- If journalism is history's first draft, the death of
Ronald Reagan has caused a step-up in the mass production of falsified
history.
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- It's mourning in America.
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- The main technique is omission. People who suffered from
the Reagan presidency have no media standing today. It's not cool to mention
victims of his policies in, for example, Central America.
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- President Reagan lauded and subsidized the contra guerrillas
-- extolling them as "freedom fighters" while they terrorized
the population in Nicaragua, killing thousands of civilians. And he proudly
funneled large-scale support to governments aligned with death squads murdering
thousands more in Guatemala and El Salvador.
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- With all the media-fueled mourning in America, there's
been none left for the victims of Reaganite policies in Angola, either.
His tireless support for the guerrilla forces of Unita "freedom fighter"
Jonas Savimbi deserves much of the credit for making Angola the artificial
limb capital of the world. Reagan saw to it that Uncle Sam walked in the
bloody footsteps of colonial Portugal and apartheid South Africa to sustain
Savimbi's monstrous warfare.
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- "Every year since the mid-1980s, I have interviewed
dozens of displaced peasants who described attacks on their villages by
Unita, kidnaping of young men and boys, looting, beatings, and killings,
while in hospital beds the rows of mutilated women bore witness to the
mining of their fields," journalist Victoria Brittain wrote in the
New Statesman magazine a decade ago. "Defectors from Unita told more
chilling stories of mass rallies at the headquarters in Jamba where women
were burned alive as witches. These were not stories the outside world
wanted to hear about Unita, whose leader was regularly received at the
White House." Very warmly. By Ronald Reagan.
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- Mainstream news outlets encourage us to mourn his passing
but not to grieve a whit for his victims.
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- Reagan lavished big money from the U.S. Treasury on anti-Soviet
mujahadeen -- "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan who evolved into
groupings like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Yet his supposed idealism rarely
gets a critical look through the obit-omit media lens.
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- Since he passed away, American media outlets have drowned
the country in nonstop veneration for Reagan as a symbol of devotion to
principle. There's precious little U.S. media space for the kind of reporting
that Agence France Presse provided a few days after he died: "Reagan,
determined to check arch-foe Iran, opened a back door to Iraq through which
flowed U.S. intelligence and hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees
even as Washington professed neutrality in Baghdad's war with Tehran. ...
Sales of UH-1H helicopters and Hughes MD-500 Defender helicopters were
approved by Washington. Though sold as civilian aircraft, nobody objected
when they were quickly converted for military use."
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- President Reagan was in the habit of telling whoppers.
His tales ranged far and wide: to deny environmental degradation, or blithely
pretend that widespread human rights violations by <U.S.-backed>
regimes didn't exist, or denigrate low-income people in the United States.
Yet now, more than ever, he's being hailed as the Great Communicator.
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- Promoting huge tax breaks for multimillionaires and large
corporations, he presided over an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the
already rich at the expense of everyone else. But today's dominant media
images present him as a beloved populist hero.
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- That's media mourning in America.
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- He's being hailed as a champion of "small government"
-- yet he vastly increased the size of Defense Department budgets and methodically
appointed federal judges who enlarged the intrusive powers of government.
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- President Reagan spoke out for labor rights in Poland
while spearheading anti-union measures in the United States and avidly
supporting regimes on several continents that repressed workers and oversaw
systematic murders of labor activists. Now, rewritten media history is
touting him as a friend to working people.
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- It's media mourning in America.
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- He was a president so immersed in anti-gay bigotry and
so bereft of non-Hallmark-style compassion that from the time the Centers
for Disease Control announced the discovery of AIDS in mid-1981, until
1987, he couldn't bring himself to publicly utter the name of the deadly
disease -- part of a policy approach that surely cost many thousands of
lives. Yet he is being lauded by countless pundits for his sunny disposition.
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- Reagan thumbed his nose at basic civil rights legislation,
including efforts to protect voting rights. In words and deeds, he conveyed
disinterest in helping to move the country beyond the curse of racism.
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- But his media persona endures as a man with a big smile
and an even bigger heart.
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- The mourning in America is overwhelming. But the country
is starved for honesty.
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- Norman Solomon is co-author, with foreign correspondent
Reese Erlich, of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You."
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon06112004.html
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