Media vs. Mumia
Why they censor 'voice of the voiceless'
By Fred
Goldstein
Here's how it works in the United States.
Look in any government directory and you will find no
Ministry of Information. No one is legally required to submit
articles to an office of censorship before publication.
Yet the organs of censorship exist. And they are all the
more powerful precisely because they don't officially exist and
therefore cannot easily be targeted.
On the weekend of April 29-30, what you might call the
Ministry of Misinformation and Disinformation--or in this case,
No Information--gave another demonstration of its power in the
case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. On April 29 a standing-room-only crowd
gathered at Antioch College, a small, prestigious private
college in Ohio, to hear Mumia's taped commencement address.
Sharing the program was Leslie Feinberg, a transgendered
activist and managing editor of Workers World newspaper, and an
ardent supporter of Mumia.
The event could hardly have been more newsworthy. A Black
death-row prisoner taking on the role of educator, giving a
commencement speech to a majority white, middle-class audience
of academically advanced students. What more could the news
media, ever in search of the novel, the sensational, the
startling, have wanted in their perpetual rating wars?
And, in fact, there was a swirl of controversy-weeks of
threats of violence from the Fraternal Order of Police. Then a
white supremacist group entered the fray against Mumia and the
students.
The organizers started receiving many interested phone calls
from the media, including ABC World News/Weekend Edition.
Informed they were coming, the students prepared for the
logistical problems of a press encampment.
But at the last minute, only Fox News of Philadelphia and an
Ohio network showed up.
When the day was over, the opinion makers of the capitalist
class were all in lockstep. The real corporate Ministry of
Information--the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, Dan Rather of CBS News, Peter Jennings of ABC,
Tom Brokaw of NBCchosen not to print or utter one syllable
about the event.
Fox News and CNN reportedly gave it a few seconds. The
Associated Press put several modest-sized stories on the wires.
They even appended the text of Mumia's excellent six-minute
speech. So the information was available. But it was
suppressed.
Mumia is an internationally known Black journalist. His
cause is so obviously just and politically important that it
has been taken up by much of the world movement. Amnesty
International has declared him a political prisoner and is
campaigning for a new trial. So the utter fear of the high and
mighty U.S. billionaire media giants of this one Black man on
death row is worthy of analysis.
Their fear bespeaks a profound feeling of vulnerability on
the part of the ruling class and is, ironically, a sign of the
greatest hope for Mumia's case and for the struggle.
What did Mumia tell the students at Antioch that so
frightened the censors?
First he summarized the individual contributions of fighters
like Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Ella Baker and Angela Davis.
He then concluded by saying, "Although they are and were
extraordinary individuals, they worked with movements that
truly transformed consciousness and how we look at the world.
Their lives teach us all what it means to betray one's class,
to contribute to the movements that have meaning, and to work
on behalf of the oppressed." He urged the students to "think of
the lives of those you admire. Show your admiration for them by
becoming them."
From Evergreen to Antioch
What is notable in the way the media tried to make this very
important occasion into a non-event is the sharp contrast with
the way they had handled Mumia's commencement address to
Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., last June 11. That
event got significant publicity in the capitalist media. The
viciously hostile title of "convicted cop killer" was dropped
and Mumia's international reputation was referred to on the
networks.
College President Jane Jervis was quoted in the New York
Times of June 12, 1999, as saying that Mumia had used his
talents to "galvanize an international conversation about the
death penalty, the disproportionate number of Blacks on death
row, and the relationship between poverty and the criminal
justice system."
She was further quoted as saying that "Abu-Jamal is a
'convicted cop killer' only in the same sense that Nelson
Mandela was a 'convicted terrorist.' Abu-Jamal was fraudulently
convicted and framed."
The message Mumia sent to the Evergreen students was similar
to the one he gave at Antioch. He extolled Malcolm X, Black
Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton, MOVE bombing survivor
Ramona Africa and other militants, and applauded "people of
diverse ideologies and lifestyles who shared something in
common: a commitment to revolution."
He told them that "the existing order is not amenable to
real, meaningful and substantial transformation. Out of the
many here assembled, it is the heart of he or she that I seek
who looks at a life of vapid materialism, of capitalist excess,
and finds it simply intolerable. It may be 100 of you, or 50,
or even 10, or even one of you who make that choice [to become
committed to revolution]. I'm here to honor and applaud that
choice, and to warn you that, though the suffering may indeed
be great, it is nothing to the joy of doing the right
thing."
One can only conclude that just one year ago the bourgeois
media did not feel any qualms about publicizing such an event.
They undoubtedly considered the Evergreen development a
harmless aberration. They reacted to it as a news opportunity
and gave the impression that there might be some
reconsideration of their previous vicious policy of slander and
silence.
