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t r u t h o u t Interview: Marc Ash Chats with Will Pitt

Marc Ash | My Chat with Will Pitt
By Marc Ash
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Tuesday 09 August 2005

With all that's on the radar screen at this point I decided to have a chat with long time TO contributor William Rivers Pitt. We talked about the state of the country, his new work with Progressive Democrats of America and a September full of mobilization. My interview with Will:

MA: Will, your voice has become one of the most prominent voices of opposition to the Bush administration. No one should be surprised - your name William Rivers Pitt draws from the legacy of the legendary English seditionist William of Pitt, of whom you are in fact a descendent, no?

WP: Yes, I am a direct descendant of Pitt the Elder on my father's side. His father, my grandfather, became a genealogist after he retired from medicine, and traced our family all the way back to the 1600s. There are a pile of people named "William Pitt" in that line, including the Earl. My favorite quote from that relative has always been, "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

MA: Follow up: Before you rose to prominence as a writer, prior to George W. Bush's rise to power, you were a school teacher. Is the job of reforming a democracy best done by professionals, or is it work best done by ordinary citizens, teachers, bus drivers, bakers, etc?

WP: The "professionals" in politics and the mainstream are not interested in reform, by and large. They are interested in maintaining their position and paycheck and power. This is how the status quo is established and held, and more often than not, you will see the "professionals" rally against any substantive change because it would require them to dance faster. It has always been the little guys, the grassroots, the workers, who have brought change to this country.

MA: You first broke on the literary scene as a journalist for grass-roots publications, truthout and others. You rose to national prominence with your book, "War in Iraq - What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know", when it became ranked as a New York Times bestseller. You've made a decision to forgo journalism in favor of activism, is that right?

WP: For a long time I felt that journalism was activism. It was and still is. The manner in which the mainstream corporate news media delivers tainted, altered, watered-down information to the public is a large part of the reason we are in such a sorry state here in America. I wrote "War in Iraq" because the basic information in that book, information about the non-existent state of Iraq's WMD program and Iraq's non-ties to al Qaeda, were getting buried under an avalanche of rah-rah nonsense in the corporate news world.

Punching through the noise, the infotainment and the flat-out disinformation by practicing real journalism within the alternate media is activism in its own right. But I began to feel after a while like it was a passive form; I felt like a quarterback chucking hail-mary passes into the sky, hoping someone would catch the ball and run with it. Too often, the balls just hit the ground. Take a look at that Iraq book I wrote. It was right three years ago, and it is still right today, but the occupation is almost 900 days old and nearly 2,000 American soldiers are dead. That hail-mary hit the ground.

So doing straight-up activism lets me run with the damned ball myself.

MA: Okay, but if the "corporate news media delivers tainted, altered, watered-down information to the public" as you say, can't they argue as you argue that it's all in the name of cutting through the nonsense to get to the truth?

WP: Professional journalism standards are not what they once were, and the days of the "egghead journalist" are long gone. What we have now on television are a lot of models reading from scripts written by the boys in the newsroom, and the aforementioned boys are drawing paychecks from major corporations that have interests to look out for that more often than not cut against the requirements of objective journalism.

Check out the Columbia Journalism Review's list of who owns what in the corporate news realm: http://www.cjr.org/owners

You will see, for example, that NBC, MSNBC and CNBC are owned by General Electric, one of the largest defense contractors in America. General Electric does very well by war, and yet we are expected to trust their "news" organizations to report objectively on Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that GE is making money off of.

Look at CNN, and their owners AOL/TimeWarner. Look specifically at all the subsidiaries of that parent company, all the subsidiaries of those subsidiaries, and remember all the advertisers associated with all of them. It is almost impossible for CNN to report objectively on something without that report affecting its parent company, a subsidiary or an advertiser.

The print media isn't immune from this. Judy Miller of the New York Times is cooling her heels in a prison cell right now, in no small part because she became the most helpful reporter Bush and friends had in their push for war in Iraq. Miller took the verbatim words of Ahmad Chalabi as gospel and published stories about how Iraq was riddled with WMD. Once she said it in the Times, the rest of the media felt safe in following in the footsteps of that august paper. So of course, Karl Rove felt entirely comfortable calling her up about Valerie Plame. Her tainted, poor reporting before the invasion is the reason she was on Rove's speed-dial.

Once upon a time about 20 years ago, the NBC Nightly News brought in 54% of that station's parent company's profits for the year. Now that General Electric owns them, the Nightly News brings in 4% of the profit. There is no money in good journalism anymore, and so there isn't much good journalism in the corporate mainstream world.

