{"id":291582,"date":"2017-01-24T23:50:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-24T22:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/misremembering-king-rewrites-the-presss-own-role-in-history-transcript-of-counterspins-special-episode-on-the-media-and-martin-luther-king\/"},"modified":"2017-01-24T23:50:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T22:50:00","slug":"misremembering-king-rewrites-the-presss-own-role-in-history-transcript-of-counterspins-special-episode-on-the-media-and-martin-luther-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/misremembering-king-rewrites-the-presss-own-role-in-history-transcript-of-counterspins-special-episode-on-the-media-and-martin-luther-king\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Misremembering King Rewrites the Press\u2019s Own Role in History\u2019 &#8211; Transcript of CounterSpin&#039;s special episode on the media and Martin Luther King"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/the-media-and-martin-luther-king\/\">January 20, 2017, episode<\/a> of <strong>CounterSpin<\/strong> was a special featuring archived interviews about corporate media and Martin Luther King. This is a lightly edited transcript.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5585027\" style=\"width: 611px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/MLKMicrophones.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5585027\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/MLKMicrophones.jpg\" alt=\"Martin Luther King \" width=\"601\" height=\"376\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Martin Luther King called for a &#8220;radical redistribution of political and economic power.&#8221; (photo: NASA\/Wikimedia)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"wrapperMI_0\" class=\"wrap-mjp  \" style=\"padding:5px 0px 40px 0px;margin:0px;width:100%\">\n<div class=\"Eabove-mjp\" id=\"Eabove-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"subwrap-MI\">\n<div class=\"jp-innerwrap\">\n<div class=\"innerx\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerleft\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerright\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innertab\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"interface-mjp verdana-mjp\" style=\"height:71px\" id=\"interfaceMI_0\">\n<div class=\"MI-image Himg right-mjp\" id=\"MI_image_0\" style=\"width:auto;height:71px;overflow:hidden\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T_mp3j_0\" class=\"player-track-title left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bars_holder\">\n<div class=\"loadMI_mp3j\" id=\"load_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"poscolMI_mp3j\" id=\"poscol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"posbarMI_mp3j\" id=\"posbar_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"P-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-play-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-total-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"statusMI_0\" class=\"statusMI\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"transport-MI\">\n<div class=\"play-mjp\" id=\"playpause_mp3j_0\">Play<\/div>\n<div class=\"stop-mjp\" id=\"stop_mp3j_0\">Stop<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"buttons-wrap-mjp\" id=\"buttons-wrap-mjp_0\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-popout-MI\" id=\"lpp_mp3j_0\">pop out<\/div>\n<div id=\"download_mp3j_0\" class=\"dloadmp3-MI\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"mjp-volwrap\">\n<div class=\"MIsliderVolume\" id=\"vol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt1\" id=\"innerExt1_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt2\" id=\"innerExt2_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebetween-mjp\" id=\"Ebetween-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"listwrap_mp3j\" id=\"L_mp3j_0\">\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<div class=\"playlist-colour\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<ul class=\"ul-mjp darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp\" id=\"UL_mp3j_0\">\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-sleeve\">\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_gif_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-gif\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_txt_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-txt\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-close\" id=\"mp3j_finfo_close_0\">X<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_dlf_0\" class=\"mp3j-dlframe\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-nosolution\" id=\"mp3j_nosolution_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebelow-mjp\" id=\"Ebelow-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [<br \/>\n\t{ name: &#8220;1. 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Bush&#8217;s 2000 inauguration.)<\/p>\n<p>Still, when Donald Trump greeted the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, if you will, with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/trump-blasts-civil-rights-icon-john-lewis-in-twitter-attack\/\">swipe<\/a> at Lewis, many in corporate media expressed ready disapproval for what <b>Washington Post<\/b> columnist Michael Gerson <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/trumps-attack-on-john-lewis-is-the-essence-of-narcissism\/2017\/01\/15\/7e3d9ab6-db4d-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.e527bfd8c2e2\">called<\/a> Trump&#8217;s disregard for the American narrative, in which Lewis is an undeniable hero. (For Gerson, Lewis&#8217;s challenge to the 2000 election is merely a sign of his &#8220;disturbing habit of hyperbole.