But then came Seattle!
Ruling class fear of new movement
Suddenly a new movement had surfaced. It was composed of
thousands of youth who were indeed fed up with the "existing
order" and were finding "a life of vapid materialism" and
"capitalist excess" totally intolerable. And they were showing
it by an act of rebellion against that order, as represented by
the World Trade Organization.
It turned out that when the Evergreen students turned to
Mumia for guidance, it was not a harmless aberration but a true
harbinger. It turned out that Mumia had his finger directly on
the pulse of a new development and did all he could to inspire
it at the time. And he fully understood what was on the
students' minds, where they were at, and how to help them make
the next step to open a struggle.
This is what the media moguls and their political
strategists learned, which is why this time they conspired to
block out Antioch. They want to keep the powerful, persuasive
and knowledgeable "voice of the voiceless" from reaching the
new movement, as well as the Black community and the restless
ranks of the labor movement-particularly at this moment of
instability in the stock market and fears of an economic
bust.
But it is already too late. It is no longer within the power
of the capitalist media to keep Mumia's voice from the growing
resistance movement. More and more people are taking up the
cause of Mumia and amplifying his voice.
The power of the people will soon force the media and the
entire capitalist establishment to deal with Mumia.
Speaking truth to power
The phrase "speaking truth to power" aptly describes Mumia's
instransigent advocacy of struggle and exposures of the ruling
class, even as he remains in their bloodthirsty clutches.
Mumia's is the ideology of resistance to all aspects of the
racist, repressive order of capitalism and imperialism. His
message falls upon the movement and the new generation like
fresh rain on parched soil.
When the Seattle demonstrations took place, he wrote, "The
specter of tens of thousands of workers, environmentalists,
human-rights activists and anarchists seizing the streets of
Seattle was a stirring sight indeed." He characterized the
police declaration of the "protest-free zone" as the "First
Amendment-free Zone" and asked, "In whose interest was this
cordon sanitaire established? The citizens of Seattle,
or the moneyed gentry of global capital?"
His conclusion about Seattle was that "it revealed the fault
line underlying the lie of the great 'economic miracle' of the
1990s. It revealed the justifiable fears of American workers.
It revealed who politicians work for. It revealed the nature of
the police. It can, it should be a beginning."
Mumia has spoken out on every issue important to the
movement and the struggle. He has condemned the U.S. occupation
of Vieques; declared solidarity with the Puerto Rican political
prisoners; called for the freedom of Leonard Peltier, a
"spiritual warrior, guilty only of daring to be Indian in a
nation where red people weren't really supposed to survive." He
has championed the return of Elián González and
declared Cuba to be "the free territory in the Americas."
On the occasion of Texas's execution of revolutionary Black
militant Ponchai Wilkerson, he issued a scathing statement
entitled "Abolish the Racist Death Machine." He denounced the
homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard, the assassination of
abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian. In his analysis of the
murder of Amadou Diallo, he carefully juxtaposed it to the
subsequent murder by the New York City police of a Jewish man,
Gideon Busch, who was mentally disturbed and gunned down.
"Busch's life," wrote Mumia, Diallo's life, was expendable in
the larger interests of the consolidation and projection of
state police power."
He has issued a statement on the Los Angeles janitors'
strike in which he decries the fact that "corporate profits are
at an all-time high" and yet "those people who clean the
gleaming towers of wealth in urban cities are treated like ...
trash and refuse."
He characterized the war in Yugoslavia as "not about
ethnicity" and "not about genocide" but about "who will be the
boss of the next century." He exposed the U.S. sanctions
against Iraq that "transform Iraqi hospitals into death
chambers and mothers' wombs into tombs." It is all in "the
interests of the world's oil magnates and multinationals, to
discipline Iraq and wreak a deadly pall over the rest of the
Arab world, over any who dare proclaim ownership and mastery
over the oceans of oil that exist under Arab earth."
Mumia's political pronouncements and analyses, miraculously
generated from his tiny high-security cell on death row, are
both a genuine danger to the ruling class and an inspiration
that strengthens the movement against capitalism and
oppression.
Mumia could not be facing the death penalty were it not for
rampant racism and the increasingly repressive nature of the
capitalist state. The ruling-class campaign to divide the
workers with racism is a principal prop of the capitalist order
at the present time. It is the cutting edge of their attack on
welfare, the super-exploitation of immigrant workers, the
spreading of low wages. It is what lets them fill the jails
with Black and Latin working-class youths and revive the death
penalty.
The struggle against racism and repression thus becomes the
cutting edge of the struggle against capitalism at home. There
can be no greater contribution to this struggle than to get
Mumia a new trial and finally set him free.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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