Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Uncle Walter Speaks Out

It’s good to know that Walter Cronkite hasn’t faded away. I keep wishing for a mainstream journalist who wouldn’t be afraid to follow in Uncle Walter’s Vietnam footsteps and admit that the jig is up in Iraq, that no matter how much Americans might wish that there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. Perhaps Cronkite can inspire someone who has inherited an anchor desk since his heyday to step up and take on this challenge, among others.

Cronkite has been making himself available to young people and to journalists and is a reminder that television journalism doesn’t have to be idiotic marketeering. Television can and should be a way to educate citizens in a democracy. Cronkite presided over a period when CBS News regularly put out documentaries, broadcast in prime time, that took on some of the most important issues of the day and pulled them apart for a national viewing audience.

Today, he laments, "We [as a nation] are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders." He’s right to find much of the fault for this in the boardrooms of corporations that run the major television networks. As long they simply regard news as another profit center in a multinational business, the keepers of the public’s most immediate source of information ignore a higher duty— to make us aware of what’s really happening in our world.

Scott Martelle quoted Cronkite in the LA Times today as telling students that, "If we fail at that, our democracy, our republic, I think, is in serious danger."

DeLay, Then the Deluge

Enumerating the troubles in the Republican Party right now takes a little ink.

In addition to Tom DeLay's indictment, Michael Brown's resignation, the ongoing Abramoff lobbying scandal and the White House procurement office, the larger shocking impact of the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the upsurge in violence in Iraq, and Bill Frist's insider-trading scandal, there is still the looming spectre of Prosecutor Fitzpatrick's investigation into Karl Rove and his outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame waiting in the wings.

I think it's time for someone to print scorecards. It's going to be quite an autumn.

Let the Games Begin...

There goes DeLay …Rove next?

Time for the Big Boys to Step Up

I spent some time this morning looking at this past Sunday’s interview show clips on the net and I’m struck by something. I know I’m not the first to notice the shallowness of mainstream television, but it feels particularly sad to see the kind of bullsh*t, microscopic, gotcha journalism employed by the big boys right now, especially when the country is in such sad shape.

For example, I don’t know Aaron Broussard, the Jefferson Parish, LA President but I felt that there had to be better ways for Tim Russert to approach minor timeline issues in his previous appearance than to go after the man on nationwide television. This, in order to “set the record straight?”

Like an addict, I watch these shows on a regular basis, since they tend to become the basis for some of the nation’s political buzz during the week ahead and an indicator of how the mainstream media views the issues of the day. Watching this morning after having been in Washington on the ground this weekend, it’s a little harder to take the disconnect between what the opinion-makers seem to think is worthwhile and what people out there are actually going through.

Perhaps we’re better off sticking with print, reading the likes of guys like Bob Herbert and Seymour Hersh, who stay with an issue doggedly, as they have with the war in Iraq. Sometimes, a moral perspective isn’t 50/50 and doesn’t require the kind of cool distance that a Russert (who’s not alone in this) displays when debriefing a reporter back from the desert, as he did with Richard Engel the other day.

Sometimes, the carnage out there requires that the talking heads break away from the mother ship, like Walter Cronkite did during the Vietnam War, going there to see for himself what a disaster the whole enterprise really was.

I don’t know if any of the Sunday kings ever get fed up with what passes for real news, but I wish in troubled time like these that we might get a little more moral courage and just a little less ass-covering on the cool screen. It was a hopeful sign that many reporters during Katrina's aftermath spoke clearly about what was happening around them. I hope some of that outrage and truthtelling finds its way back to the studios in New York and DC.

Saturday

Another description of Saturday in Washington.

I wish you could all feel what it was like to know that the country is awakening and fighting back— with grace, wit, and in incredible numbers.

It’s just the beginning.

The Grey Lady Awakens...

This story headline reminds me of the National Lampoon spoof of the New York Post published during the 1980’s, which bore a banner about a nuclear attack on New York, “Michael Jackson and Millions Die.”

