Couric, representing NBC:
"We (at NBC) all hope and pray that Saddam escaped harm, and hopefully fled to Syria."
Posted on 09/17/2003 4:10:38 AM PDT by RangerHobbit
I believe the Free Republic “hate group” smear should stay focused on the real antagonists here: NBC. Debbie Reyes can shoot her mouth off all she likes in an unofficial capacity. That’s what our troops are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan: protecting the right of Debbie Reyes and all those who think like her, to shoot their mouths off even if such people are too stupid to realize that such precious freedoms come with a price tag in blood. But when her hatred carries over and takes on the stamp of her civic office, and when a major organ of propaganda gives her hatred credibility by acting as her proxy in planting the seeds of hostility toward Free Republic members as a “hate group”, then the situation takes on an entirely different face.
I contacted the Fresno NBC affiliate yesterday attempting to get a statement from news director Julie Akins. I informed her that I was an assistant web host for one of the member sites of the US Army Ranger Associations web ring, and that we had 60,000 US military and civilian subscribers to our web ring, including the entire 22,000 member 101st Airborne Division currently serving in Iraq. Many are frequent Free Republic visitors and/or subscribers. These are amongst the people that Debbie Reyes and NBC would have America believe are a “hate group”.
I left a message on news director Julie Akins’ voice mail, informing her that since I believed in unbiased journalism, I would extend to her a courtesy she never bothered extending to Jim Robinson and Free Republic before running the NBC news smear. I told her that before I put this story out on every military web ring in the country, I’d listen to her take on events first. You see, I believe in the constructs of democracy and unbiased journalism even if NBC has long forgotten such things. In her response, Julie Akins assumes that I didn’t see the NBC “hate group” video feed because I live in Crescent City, another Northern California community about 300 miles northwest of Fresno. Yet as you are probably are already aware, the video feed is available here on the site.
Following is our e-mail exchange. I sent this out to the Fresno Bee, to NBC’s New York corporate office, and to W. Don Cornwell, Chief Executive Officer of Granite Broadcasting Corporation, the station’s owner. I believe the very least that Free Republic members should demand of Fresno’s NBC affiliate is that their station manager issue an on-air apology. Debbie Reyes should be fired or forced to attend psychological counseling to get in touch with her pathological hatred of conservatives. The police harassment and city bureaucracy harassment of Free Republic gatherings must cease immediately, by court order if necessary. I might mention also that Fresno’s NBC affiliate is owned by Granite Broadcasting Corporation, one of America’s rising stars of black entrepreneurship, and the 11th largest black-owned corporation in America. I’d hate very much to think that with that ownership comes a corporate ethos which may forgive hate propaganda and smear against other races and perceived political adversaries. There is no place for such racism in corporate America, neither in “white-owned” corporations, nor in black-owned corporations either.
***
From: "Julie Akins" JulieA@ksee.com
To: savamutt@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Coverage of the HRC and local freedom group
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 16:22:45 -0700
I received your voice mail today regarding our coverage of a story last Friday. I attempted to call you but your number would not go through. We were sent a notification from the City of Fresno and its' Human Relations Commission. The fax stated that the Free Republic group was a "hate group threatening minorities". It further stated that the groups' web site advocates violence to minorities. The fax stated that the Fresno Police had been notified to stand guard. We checked the Free Republic website and found nothing to indicate it is a "hate group", furthermore we found nothing on the web site discussing minorities in any way.
We checked with the Fresno PD and they did not confirm they had been called out in force to watch the group and their sign campaign on Shaw and Blackstone. We checked with the Human Relations Commission and they did not return our calls. We spoke with the Free Republic group and they stated that they were surprised to be so categorized and reminded us, which we knew and reported, that they were the same people who held signs saying "Support Our Troops".
We reported all of this fairly and accurately. I suspect you did not see our report as you are located in Crescent City. I suspect the person to whom you spoke did not see our report but merely operated off of word of mouth, which may have been precisely what the HRC did in identifying the group as a "hate group". I would recommend strongly that you not declare our coverage as biased unless you know with a certainty this is the case. In fact, it was our fair coverage of this event which brought it to the attention of the city council and as a result action is being considered regarding the HRC for sending out the fax.
