All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Introducing Danny Schechter.
He's a journalist, author, television producer, and independent filmmaker.
He writes and speaks about economic and media issues.
And he's the executive editor of mediachannel.org.
I was telling y'all yesterday and mentioned earlier today on the show this great piece in aljazeera.net opinion.
Helen Thomas, thrown to the walls.
At a time of forgiveness, why is Helen Thomas still being ostracized?
By Danny Schechter.
And this is posted December 29, 2010.
Welcome to the show, Danny.
How are you doing?
Hello.
Hey, it's great to be with you.
Sorry.
You know, the piece was also on Huffington Post and Op-Ed News and a lot of other outlets.
But it actually got over 2,000 responses on Al Jazeera, which is pretty amazing, you know?
Yeah, that's great.
A lot of buzz on it, a lot of pickup about it.
I think it's because it resonates with a lot of people who realized how wrongly she was treated.
But at the time, I think there was a whole lot going on.
And she apologized, kind of, for the whole thing.
So it sort of dropped dead.
But the implications of it were pretty serious.
And here was one of our, arguably, one of our best-known journalists who had been at the White House since President Kennedy was in office, covering presidential press conferences and the like, a woman, a minority woman, given her Arab-American background.
And yet, in 30 seconds, she could be exposed, supposedly, as an anti-Semite and thrown to the wolves, as the piece says.
And I think this really upset a lot of people.
And unfortunately, it hasn't really been discussed, OK?
Yeah, well, and it never really was discussed fairly in the first place.
Because what they did was they took a sound bite of her answering a question without doing the smart thing and repeating the question back in the answer, or something like that.
And she was referring to the settlers in the West Bank.
She was asked about the settlers in the West Bank.
And then she said, well, the Jews should go back to Germany, Poland, or America, where they're from.
But she was talking about the people in the West Bank, not all of Israel.
Yeah, the settlers and the occupiers.
Right.
So then they made it sound, though, by playing just the sound bite, that like, oh, here, she denies Israel's right to exist and Jews the right to live.
Right, exactly.
Well, you know, back in the 50s, actually, it was revealed.
I used to work for Ramparts magazine, back in the day, as an investigative reporter.
And we were investigating the CIA.
This was before WikiLeaks, before even the Pentagon Papers, OK?
Looking into, we had access to various documents.
And one of the things that emerged was that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence, was actually funding a right-wing cleric in Cairo, who was the person who was calling for the Jews to be driven into the sea.
It's a guy with no support and no real constituency and no real community.
But nevertheless, his comments, which went on a sort of shortwave radio station, were duplicated, copied, and then used for years by propagandists in Israel and their supporters in America.
So that's the origin of that actual cliche.
Right.
In other words, this was actually something Israel paid for, because they want to polarize things.
They want to make it appear that anybody who is critical of Israeli policy is, by definition, anti-Semitic or wants to kill all Jews.
And by setting it up this way, many people, first of all, who don't like what the Israeli government does are intimidated.
They're chilled out.
They won't speak out for fear of retribution or for fear of whatever, losing their jobs and what have you.
And at the same time, the debate then is managed by a very well-financed lobby that is very keen to use message points and to formulate slogans that they market test with the audience so that you get support for Israel based not on Israel in terms of a real breathing state, which has good things and bad things about it, but idyllic Israel, the land of the kibbutz, the land of the only democracy in the Middle East and all the rest of these cliches, without any rigorous analysis or examination of, actually, who is in power in Israel, which is like a war cabinet, which runs the place.
And the way in which politics there is manipulated when you have a minority party with one member of parliament holding the balance of power, a right-wing fundamentalist, the Israeli government basically does what they say in order to keep their government alive.
This has been true for quite some time, that the governments there are very unstable.
But they manipulate all of these minority groups and factions to support them.
And this is what's happened here.
And so when you talk about Israel, it's not a homogenous place.
It's not like all people agree on one point of view.
There's a peace camp there.
There are people who are opposed to wars.
There are a lot of Arab citizens of Israel who also have a voice and have some members in the Knesset.
So it's not this kind of us, them, black, white situation, which is how it's pictured in our media.
And this is one of the things that's annoyed me for years, as a radio newscaster and also as a television producer.
I worked at ABC News 2020 for eight years.
And one of those years, there was a story done called Under Israel's Thumb.
And it was really a very strong investigative piece about looking at three issues on the West Bank, water, land, and hospital care, and documenting and detailing how these people were being exploited and abused.
And 2020 basically said, look, we will interview Israeli officials who are directly responsible for or connected to the issues that we're exploring.
We don't want to interview somebody who doesn't know anything about it and who has no responsibility for it.
We want to talk to policymakers, generals, people who are in charge.
And at that time, General Sharon was in charge of the occupation of the West Bank.
And he just said he refused to talk to them.
He met with them.
He said, OK, well, I'm not going to go on camera, because he didn't like the questions.
