Impeachment Not on Media's Radar

Dave Lindorff

www.thiscantbehappening.org
Sunday, August 27, 2006

Reader Response to C-Span and NPR Book Events Demonstrates Wide-Spread Interest in Impeachment Issue

Before Barbara and I got a chance to get any real national attention for The Case for Impeachment outside of programs on Air America, the best the book did on the Amazon sales ranking was about #3500.

Then last weekend, we had the opportunity, over a period of two days, to air a 7.5-minute interview on NPR, and a 75-minute presention on C-Span's "Books TV" program. Suddenly the book leapt in the rankings to #42, well ahead of #400, Greg Palast's best-selling Armed Madhouse, and even #80, Ann Coulter's Godless, and closing in on #27, Al Gore's best-selling Inconvenient Truth!

It makes you wonder what would happen if the mainstream media, like the NY Times, Washington Post and LA Times, and liberal publications like the Nation, In These Times, Salon, Slate, the Progressive, Harper's, the New Republic and others, or shows like "Fresh Air" and "Democracy Now," would stop ignoring the book and instead review it.

But ignoring "The Case for Impeachment" is just part of a larger censorship going on around impeachment, as I explain in this story which is appearing in the current issue of Extra!, the publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:


Adultery Was Serious; This is Just the Constitution

There is a growing grassroots campaign demanding the impeachment of George W. Bush. Across the nation, towns and cities have been passing pro-impeachment resolutions. Websites promoting impeachment keep springing up. In several states, bills have been introduced in state legislatures that, if passed, would become formal bills of impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives, requiring initiation of impeachment hearings under congressional rules dating back to the early 19th century.


Starting last fall, several polls (Zogby, 10/29=29/05, 1/9=12/06; Ipsos, 10/6=9/05) reported that a majority of Americans thought Bush should be impeached if he lied the country into war in Iraq or if he authorized warrantless spying on Americans. Those poll results were reported all over the Internet, but they barely made it into any mainstream corporate news reports. Indeed, impeachment itself is getting short shrift in the media, despite all this impeachment organizing activity.


When the House Judiciary Committee's ranking minority member, Rep. John Conyers (D.-Mich.), introduced a bill in December calling for creation of a select committee to investigate "possible impeachable crimes" by Bush, the dramatic move received virtually no mainstream coverage beyond an AP wire item (12/21/05). Even as the number of Democratic House members co-sponsoring that bill rose from an initial handful to 39, it has received scant attention. The first time impeachment made the front page of the Washington Post was March 25, 2006, when that paper finally ran a story on the wave of town government resolutions across the country. ...