 2003, is married to Bob Courtney, president of Courtney Communications in Baton Rouge, LA.
Katherine Milner Anderson of Alexandria, VA was associate director of President Clinton's cabinet office from 1983 to 1984.
Cheryl F. Horton is a former director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. From 1995-2002, she was a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a panel with oversight responsibilities over Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Iraq.
Claudia Puig, a Cuban-American, has been with Univision Radio since 1997. She sits on the board of trustees of Florida International University, the Florida Association of Broadcasters and the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.
Recent departures from the board include Winter Horton, who hails from the communications staff of Republican Senator Robert F. Bennett of Utah, formerly director of Mullen and Co. – the notorious CIA proprietary housed in the same building as the CIA's domestic operations division, employer of E. Howard Hunt in his glory days.21 Christy Carpenter, another board member who recently moved on, is former vice-president of the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm, a cover for CIA and military covert operations, and a branch office of Oliver North's illicit arms brokerage at the NSC. Heidi Schulman, who recently resigned from the board, came from the U.S. Information Agency, the CIA/State Department disinformation front, home of "public diplomacy."22
The Congressional Pike Report on the CIA, leaked to the Village Voice and published in February 1976, notes that if the sum of all media and propaganda projects could be determined, these would constitute "the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken by the CIA." The said actions included "support of friendly media." The information flow "has been threatened [and] there are disturbing indications that the accuracy of many news stories has been undermined as well."23 The relationship hasn't changed over the years and PBS is very "friendly media."
This alliance recruited Charlie Rose to "public" television, a CBS newscaster for many years and before that an executive producer for Bill Moyers.
Some media activists sneer at the "public" facade of PBS. Under Coonrod, Minneapolis media critic Rob Levine observes, the network "eased its financial burden by watering down content to attract corporate underwriting." As a result, "public television is rarely worth watching anymore"24
Much of the network's backing comes from corporate foundations. Activist James Petras: "the CIA uses philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money." Since its creation, "the CIA's intrusion into the foundation field was and is huge."25
The same goes for the "public" airwaves. CEO Kevin Klose is the type who holds court over at National Public Radio; before joining the network, he was broadcast director of the U.S. Information Agency, the aforementioned international propaganda mill that dominated VOA and Radio Marti. The About.Com web site reports that the "public" radio czar has planted CIA trainees in psychological operations at NPR during his tenure there - demonstrating a dangerously close connection between U.S. disinformation campaigns overseas and the domestic 'public' radio network."26
The influence of the CIA and the foundations on the "alternative" media is erosive. "Welcome to a political culture defined by the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment …" Alexander Cockburn wrote in a 1997 Nation column. "What's impressed me most about ideological supervision in America on the liberal end of the spectrum is how well engineered the control systems are. "Left-wing organizations controlled, tainted or polluted by the lure of big money include:
The Pacifica Network - This insular pillar of the left was founded on the inviolate principle of listener sponsorship. But when the books were last examined, the Pacifica administration held some $270,000 in corporate stock. The network was subsidized by the Ford Foundation in the late 1990s. Carnegie Corporation and the Public Welfare Foundation also threw in generously to Pacifica, and the administration is indebted to CPB, which has subsidized 20 percent of the budget of Pacifica's station in the District of Columbia, since the early 1970s. The Pacifica Foundation executive director at the height of a well-publicized attempted coup was Lynn Chadwick, hailing from a number of CPB committees. Chadwick is also closely allied of former VOA deputy director Robert Coonrod, and received the CPB Edward Murrow Award in 1995. In 1997, Chadwick was an organizer of CPB's 30th anniversary bash.
The tumult they wrought peaked with the Listener Revolt of 1999. Pacifica, the most prominent progressive radio network in the country, is emerging from its struggle with the CIA-corporate axis licking its wounds. And Pacifica remains heavily infiltrated.
Peter Franck, Pacifica Foundation president from 1980-84, observed at a recent panel discussion that a "flying wedge from Washington" has exploited "a structural weakness that's always existed in Pacifica." The network, says Franck, is perceived by Washington power brokers as "a dangerous institution and there is a strong impetus from Washington to mute it. It's no accident that one of the first targets of bombing in Belgrade was a television station. Media and information are very important, are very powerful and very subversive, especially when you're trying to create a consensus, and you have a major national network that can reach 25 percent of the U.S. population."27
There is a vast divide between listener-sponsored and government-run radio, says Bob Feldman, a New York writer active in the Free Pacifica movement. "Around 1986, the Pacifica administration began accepting CPB sponsorship of its radio network, while Pacifica stations, including KPFK in Los Angeles, continued to promote themselves as a listener-sponsored media alternative to government-sponsored NPR and PBS stations."28
"It's crossing a very important line when those who run Pacifica are satanized," complained corporate loyalist Marc Cooper on the air.
