AIM Report: Yellow Press Promotes Red Rally - October B
October 19, 2005 Even the Washington Post's media reporter, Howard Kurtz, admitted after the fact the press did a "poor job" of describing the communists behind the demonstration. But it was worse than poor. It was deliberate deception.
Ms. Petula Dvorak's Washington Post story about the September 24 "anti-war" rally used a strategy that has been employed in the past by reporters anxious to avoid any mention of how communists run these events. She decided to focus on the dupes in the crowd. Dvorak reported, "The demonstration drew grandmothers in wheelchairs and babies in strollers, military veterans in fatigues and protest veterans in tie-dye."
AIM covered the event and posted photographs of some of the communist banners and signs on our website.
Even the Washington Post's media reporter, Howard Kurtz, admitted after the fact the press did a "poor job" of describing the communists behind the demonstration. But it was worse than poor. It was deliberate deception.
Imagine what the reaction of the media would be if it had been discovered that the Ku Klux Klan had played a key role in putting on a pro-war demonstration in the nation's capital. Do you think reporters would ignore that evidence? Or would they jump on it, doing stories and follow-up stories about how this came about, who was responsible, and whether it would ever happen again?
Deception
On the matter of who was actually in charge of the rally, a simple Google search could have uncovered information showing the connection between International ANSWER, the main march organizer, and the communist Workers World Party. The media deliberately ignored this information because there was an obvious effort to keep the American people in the dark about the nature of the "anti-war" movement.
By its own admission, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) paid the full costs of the stage, sound and setup at the rally. The group's leaders, including Brian Becker, come out of the Workers World Party. This is a group so extreme in its adulation for anti-American dictators that honest liberals like David Corn of The Nation magazine have recoiled in dismay over how many people on the left associate with them.
The immediate aim is to defeat the U.S. in Iraq by creating the impression that the American people are tired of the war and want to withdraw U.S. troops.
Some would argue that it's a sign of America's strength that we permit communists to openly demonstrate on U.S. soil against American policies. But it's a sign of the weakness and corruption of our media that the key role being played by the communists is being carefully concealed from the American people.
A newspaper with an honest editorial page, Investor's Business Daily, declared that the role of the Workers World Party was an absolutely critical fact. The paper said, "ANSWER is a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party. And any group that qualifies for that epithet in front of its name deserves special scrutiny, since Josef Stalin was responsible for the murder of as many as 25 million human beings."
We had wondered what the reaction of the press would have been if the KKK had organized a Washington rally. Investor's Business Daily brought up another scenario and said, "Imagine for a moment it was a different group that sponsored the demonstration—say, a neo-Nazi group. Think The Washington Post and other media would report that? You bet they would. After all, Adolf Hitler and his thugs were some of the worst mass murderers of all time. We would expect—no, demand—media to report that a demonstration attended by hundreds of middle class moms, concerned fathers and pacifist students was in fact organized by Brownshirts."
The paper asked, "So why do communists—particularly those who march under Stalin's flag—get different treatment? And why do thousands of average people feel comfortable marching arm in arm with them?"
Speaking of the Post, the paper never published a letter from John J. Tierney countering a Post "news" article about his views on the "anti-war" movement.
Censoring The Truth
The Post story by Dana Milbank and Alan Cooperman ridiculed Tierney, author of The Politics of Peace, for "seeing red" and allegedly telling a Heritage Foundation event that anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan was an "anti-American communist." Tierney told AIM that he never made such a charge. His book is published by the Capital Research Center.
His never-published letter said this:
"Your August 31 article 'Conservative Author Is Seeing Red in America' both simplifies and distorts my message about anti-American organizations attempting to co-opt the peace movement. I never accused Cindy Sheehan or any individual anti-war activist of being a 'communist.' My point was that several core groups masquerade as 'peace' activists but are, in fact, rooted in and driven by extreme, leftist ideologies, some including standard communistic socio/economic interpretations. My message to peace activists was a straightforward heads-up about the anti-American wolves who have donned doves' clothing."
So the Post lied about Tierney. And it refused to expose the wolves.
Anti-American Bent
Anybody who listened to Becker and many of the other speakers couldn't help but notice the rhetoric denouncing imperialism. This was Marxism openly on display.
Speakers depicted the U.S. and Israel as the main enemies. The heroes were Hugo Chavez, the anti-American ruler of Venezuela, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. But reporters for the liberal papers decided to ignore these speeches in order to emphasize so-called average folks who showed up. The Post, for example, focused on a Catholic Sister named Maureen Metty, attending her first-ever political rally.
Sister Metty should have been asked what the late Pope John Paul II would have thought about a Catholic nun participating in a pro-communist rally when he had played such a key role in bringing about the fall of Soviet-style communism.
The veil came off when one of the leaders of the WWP and ANSWER posted an article urging "solidarity" with the "Iraqi fighters" and "resistance" killing American troops and innocent civilians in Iraq. The article, "Iraqi resistance earns world's respect," was posted on the website of the Workers World Party (WWP) and is written by John Catalinotto, a WWP veteran who also represents International ANSWER, the WWP front organizing and sponsoring the protest.
The Catalinotto article stated that it is appropriate "that the U.S. anti-war movement, especially the serious opponents of imperialism, think of the Iraqi resistance as an important ally…The duty of the movement here is to join the struggle to make the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq impossible and to do this in solidarity with the Iraqi sisters and brothers who have stopped the empire in its tracks."
We were tipped off about the article by Herbert Romerstein, a former government investigator into communist strategy and tactics who produced a 1974 congressional study, "The Workers World Party and its Front Organizations," examining how the organization manipulated innocent people into supporting communist regimes and Arab terrorism. Romerstein said that the Catalinotto article reveals the real intentions of the protest organizers. "They've finally come out in the open," he said. "They've pretended to be for peace. But they're really a solidarity group for Al-Qaeda and the terrorists in Iraq. The Marxist-Leninists and the Islamic fundamentalists are now allied against the United States."
Another Dishonest Performance
The dishonesty of our media was also on display at the New York Times, which ran a story by Michael Janofsky referring to the main sponsor of the rally, the ANSWER Coalition, as representing "a wide range of progressive political objectives…" This is comparable to saying that V.I. Lenin was a liberal activist.
In fact, AIM editor Cliff Kincaid picked up a copy of the "selected writings" of Lenin on "National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism" at the rally. It was available at the literature table of the Workers World Party.
Feeding The Press
AIM editor Kincaid also attended a news conference in Washington on September 1 that outlined the plans for the September 24 protest. He witnessed how the radical operatives carefully attended to the needs of the press, offering special access, interviews and information.
Reporters for major media, including the Post and Times, were singled out on a first-name basis.
One target was Elizabeth White, a writer for Associated Press, a national news service. She produced exactly what the ANSWER crowd wanted. Her story, which circulated nationally and was so sympathetic to the protest that it was distributed by ANSWER to its own email list, did not contain any hint that there was anything controversial about the rally or its organizers.
This is how the communists manipulate our press. That it happens time after time demonstrates the problem we face as a nation as we struggle with a menace, fanatical Islam, more insidious than the international communist movement. |
