http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061708a.html
By Jeff Cohen
June 17, 2008
It was nineteen years ago this week that I.F. (Izzy) Stone died. The
legendary blogger was 81.
Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?
Well, yeah, but when I think of today's blunt, fact-based online
hell-raisers, my mind quickly flashes on Izzy Stone. You may think of
Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Arianna Huffington. I think of Izzy.
Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we
associate with today's best bloggers.
Like them, he was obsessed with citing original documents and texts.
But before search engines, Izzy had to consume ten newspapers per day
– and physically visit government archives and press offices, and
personally pore over thousands of words in the Congressional Record.
That's how he repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of
his day in exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War.
Izzy was the ultimate un-embedded reporter. His journalism was
motivated by a simple maxim that resonates loudly in our era of
Cheneys and Rumsfelds and WMD hoaxes: "All governments lie, but
disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same
hashish they give out."
Month after month from 1953 to 1969 I.F. Stone's Weekly (biweekly
through 1971) exposed deceptions as fast as governments could spin
them. His timely and timeless dispatches are gathered in an
exceptional paperback, The Best of I.F. Stone.
In real time in August 1964, Izzy was virtually alone in challenging
the Gulf of Tonkin hoax, an imaginary "unprovoked attack" on U.S.
warships used by the Johnson administration to send several hundred
thousand American troops into Vietnam.
How did Izzy do it? By citing international law texts and finding
nuggets of truth in the Congressional Record of the Senate debate (no
C-SPAN then) and in contradictory reporting in mainstream publications.
Izzy's expose began boldly: "The American government and the American
press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from
the American public." He fumed at the credulous MSM: "The process of
brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for
newspapermen."
Only two senators, Oregon's Wayne Morse and Alaska's Ernest Gruening,
had voted against the Tonkin Resolution; Izzy noted that the press
had "dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the antiwar speeches of
Morse and Gruening."
Like today's online journalistic entrepreneurs, being his own editor
and boss allowed Izzy the freedom and space to parse out the
distortions of government in detail.
A year before the Tonkin hoax, he wrote: "In this age of corporation
men, I am an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise."
While most journalists "find their niche in some huge newspaper of
magazine combine, I am a wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone."
Bloggers battle today's McCarthyites who smear Iraq War opponents as
un-American abettors of our country's enemies. Izzy battled the
original Joe McCarthy, in issue after issue of his weekly.
Indeed, he launched his publication the same month – January 1953 –
McCarthy became chair of the Senate Operations Committee, enhancing
his powers of intimidation.
Izzy warned prophetically: "McCarthy is in a position to smear any
government official who fails to do his bidding. With such daring and
few scruples, McCarthy can make himself the most powerful single
figure in Congress."
Three months later, he wrote: "The most subversive force in America
today is Joe McCarthy. No one is so effectively importing alien
conceptions into American government. No one is doing so much to
damage the country's prestige abroad. . . .If 'subversion' is to be
met by deportation, then it is time to deport McCarthy back to Wisconsin."
Not until 11 months later did Edward R. Murrow air his first report
on McCarthy.
Today, online media critics and bloggers expose the bigotry and
fallacy gushing forth from Fox News and talk radio and the Rev.
Moon-owned Washington Times, long-edited by Wes Pruden Jr. They blog
about MSM being stenographers to rightwing extremists.
When racists in Little Rock were obstructing court-ordered school
desegregation in 1958, Izzy was on the scene reporting: "A staff
correspondent in Little Rock quoted the Reverend Wesley Pruden the
segregationist leader, as saying, 'The South will not accept this
outrage, which a Communist-dominated government is trying to lay on
us.' This was my introduction to a regional journalism which prints
such statements matter-of-factly."
The Communist-dominated regime referred to by Pruden Sr. was headed
by Eisenhower.
Izzy loved to tell the story of how he found – hiding in plain view
in different editions of the New York Times – one-paragraph
"shirrtail" wire stories indicating that our country's first
underground nuclear test in Nevada in 1957 was detected in Toronto,
Rome and Tokyo.
Months later, just as hawks in Washington were preparing to attack a
test ban treaty with the Soviets on the basis that nuclear tests
could not be detected more than 200 miles away, Izzy found a
seismologist in the Commerce Department who told him the test had
also been detected as far away as Alaska and Arkansas.
Izzy's reporting obstructed the government's lie before it could get
its shoes on.
Starting out in his teens, Izzy was a daily reporter, editor and
columnist. After moving to D.C. in 1940 to become Washington editor
of The Nation, he exposed U.S. corporations still doing business with
Hitler's Germany. He was one of the first to sound the alarm about
the Nazi holocaust, referring in 1942 to "a murder of a people."
An anti-racist, he battled the all-white National Press Club over
exclusion of black journalists.
Izzy's cantankerousness and "hound-dog tenacity" – in the words of
his biographer– would make even the most stubborn blogger blush.
Although he was a lifelong progressive, his journalistic hallmark was
independence: "I felt that party affiliation was incompatible with
independent journalism."
His writings show deep admiration for Franklin Roosevelt, yet his
article on FDR's death criticized his "deplorable disrespect for the
constitutional amenities" in resisting a reactionary Supreme Court
that knocked down one New Deal bill after another.
He wrote books passionately supporting the birth of Israel, but
strongly criticized it for mistreatment of Palestinians. He advocated
peace and negotiations with the Soviet Union, while increasingly
vocal in denouncing its rulers: "The worker [in Russia] is more
exploited than in Western welfare states."
He despised racists, but fought for their free speech rights, and
everyone's: "Once you put ifs and buts in the Bill of Rights,
nobody's civil liberties will be secure.''
That he marched to his own drummer can be seen in his dispatch from
the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, in which he criticized
"respectables" for muting "Negro militancy" into support of JFK's
inadequate program, and referred to Martin Luther King as "a little
too saccharine for my taste."
Born of immigrant parents, Izzy was an American patriot who
worshipped the Bill of Rights: "You may think I am a red Jew
son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive."
And he worshipped our country's tradition of press freedom: "There
are few countries in which you can spit in the eye of the government
and get away with it. It's not possible in Moscow."
But Izzy was never naïve about American traditions that threatened
freedom, and he had a 5,000-page FBI spy file to prove it.
Today's muckraking bloggers are often belittled for working from
their homes, far removed from the corridors of power. Izzy worked out
of his home. If he were alive, he'd be applauding the Josh Marshalls
and other independents, urging: Keep your distance from power.
"I made no claim to inside stuff. . . I tried to dig the truth out of
hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as
accurate as possible. . . I felt like a guerilla warrior, swooping
down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least
expected independent inquiry.
"The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department or
the Pentagon for a wire service or a big daily newspaper soon finds
himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations
forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There
are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line. . .
"But a reporter covering the whole capitol on his own – particularly
if he is his own employer – is immune from these pressures."
Imagine the obstacles Izzy faced – did I mention his impaired
eyesight and hearing? – launching a weekly and finding an audience at
the height of McCarthy's witch hunts (even at $5 for an annual subscription).
Far fewer obstacles face today's bloggers who seek to follow in
Izzy's footsteps – blessed as they are with relative freedom and this
awesome research and outreach tool known as the Internet.
As these upstarts speak truth to power, I see Izzy Stone watching
over them, from the heavens.
--
Jeff Cohen is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media
at Ithaca College. He first saw I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly at a D.C.
peace march in 1969. Soon after Cohen launched the media watch group
FAIR in 1986, Izzy Stone signed on to its first formal protest, a
telegram to ABC News on the exclusion of progressive voices.
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