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>But the <i>relative<\/i> ease with which elite media defended John Lewis belies a more complex relationship between the press corps and the civil rights movement, which the King holiday always serves to highlight.<\/p>\n<p>Media&#8217;s traditional misremembering of King distorts his ideas and priorities, and rewrites the press&#8217;s own role in history; it also projects a distorted vision of what protest means, and how social change happens\u2014a <i>clear<\/i> view of which is much in demand right now.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve talked about this subject a number of times on the show; we&#8217;re going to revisit some of them today on this special look at The Media and Martin Luther King\u2014on <b>CounterSpin<\/b>, brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Back in the 1990s, FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/media-beat-column\/the-martin-luther-king-you-dont-see-on-tv\/\">column<\/a>, \u201cThe Martin Luther King You Don&#8217;t See on TV.\u201d It noted how the timeline in media&#8217;s story seems to jump from 1965\u2014marching for voting rights in Selma\u2014to King\u2019s assassination in Memphis in 1968. Because national news media have never really come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years, when he challenged the country&#8217;s fundamental economic and international priorities, when he opposed the war in Vietnam, when he <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/views04\/0115-13.htm\">called<\/a> the United States \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5572031\" style=\"width: 361px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/IHaveADream.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5572031\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/IHaveADream.jpg\" alt=\"Martin Luther King at the March on Washington\" width=\"351\" height=\"266\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Martin Luther King at the March on Washington.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>As Joseph Torres of the group Free Press <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freepress.net\/blog\/2017\/01\/16\/reclaiming-kings-legacy\">wrote<\/a> just recently, \u201cSanitizing King\u2019s legacy is a deliberate act.\u201d Well, that sanitizing is reflected not just in what media don&#8217;t talk about when they talk about King, but also in how they present those things they do discuss. Any holiday roundup, for example, will include footage from the 1963 \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/kinginstitute.stanford.edu\/king-papers\/documents\/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom\">speech<\/a>. The narrative there, put simply, is of a fractious country brought together by the sheer force of King&#8217;s moral eloquence, universally recognized and appreciated.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t really much like that at all, as <b>CounterSpin<\/b> <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/counterspin\/gary-younge-on-i-have-a-dream-susan-ohanian-on-common-core\/\">discussed<\/a> with Gary Younge in the summer of 2013, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Gary Younge is New York correspondent for the <b>Guardian<\/b> and author of the book <i>The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s Dream<\/i>. We asked him about preeminent misrememberings or misunderstandings of King&#8217;s words that day.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5585028\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/GaryYounge.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5585028\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/GaryYounge.jpg\" alt=\"Gary Younge (cc photo: www.stephan-roehl.de)\" width=\"350\" height=\"197\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Gary Younge: &#8220;You ask anybody who knew King well, anybody who was in the movement, did you think we\u2019d be speaking about this speech 50 years later, they all say no.&#8221; (cc photo: www.stephan-roehl.de)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Gary Younge:<\/b> I think the first one is that significant powers, the main powers in the country, did not want the March to take place, and without the March, there wouldn\u2019t have been a speech. Kennedy didn\u2019t want it to take place. Most Americans thought that the March was a bad idea. An overwhelming majority of white Americans thought that the country was moving too quickly towards civil rights. There is this sense that there was a group of bad guys in the South, bad white people with sticks and dogs, and that everybody else was basically on board, and that\u2019s just not the way it happened. So there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n<p>That everybody knew, as soon as that speech was delivered, that it was a speech for the ages, and that it struck a chord immediately. I mean, it was a great speech. I haven\u2019t met anybody who was there say it wasn\u2019t a great speech. Kennedy greeted King, saying, \u201cI have a dream,\u201d and was looking at the March on a TV in the Oval Office and said, \u201cDamn, that man can speak.\u201d It moved people, it certainly moved people.