And so you would expect 2020 to then back down, say, well, look, we can't really do an interview if we don't have an Israeli point of view represented.
It's going to look unfair, one-sided, and all the rest of it.
But it was clear that ABC was being played by the Israeli government.
So ABC took the position, we are going to go ahead with this story.
And we will report to our audience that Israeli officials were given an opportunity to participate and refused.
Israel found this unacceptable.
They sent people from Israel to New York to try to persuade the upper-level executives of ABC to cave on the issue and not to run the piece.
As it turns out, that day, I was at the studio, because I had another story on the air.
And the show went on at 10 o'clock at night.
At 8.30, trucks arrived at the offices of ABC, carrying those big mailbags filled with letters and protests against this piece, which had not yet aired.
Nobody had seen it, OK?
But denouncing it as unfair, anti-Semitic, and the rest, which was just an example of how propaganda operates.
It's either your way or the highway.
Well, boy, it sure seems to indicate.
What year was this, by the way?
This was 82.
Wow, yeah, I mean, that is, boy, the power of the telephone tree, huh?
Yeah.
Everybody on the list, call everybody else on the list, everybody write a telegram now.
And it gets done.
That's amazing, really.
And about a TV show that they hadn't seen by a reputable news-gathering organization, OK, which had aired a lot of blatantly pro-Israel propaganda in the network.
But this one story that they were doing basically got the attention of the Israeli government, who tried to kill it when they couldn't kill it.
They mobilized the whole campaign against ABC.
They just happened to be there and actually saw it.
And it didn't work in this case?
They were able to stop the program?
The piece aired, but for the first time that I've ever seen anything on ABC, Hugh Downs, who was the announcer, at the beginning of the story, basically said, you know, the Israeli government was invited to participate, but refused.
Said it again at the end.
All right, I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, Danny.
It's Danny Schechter.
His website is plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with Danny Schechter.
He's got this piece, Helen Thomas, Thrown to the Wolves.
It's at aljazeera.net, at the Huffington Post, and all over the place.
His website is plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.
If I could just jump in for a second.
I actually blog at newsdissector.com/blog.
NewsDissector.com/blog.
That's on mediachannel.org.
So I blog every day about various issues.
I do a radio show myself on the Progressive Radio Network, Tomorrow at One, and I plunder the crime of our time.
Dot com is about my film and book, which looks at the financial crisis as a crime story.
So, you know, that's the work I've been doing as an investigative journalist and reporter, and as a journalist.
And the filmmaker, and troublemaker, or whatever you want to call me.
Yeah, right on.
I'm looking at newsdissector.org right now.
Now tell me this.
Well, let's go back.
For people who aren't all that familiar, tell us a little bit about Helen Thomas.
And, you know, I think it's kind of important, the context of who it is that we're talking about, being blacklisted this way.
Yeah, I mean, Helen Thomas, as I say, you know, she's 89.
And I was 90 years old.
She's 89 and was 90 years old.
So, you know, she's been an institution, an icon.
When she had her birthday, she has the same birthday as President Obama.
Obama brought a cake out to the White House press room to honor her.
I mean, she's been honored by everybody in journalism.
She's spoken all around the world.
She's very widely known.
And of course, she covered these press conferences.
She was the person who, under the Bush administration, kept challenging Bush on the WMD.
You know, most of the press corps in Washington now is totally compliant, if not complicit, with what's going on.
They're not aggressive.
They're not really challenging a policy.
And, you know, they're manipulated, basically.
There are fewer press conferences than ever.
And, you know, it's sort of a charade rather than a real interaction.
And Helen Thomas used her opportunity.
Because of her seniority, she had the first chair, you know, in the press room.
She was sitting right up front.
And she would often get to ask the first question because she was sort of the dean of the press corps.
She was also one of the founders of the National Press Club.
She went to Wayne State University in Detroit, which honored her with an award and then took it back after this incident.
Everybody was sort of fleeing.
And I just felt like this is outrageous.
You know, how many politicians, quote, misspeak, you know, and they're sort of, you know, brought back into the fold, you know, even involved in affairs, involved in criminality, you know, they're rehabilitated.
Helen Thomas, first of all, wasn't involved in a sex scandal, wasn't taking money, and, you know, made an argument which most Americans don't hear or couldn't hear because the American media has done such a bad job of covering, you know, the Middle East and covering the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.
I mean, if you placed her in a position within the Palestinian spectrum, she would be right in the middle.
She's a moderate, you know, not an extremist by any means.
But nevertheless, because she was sort of set up by not journalists, but a rabbi and his son that do a very provocative website and challenging to put a camera right in her nose, she, you know, kind of spit out these phrases.
She, you know, later said that was not really her full feeling, in other words, there's no context, no background offered.
And this was used basically to set her up and to make it appear as if she was a hater, which she isn't, you know, and she's worked with Jews throughout her whole career.
She's a friend of mine and I, you know, I can claim to be a member of the tribe here, you know?
