Letter to the Editor:
Thank you for publishing this interesting article [Cheryl Gould, KGTD, June 27].
Several of Cheryl Gould’s reported remarks at the Kent library on June 25 illustrate well some of the major, long-standing defects in mainstream U.S. journalism (both print and broadcast). One example is this account of part of her time in Paris for NBC in the late 1970s:
“She kept pitching stories about this guy [Ayatollah Khomeini] to NBC in New York, but they weren’t interested. Until Nov. 4, 1979, when it came across the wires that students had taken over the U.S. embassy in Tehran.”
That NBC editors and producers in New York in the fall of 1979 were not aware of the importance of this man is not surprising (they may not even have known his identity) and is typical of the insular myopia and historical amnesia which characterized the U.S. corporate media coverage of foreign affairs in the 1970s and that, to a large degree, still does.
The articulate commentary of well-informed observers of U.S. foreign policy like Noam Chomsky was totally ignored (in effect blacked out) by mainstream corporate media outlets like NBC during Cheryl Gould’s career there, and still is. The results have been predictable catastrophes like the U.S. invasions of Iraq (1991 and 2003) and Afghanistan (2001).
Martin Luther King’s courageous opposition to the Vietnam War in the last two years of his public ministry, and his linkage of that war to domestic poverty and racial oppression, were roundly denounced by the editorial boards of both the New York Times and The Washington Post at the time, a fact few of us remember, even those of us who were alive then and old enough to read those newspapers.
A year before his assassination he said, “…I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” The statement that our government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” is still true but you will not see it quoted in the Times or hear it on NBC, NPR, or even PBS news programs.
I have felt pleased to learn of the recent revival of the Kent GTD. My family lived in Kent from 1952 to 1970. The GTD published my first letter to the editor in 1961, just after my 13th birthday. I later worked as a general assignment reporter for weekly newspapers in the Hartford area from 1976 to 1981, before moving on to other work.
John Breasted
Great Barrington, Mass.