I do not know the personal beliefs of each member of the group. I do not know the politics of the group. We, as Americans, are allowed to disagree. We, as Americans, are allowed to state our disagreement openly. It seems in our post September 11th fervor some have forgotten this fact. It is divisive to attack one other because we exercise our right as Americans to state our disagreement. If and I say IF the HRC then you are wrong to do so. That, said, we reported the facts of this story from both points of view, period. We as a news organization had and still have no axe to grind on the subject. It was one of many stories we covered that day.
Julie Akins KSEE TV News Director
juliea@ksee.com
***
Magnificent bit of backpedaling Julie, but I'm not buying. Did you attend journalism school? I did, though I never opted to work as a news journalist. I worked instead as a commercial writer in Ventura and Silicon Valley, yet I still remember the most sacred dogma from the mouth of every reputable Journalism 101 professor in the free world:
Verify! Verify! Verify!
You verified NOTHING to support the malicious slander against Free Republic’s web site presented to your newsroom via fax by a largely "progressive" (read: Marxist) Democratic Party bureaucratic agency, none of whose members you could contact before running the story in order to verify that they’d even sent the fax in the first place! F minus Julie! You flunk Journalism 101!
NOT A SHRED OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE COULD YOUR NEWSROOM VERIFY to support the hateful, politically-motivated slander you'd received to suggest in any way that a group of conservative Republicans, conservative Jews, conservative Hispanics, and conservative blacks, many of them war veterans past and current, many of them fighting terrorists in Iraq to maintain a semblance of freedom on this planet, are a "hate group".
WHY!
I'll tell you why Julie. Because you've been conditioned into believing that any slander, any degradation, any pejorative is right and correct and proper when used to express Big Media's festering contempt for religion, for law and order, for our Constitution, for our military, for our veterans, and especially for the perceived white, male, gentile, heterosexual status quo. I know how our “unbiased” media nabobs feel on such matters. I should. Enough of those draft-dodging “me” generation reprobates who established the ideological direction of broadcast journalism in this country were at Berkeley during my short tenure there. They’re all millionaire Marxists now and don’t even see the dichotomy. Hey baby, whatever works....let’s jump in the Mercedes and do lunch down at the Daily Worker Cafe in the Village.
That's why you ran the story. You ran it because your job obligates you to believe such things even if you have to believe them on the sketchiest of unverifiable anecdotal rumor. What you did was grossly incompetent. What you did was to perpetrate an act of hate that our sick culture condones against any decent, law-abiding group of people with "conservative" skin, while condemning as "racist" (like the Fresno Human Relations Commission does) any censure of Arab "immigrants" who cross our borders illegally with mass homicide as their only motivation, or any act of redress by our military against those who murdered 3500 of our fellow citizens while attempting to destroy our very democracy.
NBC controls the most powerful organ of propaganda ever invented. They, CBS, FOX, ABC, and CNN control the ideological locus of propaganda over hundreds of millions of people. This all-powerful medium can incite riots, it can sway elections, and it can plant the subconscious seeds of innuendo in thousands or even millions of minds that a disabled, white, Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair, waving the American flag and beckoning passersby on a Fresno street corner to support our troop’s in their tough fight against international terrorism, is a social icon of "hate".
Are you proud of yourselves? Shame on you! Shame on you!
Now, since you, your newsroom and station manager are apparently politically handicapped and prone to being duped by any snake oil salesmen who appeals to your own conditioned visceral prejudices, let me give you a little lesson in Political Reality 101.
The more sinister chapter of the “antiwar” movement in this country is steered largely by “progressives” like former Fresno Human Relations Commission member Su Kapoor and current “progressive” Fresno Human Relations Commission member Debbie Reyes.