Never forget this: One of the main reason Nazi Germany's extreme military and nationalistic build-up in the 1930s went almost unnoticed in the wider world was because the European news media at that time was owned by chemical and steel companies, which were profiting from Germany's build-up. They didn't report it, and so it did not gain notice until it was too late. The moral is simple: A news media owned by companies more interested in profit than fact is a cancer. That is exactly what we have now, and we are seeing the ramifications all over the world.

MA: You've thrown your hat in with Progressive Democrats of America. Why PDA?

PDA is doing a lot of the things I've been wanting to do for years now. They are creating an effective amalgam between liberals who want to work within the Democratic Party and progressives who operate outside the party. Too often, those two groups have been at loggerheads, and this has led to division and disaster. PDA trains activists and organizers to join local Democratic caucuses all over the country, to take over the party from the bottom up, the way the hard-right evangelicals did with the GOP. See my article "The Dawn of a New Democratic Party," which I wrote back in 2001 before joining up with truthout, to see what I mean.

At the same time, PDA is working with excellent Green Party activists like David Cobb and Medea Benjamin to create a political big tent. They call this their "Inside/Outside Strategy." It means activists working within the Democratic Party to bring it back to where it belongs, and activists working outside the Party to push the Party in the proper direction.

PDA is also masterful at coalition-building and working with progressive members of Congress. The AfterDowningStreet.org coalition is an example of this. They are taking the ball and running with it.

MA: PDA has some events on the calendar. Can you tell us a little about those events?

WP: The biggest thing on the calendar is the massive protest that is happening in Washington DC over the weekend of September 24th. PDA will have a significant presence at the protest itself on Saturday, but the really interesting stuff will take place on Sunday and Monday.

On Sunday, PDA is running a wide-ranging convention at the David A. Clarke School of Law. PDA activists from all over the country will come together to game out progressive electoral and legislative strategies for the 2006 midterms. On Monday the 26th, PDA will be heading up to Capitol Hill with activists from United for Peace and Justice to lobby Congresspeople for legislation demanding a withdrawal from Iraq. All in all, this will be a big weekend.

The rest of the issues we are working on can be found at the PDA website.

MA: What's the aim of these events - if all goes well, what will you accomplish?

The aim of the protest is straightforward: To put as many people as possible onto the DC streets. Bush's approval ratings in general, and regarding Iraq specifically, are abysmal and dropping like a brick. A quarter million, a half a million, a million people protesting in Washington DC will serve to show beyond doubt that this country is rejecting Mr. Bush and his plans for this country and the world.

The Sunday event is geared towards helping people take the fight home to their local caucuses, districts and towns. The House of Representatives and the Senate are up for grabs in 2006, and the grassroots need to get working now to make sure Bush and his friends don't continue getting rubber-stamp approval from Congress.

Monday will see activists in every office of every Democrat, and more than a few Republicans, demanding that Congress work to get us out of Iraq. We will remind them that we are not going away, we will remind them that we are watching, and we will remind them that there will be a price to be paid for their failure to take responsibility for the messes they have helped to create.

MA: It's going on five years now since five members of the US Supreme Court interceded dramatically in Florida's electoral process - in America's electoral process. You along with many other Americans have dedicated yourself to opposing their will and the administration they created. Where are we - what is the state of American Democracy today?

WP: The state of our democracy is poor. I wrote an essay recently for truthout called "Bush's Soviet State."

In that essay, I said "Bush and his people have managed to walk through the raindrops since 2001, managed to pull off more than a few impeachable crimes, for no other reason than that they are accountable to no one in government ... or, more properly, no one in government who has the power to call them to account has done so. Congress is run by Bush allies, the Justice Department is run by his longest-standing hatchet man, and all of them prefer to maintain the pleasant fictions over any attempt to fix what has gone so drastically and demonstrably wrong. We watched the Soviets smash themselves to pieces because they refused to deal with what ailed them, because lies made life easier on the powerful, because actually attempting to address a problem might expose the powerful to censure or even removal, because no one had the power to stop them. It is happening again, right before our eyes."

One of the central problems facing our democracy has to do with simple accountability. Our system was based on checks and balances, and since 2000 those checks and balances have been erased. The administration can do and has done whatever it wants because no one in the Justice Department or Congress has the power or the will to stop them.

That is why the 2006 midterms are so important. Accountability could come awfully late, especially for the dead, but if we take back Congress, we can begin the process. It is past time.

MA: William Rivers Pitt, thank you for taking time to visit with the folks that read truthout.

WP: Any time, hoss.



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You can send comments to t r u t h o u t Executive Director Marc Ash at: director@truthout.org.

posted by Annamarie at 5:20 PM