“I’m sort of amazed,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a prominent Jewish human rights group, told AFP.
“It has become our business, because in my opinion, there would be a great distortion of history” were Pius XII to be elevated to sainthood, he said.
“Pius XII sat in stony silence” as the most egregious crimes against Jews took place. In 1941, when massacres began, “you’d expect to see a thick file” of cases in which he sought to intervene.
“But you do not,” Hier noted. In addition, Pius’s predecessor, Pius XI, wrote an encyclical about anti-Semitism. Yet instead of publishing it or drawing attention to it, Pius XII buried it, Hier noted.
“These were turbulent times. You had people who stood up to dictators. Pius (XII) did not,” Hier stressed.
During this campaign, comedy shows like Saturday Night Live and Bill Maher and shows like The View did the job that the corporate media and its hirelings were too intimidated to do. The right’s coming down hard on Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann for their comments about the Republicans prompted NBC heads to travel to Minneapolis hat in hand and beg forgiveness from these Republican bullies. For going along to get along, Imus defender David Gregory was given the plum job as host of Meet The Press. Of Pope Benedict, the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Bill Maher said, “Whenever a cult leader sets himself up as God’s infallible wing man here on Earth, lock away the kids,” he laughed. “I’d like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult,” Maher said. “Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats.” By contrast, MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell and CNN’s Kyra Phillips tee-heed all over themselves as they anticipated the Pope’s plane landing in Washington. This is the Kyra Phillips who said that she was “outraged” by the way Michael Vick treated those pit bulls (and asked a black guest whether dog fighting was “cultural.”) She cares more about the fate of pit bulls than the victims of child abuse. Jonathan Capehart, who like Juan Williams was brought on by the white men who run the media to diss Rev. Wright, said that he was “nervous” about what to call the Pope. “Your highness?” “Your holiness?”
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, one of those who worked the Wright story to death, could have questioned the pope about the pedophilia cover-up and the revival of the Latin Mass, but he said that he was so much in “awe” of the Pope that he was rendered speechless when he and other journalists were invited to question the Pope.
ABC’s Cokie Roberts hitched a ride with the Bushes who were on the way to greeting the Pope. Mrs. Roberts complained during one session of ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos about Barack Obama’s audacity to run for president during a year when it was possible for a woman to be elected. She was clearly annoyed.
While Barack Obama and Rev. Wright were twinned (ads also appeared linking him to O.J. Simpson and Kwame Kilpatrick), the associations of John McCain, who once called the media his base, were underplayed.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote about McCain’s appearance before the Associated Press: “The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist.” (An AP questioner that day mistakenly referred to the Al Qaeda mastermind as “Obama bin Laden.” At one point, Stephanopoulos asked McCain about his soliciting the support of Rev. Hagee who has made anti-Catholic statements. McCain said that Rev. Hagee was good for Israel even though his position is similar to that of the Latin Mass, that Jews must be converted in order for the Rapture to occur. George Stephanopoulos doesn’t know this apparently and asked no follow-up question. Unlike Obama, who distanced himself from the comments of Rev. Wright, McCain said that he disagreed with Hagee’s position, but still welcomed his endorsement, which he solicited. Predictably, there was no ratings-driven outrage resulting from McCain’s reaffirming his embrace of Rev. Hagee.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton became, in Pat Buchanan’s words, “the coal miner’s daughter,” in an effort to win the votes of beer drinkers, hunters and bowlers. This hundred-million-dollar-plus populist, who opposed women on welfare continuing their college education, joined Senator McCain (who, with his hundred-million-dollar wife, owns eight homes), and a bunch of rich columnists, David Brooks, William Kristol, and confessed white supremacist George Will (FAIR), in criticizing Obama for his remark about people in small towns (The headline on Lou Dobbs’ show read “Obama slams small towns”) being bitter about government. Wall Street’s Lou Dobbs said that the remark was “ignorant.”
The media consensus was that Obama had insulted these god-fearing salt-of-the-earth types with his comment about their being bitter. How did the salt feel? Zogby Poll on April 17 reported that, “Pennsylvanians by a two-to-one margin (sixty percent to twenty-nine percent) are more likely to agree with supporters of Obama that voters in Pennsylvania are bitter about their economic situation than with Clinton and critics of Obama that he is an elitist who does not understand working people.” Yet, on April 28, big bucks reporter Andrea Mitchell, appearing on her MSNBC show, said that Barack’s remark constituted a “self-inflicted wound.” April 28 saw an all-day ignorant reply to a speech made by Rev. Wright at the National Press Club where he was subjected to a third- degree grilling by a woman who admitted that she hadn’t read Wright’s entire speech during which “controversial” remarks were made. Neither did the usual upscale entertainers posing as journalists. Though Rev. Wright said that his was not a “liberation theology” they kept referring to it as such. MSNBC’s Dan Abrams sicced some members of the black right on Rev. Wright: Michelle Bernard, and Rev. Sun Moon’s Tara Wall. Bush’s preacher, Rev. Eugene Rivers, was also brought in. Just as MSNBC didn’t check the connections of its military experts to defense contractors, apparently, Rivers’ background hasn’t been vetted. Joe Klein, who rose to power by dissing black culture, so much that FAIR dubbed him “a white militant,” harshly questioned Wright’s patriotism, as though Klein had a tiny flag waving from every orifice of his body. Tucker Carlson termed Obama’s remarks about Wright “pathetic.”
There’s something deranged about a corporate media that would engage in character assassination against Rev. Wright for his views, yet praise a man who tried to cover up the destruction of thousands of lives. But the people who own the media have found that character assassination and driving a wedge between different groups is a moneymaker. One is reminded that the introduction of the 1830s penny press featured sensational reporting of the autopsy of a black woman whom P.T. Barnum claimed was George Washington’s nurse. This was the O.J. story of the time. The modern media continues features that were perfected by the circus. Jonathan Klein told his token Latino commentator, right-wing Cuban Rick Sanchez, who wants New Orleans to become a Mexican-American city, that the issue of race was something that could make big bucks, according to The New York Observer.
When the primaries began to move west, the lead became something about the long-standing enmity between blacks and Latinos. It’s certainly there. Strife between blacks and Latinos on the school playgrounds and in prisons. (In California’s Central Valley there is conflict between Latinos and immigrants from South East Asia.) There are also tensions between Mexican immigrants and blacks, which is understandable since the Mexican media runs the kind of images of blacks that in the United States have been consigned to the Jim Crow museum at Ferris State University, except for the kind of materials that the Republican Party uses from time to time. But could Latino-black relations be more complex than a sensational cable news lead?