If one goes to highbrow Marxist web forums like Utne for instance, they’ll soon learn that “progressive” is simply a euphemism for Marxist or communist. Get a leading “progressive” on-camera and ask him/her why their “antiwar” movement refuses to condemn the murder of 30,000 civilians a year by communist FARC guerillas in Colombia and Peru, the execution of up to one million anti-communist Chinese political dissidents a year by the Chinese communist government, the displacement and genocide of 500,000 Montagnards by the Vietnamese communist government, or why none of them has ever issued a public policy statement demanding that Pol Pot’s “killing fields” executioners be brought before an international war crimes tribunal, and if they don’t deny out of hand that any of these genocides ever happened in the first place, the best response you can hope for is “no comment”. One might understand then why these people hate a web site frequented by Vietnam and Korean War veterans who have seen the kind of horror first hand that "progressives" would be only too happy to visit on America.
That aside, there is something far more sinister emerging from the far left since 9/11, a broiling skeleton of animosity and resentment that’s been hiding in their collectivist closet for more than 30 years, one that the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the ADL, the JDL, and the World Jewish Congress are only too well aware of: virulent anti-Semitism. I don’t mean left/right partisan bickering labeled as anti-Semitism. I mean across-the-board Jew-hating virulent anti-Semitism. The Free Republic web site with its 100,000 members represents one of the most outspoken and unabashed supporters of Israel in the free world. Go to any thread on the Free Republic web site regarding Israel or the murdering savages who bomb her children in their school busses, and you’ll soon come away knowing why it is that the far left in this country (like the race-baiting members of the Fresno Human Relations Commission) so hate the Free Republic web site. When 95% of respondents to these threads shower support and empathy for Israel and her plight, sympathizing with the only island of democracy in a sea of antidemocratic despots, one can quickly understand why anti-Semitic Marxists and the American left-wing will do anything they can to shut conservative opinion up. Over my dead body.
Tom Sweetnam / 75th Ranger Regimental Association / 159 Starfish Way / Crescent City, CA 95531 / 707 465-6306 / savamutt@hotmail.com
This is not what happened. The HRC spouted off in an official capacity, using the money, power and authority of the government to smear us as a hate group.
Megabravos!
I've read lots of stuff at FreeRepublic over the past few years. This may be the best writing I've ever seen here.
ML/NJ
If you happen to be a government employee, and send the fax on the letterhead of your department in an official capacity, then it is a story. It is a story of abuse of power.
Couric, representing NBC:
"We (at NBC) all hope and pray that Saddam escaped harm, and hopefully fled to Syria."
Television news does not need our permission to slant any story the way they want to slant it. You really only have three choices that they will understand at all.
Ask for a retraction/follow-up story if you believe FR's name has been defamed without adequate clarification. If their news department has decided FR is not a hate group, have they said so publicly? If not, ask first to have this publicly stated, most preferably in the context of a news story. JimRob can certainly be the subject of an interview on the matter.
The second option is to ask for equal time in the form of a presentation to their viewers. This, if granted, helps to fulfill their FCC demand for community involvement. Unfortunately, if granted, this will probably be run at 4:30 a.m. amongst a bunch of infomercials when nobody is watching.
The third option is to file a complaint with the FCC. It really will do nothing except it will be on their record whenever it comes time for the station's license to be renewed. I've never known of a station having its licensed revoked by the FCC due to complaints so it is more or less a hollow threat but one that, as a public record, most local stations do not like to have attached to their name.
Rather than accusatory and longwinded e-mails, I would suggest taking the sole approach of asking for retraction/equal time to clear FR's name if it has been unfairly damaged. Offer JimRob for an interview and suggest they do a follow-up story and let it rest after that.
Little Julie is not going to see where Pol Pot or homicide bombers is relevant. All she cares about is that both sides of the dispute have been fairly represented and, if our side has not been, offering them access to our Founder is better public relations than firing off e-mails telling her she flunked J-school.
If there's a transcript of the story, offer specific portions that show that FR has been defamed. Ask her if the same thing were said about a group she was a member of if she would feel it was a gross mischaracterization to be portrayed this same way.
We're on the same side, partner. But whatever you do, try a different tack besides lecturing her on journalistic ethics or plots to overthrow our country. I doubt it will be well-received.
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