h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

WebWitch posted this at my homepage and I thought I should copy it here FYI:


Having just read your column on the Peace Marches, I'd like to add a couple of bits of info to the mix:

1. Academics and intellectuals have *not* ignored the situation. They have spoken out in their hundreds and thousands, over and over again, despite being targetted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (http://www.goacta.org/flashindex.html), a right-wing organisation headed by Lynne Cheyney, wife of the Vice-Pres. This organisation maintains and makes public a list of anti-war/anti-Bush administration intellectuals and academics, labelling them "unpatriotic", and lobbying to have them either sued to shut up or fired. The ACTA published in Feb 2002 a document entitled 'Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It', outlining its attitude to "unpatriotic" educators and educational institutions. You can find articles about this at:

The Guardian (2001): http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4322832,00.html

Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1213-05.htm

The National Catholic Reporter: http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/121401/121401o.htm

It's all just so much worse than you might have thought... Of course, you won't find this in mainstream US news, because:

2. The US news services have failed to provide decent investigative reports for many year, mainly due to finances. They have to run their news stations as businesses, not public services, and so cannot afford to offend their sponsors (some years ago Chrysler, for example, sent out a letter requiring over 100 local newspapers, radio stations, and TV news stations to sign a form giving the company a veto on any news stories it didn't approve of. Almost every letter came back with the form signed). They also have to make a profit, and, as Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com), the man who broke the story of the voting irregularities in Florida and other states in 2000, explains investigative reporting requires heavy investment. The mainstream commercial US press has a long history of accepting press-releases from the government as fact, without checking up. The 1991 Gulf War highlighted the extent of the US press's complicity when it had every press company sign a contract stating that they would only report what the US government gave them permission to report. Only the British news media refused. So add this abject failure in the area of investigative reporting (Greg Palast tells a fab story: when he submitted his story on the Florida voting irregularities to a major US news company, they told him they couldn't accept it because it was factually inaccurate. He asked how they'd found inaccuracies, and they said "We phoned Jeb Bush's office, and they said so.") to the Bush administration's bullying tactics, and there's your reason for lack of reporting on the marches. Even now, they're barely giving it air-time (the printed press are better).

So, anyway, that's that, and thank you for your time and patience

All the best!


thanks WebWitch
~jwf~