Along with CPB grants came infiltration, lock-outs, lawyers, union busting, censorship and livid listener protest. On one side stood the banned and the fired, on the other Coonrod and his painted ladies of the left inside Pacifica, most prominent among them political oommentators Marc Cooper and David Corn of The Nation.
The Nation - "If history teaches anything," to pluck a leave from Ronald Reagan's tree of wisdom, "it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly." At The Nation, self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is the routine. This bastion of "liberal" thought flamed Oliver Stone for proposing in JFK that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA dupe. David Corn, the magazine's Washington editor, bills himself as an authority on the intelligence sector but denies CIA drug allegations. (Could one of the magazine's key funding sources, the JM Kaplan Fund with its reputation as a CIA bank, have anything to do with The Nation's position on the Kennedy murder and the CIA's adventures in the narcotics trade?) After 9/11, Katrina vanden Heuval, the "liberal" editor of The Nation - and grandaughter of the mobbed-up founder of MCA, Jules Stein - knew war fever. G.W. Bush's war, she wrote with professor Joel Rogers in the Los Angeles Times, "presents the opportunity of a lifetime." After all, war "heightens social solidarity," those flags flapping from every Nissan, "while underscoring the need for government and other social institutions that transcend or replace the market." Pass the champagne and condoms, please. War heaves tax revenues into the defense industry's pyres of waste.
The Nation also belched smoke at the Pacifica crisis. And had a shameful secret to conceal – its own staff was implicated in attempts to destroy the network. In the May 19, 1999 issue, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor to the magazine and host of Pacifica's RadioNation, attributed the struggle at the network to a disagreement over policy, and characterized critics as "virulent and irrational" after the firing of the Berkeley station manager aroused "all their worst conspiracy fears."
The Nation's coverage of the coup has generally leaned to the "left eating its own" cover story. One reason the magazine balked at endorsing the democratization of Pacifica, Feldman says, is because the CPB chairman (1996-97) was Clinton-Gore fundraiser Alan Sagner, a financial backer of The Nation. After his term at CPB ended, Sagner "continued to sit on the CPB board of directors until his term as a director expired at the end of 1998." The Nation supporter "was thus apparently one of the Clinton White House appointees who approved former VOA deputy director Robert Coonrod's selection as CPB president and CEO. [Sagner] was also apparently one of the CPB board members responsible for allowing the current situation of free speech denial and listener-sponsor/staff disenfranchisement at the CPB-funded Pacifica radio stations to develop."29
Such conflicts are not unusual at The Nation. The magazine's
Washington editor, David Corn, boasted in a November 9, 2001 AlterNet posting that he "had been dispatched to Trinidad by the U.S. State Department to conduct a two-day seminar on investigative reporting for local journalists." Reporters who avoid conflicting with the interests of their readers are not "dispatched" by the State Department, a branch of government that has no use for dissident writers and has been known to plot their deaths.
The Nation, like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), is generously supported "by foundations controlled by extremely wealthy folks," Feldman says. "In 1992, for instance, the Nation Institute received at least $85,000 worth of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Diamond Foundation, the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation and the [Moyers controlled] Schumann Foundation."
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) - For years, checks to FAIR, the media watchdog, have been written by the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, based in Montclair, New Jersey. Reporter Rick Edmunds, in a study distributed by the Poynter Institute, an environmental think-tank, recalls that "Schumann made a rare appearance in a number of newspaper stories in late 1999" with the revelation that Bill Moyers [drew] a salary of $200,000 per year as Foundation president.30
The foundation is a clot of conflicted interests. Joan Konner, former publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, was a director of Schumann Foundation in the late 1990s. In the same period, Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation gave CJR a $1 million-plus grant.31
Like its chairman, the Foundation's "progressive" reputation is a bloated hot air balloon. Schumann is heavily invested in oil, tobacco, war and media conglomerates. According to a 1999 IRS form, Schumann's $92 million portfolio included shares in Lockheed Marietta ($196,000), Raytheon ($185,000), Viacom ($1.1 million), Cablevision Systems Inc. ($1 million), Time-Warner ($723,000), Seagram ($225,000), Philip Morris ($343,000) and Exxon Mobil ($1 million). Dividends for 1999 alone totaled a net of $2.7 million.
Most programs aired by NPR conclude with the announcement, "Made possible by generous grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ..." Yet CounterSpin, FAIR's syndicated radio program, offers no such announcement. The ethics of an "anti-corporate media" watch group that relies on corporate foundation grants are highly dubious.