So, you know, I find all of this, the media channel that I edit actually gave her an award for a truth in media.
I mean, she's an icon.
And the fact that somebody like that could be, you know, basically obliterated and disappeared like some priest in Argentina, you know, overnight, you know, something that was a disgrace to our media, in my opinion.
I mean, I'm very passionate about it.
I feel it was totally wrong.
And I said so in this article.
And she spoke with me about it.
And, you know, the article, Al Jazeera ran it, but, you know, it was run all over the world, in South Africa, in England, in Canada, here, you know.
You know, people are very angry about what happened to Helen Thomas.
And she's, you know, but the media is so compliant, you know, oh my gosh, she expressed, you know, an angry comment.
You know, she made people uncomfortable.
That must be punished immediately.
That was the attitude.
Right.
Well, you know, I have a theory that it's, you know, the whole anti-Semitism thing makes it easy cudgel to beat people over the head with.
But I think that the reason that the rest of the media all went along with it is because they resent her for the other reasons that you talked about.
And she's the only one of them.
They're all just a bunch of Chuck Todd's up there.
And she's up there asking real questions and especially during the Bush administration, really taking them to task.
She's been critical about Afghanistan.
For example, a recent issue at the White House was she asked President Obama and Hillary Clinton what countries in the Middle East have nuclear weapons, okay?
Now, everybody knows that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, okay?
And they avoided the question.
You know, didn't want to acknowledge it because Israel follows a practice of what they call strategic ambiguity.
You know, we're not going to really talk about it.
We're not going to tell the truth about it.
So, you know, she was persistent about this.
She was trying to show the hypocrisy of attacking Iran, which doesn't have nuclear weapons, but making it appear as if they do, you know, and not really questioning Israel, which has refused to sign nonproliferation agreements.
You know, at the same time, the U.S. has supported nuclear weapons for Pakistan, India, you know, and India I don't think is part of the nonproliferation regime either.
So there's a tremendous amount of hypocrisy here, and Helen is somebody who doesn't like hypocrisy.
She challenges it, and she, you know, basically was brought down by this incident.
But, you know, here she is, who in her, you know, her senior years should be honored for her great contribution, treated like a pariah, treated like a nonperson, a nonentity.
I mean, that to me was beyond the pale, you know, and I felt like nobody had really revisited that story.
So I tried to, and, you know, I've gotten a tremendous amount of response to it, but I also think it's an issue that really everybody should think about because if it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone.
I mean, you know, who, you know, you know, Dan Rather, you know, journalism, you know, institution, gone.
Walter Cronkite, basically forced to retire at 65, whereas Rather was allowed to stay on till 70.
Edward R. Murrow basically pushed out of CBS News.
I mean, the history here is not one to be proud of, and I worked at CNN, I worked at ABC News.
You know, I have some knowledge of how those institutions operate because I was on the inside, and I must say that, you know, Americans are not getting the information we need and deserve, and that's why, you know, the administration is trying so hard to suppress WikiLeaks because they don't want other sources of information to come out, and this is why this fight for information, this fight for media is central to the fight for change and for peace.
Well, you know, I know she's a friend of yours, and I don't, and I like her.
I've interviewed her on the show before.
She's a nice lady, and she certainly was among the best, certainly in the press corps in the last decade, but would it be true from an objective point of view, I don't really remember that well because I was a little kid, but, like, say if we were back in 1982, the era of that 60 Minutes piece you were talking about, wasn't she sort of marginal and more wrote about, you know, fashion and gossip and marginal things?
There were other reporters that made her look like kind of the Chuck Todd of today, and so this is kind of a measure of how far we've come, I think, no?
No, she was always a serious wire service reporter.
You know, wire service reporters were like just the facts, man, the kind of people, okay?
She later in later years became an opinion journalist, and she said, you know, that she'd been self-censoring herself for many, many years because as a wire service reporter, she had to stay with whatever was at the top of the news, and, you know, she didn't really have her own agenda.
She was working for a UPI for many years, then she worked for Hearst.
I mean, you know, this is, you know, an environment.
You know, people don't realize, you know, it's not like journalists are free to do whatever they want to do, you know, because we have free press in America.
When you work for, you know, the biggest problem in mass media, in corporate media, is self-censorship, not censorship, but, you know, what you do is monitored, and, you know, you have to be careful if you want to survive, you know, in that shark tank, and so, you know, Helen did survive to her credit for all these years.
One of the things I pointed out in my article is that one of the leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, who she calls a national censor, actually was trying to get her fired, you know, challenging her on 25 questions she asked over the years.
So she was under a lot of pressure.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry to cut you off there, but we do have to leave it there.
I do appreciate your time on the show and your insight in this great piece about Helen Thomas thrown to the walls at The Avenue Post and Al Jazeera.net.
Thank you.
I'm at Danny at Mediachannel.org if anyone wants to write to me.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Thanks a lot.
