Saturday, November 18, 2006

“RAG” TIME CONTINUED: THE “INDYPENDENT” HOW A PSEUDO-LEFT RAG COVERS UP GENOCIDE AND HURTS THE HOMELESS. A TARLETON TALE.

UP FRONT News November 10, 2006
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
“The paper that can’t be bought and can’t be sold.”

“RAG” TIME CONTINUED: THE “INDYPENDENT” HOW A PSEUDO-LEFT RAG COVERS UP GENOCIDE
AND HURTS THE HOMELESS. A TARLETON TALE.

Some weeks ago I attended a meeting of the staff of “Indykids”, the pediatric division of the “Indypendent, a newspaper that falsely claims to be independent. The editors there were complaining about the decision of the Queensborough Public Library to refuse to place “Indykids” in its many branches. I asked the editors what was the stated reason for the refusal and editor Amanda Vender told me that the library views “Indykids” as “slanted.” Since I believe in freedom of the press, I offered to help and asked that Indy- kids send me an e-mail about the matter with copies of any correspondence with the library. I never heard from Indykids again. And now that I have had a chance to read the paper, and have been more than familiar with editorial practices at the Indypendent, I have to conclude that the library’s assessment that Indykis is “slanted” is 100% correct.

Not too long after I first saw the Indypendent, as a journalist I attended a couple of their open meetings. At one of those meetings, I spoke with Indypendent editor John Tarleton about a story warranting coverage and offered to do a story. The article was about the under-reported Bringing America Home Act, a major piece of legislation buried by the real estate friendly right wing in the U.S. Congress. Enactment of this bill, which is prob-ably impossible without serious media attention, could end homelessness in the U.S. over a period of years. I wrote my piece, gave to Mr. Tarleton and never heard from him again. Some weeks later I visited the Indypendent and saw the rather dour John f. Kerry lookalike Tarleton. His response to my inquiry about the story was, “We don’t print press releases.” Tarleton really should work for the New York Post.

Since early 2005 the Indypendent was aware of my candidacy as a small “d” and capi- tal “D” Democratic leftist for the U.S. Senate, challenging the Republicrat Hillary Clin- ton. The Indypendent, like another censored newspaper, “People’s World” published by the Communist Party of the USA, printed not a syllable about my candidacy, a candidacy which was reported in, aside from front page coverage in the Staten Island Advance, Newsday, the New York Press, The New York Times, The New York Press, The Queens Ledger, The Knight News (Queens College), Pipe Dream (Binghamton University), The Independent (SUNY Purchase) and presumably elsewhere in the print media. I also ap- peared as a candidate on the nationally broadcast INN World Report, seen locally on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, The Conversations With Harold Channer Show on MNN, and the radio stations at Binghamton U. and SUNY Purchase. On one occasion, citing Indypendent coverage of other “anti-Hillary” candidates, (both of whom have links to the currently “left” but always fascist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., who is an expert at infiltrating the media), I asked Tarleton about reporting on my candidacy. He made what, if printed, would be a libelous and defamatory comment about my mental health. That, by the way, was the same approach taken some years ago by the right wing Democratic Mayor Ed Koch when he sought to silence my blowing the whistle on his cover-up of budget cut-caused patient deaths at City operated Queens Hospital Center. That has been the same approach, utilized habitually by LaRouche, against those who differ with him and by political lunatics (who get fawning coverage in places like the Indypendent and WBAI) like the violent, psychopathic terrorism-connected demagogue Geoffrey Blank.

The Indypendent and Indykids are rags. A recent issue of Indykids reports on the poli- tical situation in Nepal. It writes about oppression by King Gyanendra. It refers to the “communists, who control 80 percent of the countryside” and who “are still concerned about foreign interference in Nepal and the people’s rights to education, healthcare and jobs.” At the bottom of the report next to an asterisk, it states “*Communists are people who believe in creating a society where all resources are shared equally by the people.” Yeah! And Mao Zedong, whose genocidal and murderous politics drives the Maoists in Nepal, is the tooth fairy. The Indypendent, while presumably correct in its characteriza- tion of the autocratic royalty of Nepal, says nothing about the fact that Nepal’s Maoists have murdered thousands of innocent people, among with some guilty ones. The Indy- pendent joins the New York Post and some other major media in its censorship of the fact of the over half century of Genocide in Chinese Communist occupied Tibet, not to spake of the Bringing America Home Act.

I saw Tarleton again yesterday, handing out his rag after a very overly long speech (with no Q&A) by the egotistical Amy Goodman, who trumpets much of her stuff through the heavily censored WBAI. I told him that I was doing a story on him and his rags. His mouth hung open.
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