Feldman: "It doesn't seem politically appropriate for foundation-subsidized, anti-corporate journalists to engage in alternative media empire-building activity or to promote the censorship of conspiracy researchers on Pacifica's airwaves. The for-profit telecommunications corporation which helps fund and promote FAIR, Working Assets Inc., takes in about $140 million a year in revenue."32
The "non-profit" organization is doing just fine, thank you. According to FAIR's 990 form, CounterSpin "costs about $43,000 a year to produce. Yet the same 990 form indicates that FAIR's total expenditures for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2000 was $912,201. Between 1998 and 2000, FAIR's Jeff Cohen was receiving $41,000 a year from part-time executive director/vp job at the same time the Murdoch media conglomerate was apparently paying him about $12,500 a year for just an hour a week on its NewsWatch panel show.
In recent years, Janine Jackson, Counterspin co-host, has been engaged in the founding of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting [CIPB]. According to the 2002 Foundation Directory, Feldman notes, the CIPB president "is long-time PBS commentator Bill Moyers. So don't expect CounterSpin to allow CIPB to reform the public broadcasting system beyond the political parameters set by Bill Moyers."
Now, where are the most knowledgeable spokesmen of the left to challenge the intelligence community and its deepest lies, the fascist geoplolitics of the corporations? They are not to be found at FAIR, NPR or any of the other foundation-supported "progressive" pabulum factories. Legitimate reporting on truly hardcore issues, particularly fascism in American politics, far-right conspiracies, has been banned from the most accessible organs of the left. Representatives of the anti-fascist left have been, rare exceptions aside, shut out entirely.
NOTES
1) David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972), p 437.
2) Laurence Jarvik, PBS: Behind the Screen, (Forum, 1997), pp. 58-9.
3) Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, October 1977, p. 63.
4) Bill Moyers taped at the LBJ White House, February 8, 1964, from Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964, (Touchstone 1997).
5) Halberstam.
6) Peter J. Boyer, Who Killed CBS? (Random House, 1988), pp. 334-54.
7) Ibid.
8) http://www.pbs.org/whatson/press/aug01/campbell.html
9) New York Review of Books, November 9, 1989, letters section.
10) HYPERLINK http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/019.html http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/019.html
11) Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ, New York, Random House, 1997.
12) Texas Secretary of State Business Organization Inquiry, April 25, 2002.
13) http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/about_tai/board_of_directors.html
14) HYPERLINK http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/about_tai/john_petersen.html http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/about_tai/john_petersen.html
15) Anonymous, "Special Prosecutor Jaworski well known in Geronimo," New Braunfels Herald, November 8, 1973.
16) Anonymous, "Jaworski Elected by Red Cross," Houston Post, May 3, 1954.
17) Jack Keever, "Jaworski recalls varied career in state bar tape," Daily Review, Athens,Texas, December 12, 1984.
18) "Leaders from many fields to attend Jaworski rites," Houston Post, December 11, 1982.
19) Steve Behrens, "Coonrod, new president at CPB, a diplomat by career and style," Current, Oct. 6, 1997.
20) Todd Shields, "CPB Chief Out; Former FCC Staffer Ferree In," Media Week, April 11, 2005.
21) HYPERLINK http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/07.03.97/scoop-9727.html http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/07.03.97/scoop-9727.html
22) HYPERLINK http://www.cpb.org/about/corp/bios/board/ http://www.cpb.org/about/corp/bios/board/
23) CIA: The Pike Report (Spokesman Books, 1977).
24) Rob Levine, "Money Public Radio,"
HYPERLINK http://www.citypages.com/databank/23/1107/article10161.asp?page=4 http://www.citypages.com/databank/23/1107/article10161.asp?page=4
25) James Petras, "The Ford Foundation and the CIA," December 15, 2001. HYPERLINK http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/ford010102.htm http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/ford010102.htm
26) HYPERLINK http://pirateradio.about.com/library/hos/blhoskklose.htm http://pirateradio.about.com/library/hos/blhoskklose.htm
27)http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Pacifica/franckint.htm
28) Bob Feldman, "Listener-Sponsored Radio versus Corporation for Public Broadcasting-Sponsored Radio," July 22, 1999, in e-mail to the author.
29) Bob Feldman, "Nation Magazine's CPB Connection," February 21, 1999, HYPERLINK http://www.radio4all.org/fp/sagner.htm http://www.radio4all.org/fp/sagner.htm
30) HYPERLINK http://www.poynter.org/centerpiece/foundations/dart.htm http://www.poynter.org/centerpiece/foundations/dart.htm
31) Bob Feldman e-mail to author, April 21, 2002.
32) Bob Feldman, 5-23-02 email to author.
