Lost deep in Labor Day’s news dead zone was the midnight resignation of Van Jones, President Obama’s “czar” for green jobs.
The handsome, articulate, Yale-educated Jones was named by Time magazine as an “Environmental Hero” in 2008, a star. His task: To bring urban minorities into the mostly-rich-and-white Green movement, which has historically ignored ghetto folks who actually live where environmental problems are objectively worst.
When conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck started criticizing Jones, I thought Beck was nuts. Turns out Beck was right. Jones is gone.
To me, the Jones fiasco raises some ironies: First, why didn’t mainstream press, including top outfits like Time, report Jones’ story? Let’s pretend John McCain won the presidency and proposed for “czar” some white guy who helped found a group with “Revolutionary” in its name and shaves his head. Would our trusty press watchdogs be on the story? Like stink on a skunk.
The other irony? When I thought Beck was reaching, I poked around a little in some older YouTube clips, posted before Obama was elected, and Jones selected. One item is a half-hour speech Jones made in 2007 to the National Conference for Media Reform.
Media reform? Hey, I’m for that!
Jones leads off bragging how the “media justice movement” and the netroots had “built a progressive infrastructure online that now rivals right wing talk radio,” thanks to “radio guerrillas like Amy Goodman” (of leftist Democracy Now! radio). Jones went on to speak about a “blackout by the mainstream media” and made a call for “free broadband available to everyone” to much happy hooting and hollering.
Conference sponsor Free Press sees a “diversity crisis” in journalism. Because racial and ethnic minorities make up 34 percent of the U.S. population yet own “only” 7.7 percent of full-power radio and 3.15 percent of TV stations, there’s a problem.
Free Press also sponsors “stopbigmedia.com,” which in its “news links” for Sept. 9 featured “Glenn Beck vs. Van Jones, McCarthyism Enters the 21st Century,” on the Huffington Post.
OK, so who funds Free Press? Tides Foundation, for one, which just happens to also throw money at ACORN, the Center for American Progress, Democracy Now!, the Ella Baker Center (which Van Jones founded), the Rainforest Action Network, basically a whole bunch of Left causes, even Montana Conservation Voters.
Look, I’m not going to bore you about how Tides is a “donor-advised” outfit, meaning that tax-deductible “charitable” contributions to Tides are pooled and then anonymously re-directed to non-charitable political “Action Funds” – basically money-laundering for the activist Left. But it matters that Van Jones was a feature at a conference for people who think the media is way too far to the right, and want to “reform media, transform democracy.”
But why? Why would anyone, much less “of color” or otherwise politically “correct,” want to own radio and TV, or even newspapers?
As an institution, “mainstream” journalism is in a world of self-inflicted hurt, becoming more useless and more irrelevant every day, as it clearly was in the Jones saga. It was up to alternative media, the radio right-wing and the “netroots” Left, to slug it out over Jones. America’s “real” journalists pretty much sat on their fannies, when the facts were already available from credible, open sources. No matter your politics, that’s a shameful abdication of responsibility.
So again, why would anyone, black, white, red all over, blue, green or purple, want to own and control an institution that seems less and less willing and able to ferret out the truth with every passing hour?
Well, to those who feel that journalism isn’t about telling the truth, but more about controlling what “truths” people hear, the answer is obvious. To anyone who feels that journalism should be about the truth, and reporting that truth to an informed society of free people, the answer is just as obvious, and obviously dangerous.