The NYTimes, which couldn’t bring itself to run a front page story when hundreds of thousands marched on Washington this weekend, now tries to make everything alright by reporting that Cindy Sheehan got arrested at the White House today.

I guess the celebrity focus is better than nothing, but geez guys, can you please get it together on the big story?

The Fulcrum Shifts on Iraq— and Bush

As Petula Dvorak's article in the Washington Post today aptly captures, the mood of the marchers yesterday in DC was truly electric as the White House came in view.

In the last few years, the opportunity to actually face the seat of this Administration’s power in any direct way has been kept from us. If this Administration wasn’t dragging off someone from a Bush campaign rally, it was busy vetting the audience for a Social Security phase-out Town Hall. Even a Gold Star mother was arrested by the Secret Service for having the temerity to suggest to Laura Bush that she send her kids off to Iraq. Chickenhawk neocon desk warriors were shielded from even the suggestion that THEIR children face the consequences of their quest for the imperial Holy Grail.

But all that has gone by the wayside since Hurricane Katrina blew the cover off the real priorities of this Administration. First, television journalists awoke in the flooding streets of New Orleans to realize how their somnolence has affected real people in the country-and they finally spoke the truth into the wind and water. Then we had Mississippi citizens bluntly telling the Vice President what he could do with himself while he preened live on CNN as a savior in the Gulf. Even some conservatives have realized that their President looks like a Manchurian Candidate, undermining their pet ideas with his Administration’s incompetence.

Yesterday’s march might just have marked the fulcrum’s shift; the subtle moment when what had been impossible is now inevitable.

We have three more years before another Presidential election, but the public is beginning to finally realize that we’re saddled with leadership that has lied us into a war gone bad, sat criminally negligent while our people drowned, spent us like drunken sailors into insane deficit, and now only dithers about how to provide relief without canceling any of it’s giveaways to the richest 1% of the population.

So it’s only right that the coalition out on the streets runs wide and deep on Pennsylvania Avenue. Signs like “Another Republican Against Bush’s War” and “Marine Mom Says Bring Them Home Now” rub up against a Katrina victim’s lament, “Make Levees, not War.” Vietnam vets march side by side with lesbian couples and union organizers, students and retirees. White, black, and colors in-between shout out rallying cries in several languages.

It’s time for coming together to save the country from the worst hijacking, the one that’s been ongoing since the Florida recount was cancelled in court.

It’s also time to get down to the serious reclamation work ahead— criminal investigations, independent commissions, soldiers coming home to take seats in Congress— truth-telling and setting right what has been so seriously put wrong.

Yesterday was a new beginning, but only a first step. Onward.

Washington Antiwar March Photo Essay

Go to this site for my photo essay about the March in Washington yesterday. The energy on the Mall and all the way to the White House was palpable and the demonstrators were both determined and, as you’ll see from many of the photos, in great humor as well.

Forget Handing Out Soccer Balls and Chocolate...

“It’s not about Hearts and Minds anymore. It’s about putting two in the heart and one in the mind.”

-Richard Engel, journalist
(quoting an American commander in Iraq on Tim Russert’s MSNBC show)

The White House Inundated with Antiwar Protesters

More later, but arriving back from DC, I’ve got to say I haven’t seen this diverse a group of people out in opposition to the war (or any other conflict) EVER.

DC today was full of protesters— all ages, in many shades of color and in several languages (a large number of Spanish speaking demonstrators), middle class, working people, students, even signs bearing slogans like “Republican Against the War” and “Republicans for Impeachment.”

The group had to number well over the 100,000 base expected and passing the White House was a sea of energized people. It was a pivotal day for the movement to end the war on Iraq and to prioritize resources where they’re needed.

A lot of people were making the connection to the disasters in the Gulf and the wasted human and economic capital stuck in the deserts and cities of Iraq.

I’ll post a link to a photo slide show sometime in the next day.