<\/p>\n<p>But you ask anybody who knew King well, anybody who was in the movement, did you think we\u2019d be speaking about this speech 50 years later, they all say no. While the speech was lauded immediately by the <b>New York Times<\/b> and others, it actually kind of fell from public view. Very few people quoted it; it wasn\u2019t quoted in the <b>Congressional Record<\/b> barely at all, even though there was a Voting Rights Act and a Civil Rights Act.<\/p>\n<p>And King became more unpopular in the years following the speech. He moved on to poverty and the Vietnam War, and these things got him in an awful lot of trouble. And he died an isolated figure. It was only after he\u2019d been assassinated that the Dream was resurrected, and over the years became polished and gleamed to become a national icon.<\/p>\n<p>So it\u2019s not as though history goes through the collection of speeches that are available and says, this one is the best one objectively, I like his diction, I like his metaphors and so on. It\u2019s America has chosen to remember this speech, because it does something very particular for America in this moment.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> You make a point of the fact that \u2014 you know, our listeners may know that \u2014 how media ignore King\u2019s anti-war stance and his emphasis on economic restructuring. I remember David Gergen, the pundit, <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/extra\/dreaming-away-the-reality-of-racism\/\">expressing<\/a> confusion and dismay that Hillary Clinton chose to use a remembrance of King as a time to mention poverty. He thought it was just out of place.<\/p>\n<p>But you make the point that even his views on racism have been misunderstood, and it\u2019s just this fact of segregation, which King was acknowledging the end to, but he didn\u2019t believe that segregation and racism were the same thing, and that racism ended with segregation.<\/p>\n<p><b>GY:<\/b> Well, right, this is the very useful elision of the conservatives and the right, is to use segregation as a foil for racism, and to say that racism is now finished because segregation is finished. At the moment, on that day, A. Philip Randolph said, \u201cOf course we want equality, but gaining entry to these establishments will do us little good if we do not have the money to buy anything there.\u201d And so the end of segregation\u2014which was a major achievement, which should not be undermined or undersold\u2014it meant the end of the most explicit form of racism that could exist, but it didn\u2019t mean the end of racism, and King never, ever thought it did.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> King&#8217;s legacy has been instrumentalized toward a number of ends; pundits have argued that he would have supported wars in regions around the world\u2026. But the most popular conservative appropriation might be that\u2014because he said people should be judged by the content of their character\u2014King would have opposed affirmative action.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the evident weakness of the idea that the person who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/134362247\/Martin-Luther-King-Jr-The-Three-Evils-of-Society-1967#scribd\">called for<\/a> a &#8220;radical redistribution of political and economic power&#8221; was opposed to affirmative action, it&#8217;s been tossed out for years by the likes of David Horowitz and Charles Krauthammer as proof that King was in fact a conservative. An early observer of the phenomenon, Paul Rockwell, <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/extra\/the-right-has-a-dream\/\">noted<\/a> that when Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster signed an executive order abolishing affirmative action, he presented that as the fulfillment of King&#8217;s dream.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, you say, but that was back in 1995\u2014but, nope, it&#8217;s 2017, \u00a0and the <b>Washington Post<\/b> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/martin-luther-king-jr-was-a-true-conservative\/2017\/01\/15\/b0f465e4-d9c6-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html?\">editorial headline<\/a> reads: \u201cMartin Luther King Jr. Was a True Conservative.\u201d And that&#8217;s because<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>in his way, Dr. King did a lot to preserve, protect and defend the best of our principles and values. Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was despised by many conservatives of his day, helped keep American society from succumbing to the radical ideologies that brought death and devastation to much of Europe and Asia, Dr. King worked to turn back extremism, violence and racial nationalism at the height of the civil rights movement, and to keep the cause of essential and long-overdue change in the American mainstream.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As FAIR analyst Adam Johnson <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/wapo-organ-of-extreme-center-calls-mlk-true-conservative\/\">noted<\/a>, the <b>Post<\/b>&#8216;s false dichotomy\u2014in which King, or their version of him, represents the \u201cgood\u201d left, unmoved by racial nationalism and Marxist ideology\u2014is just the same tired take, erasing the King that said in 1961, &#8220;Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God\u2019s children.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Conservatives eager to present King as one of their own would have some difficulty, in any event, squaring that with how conservatives viewed him in his time. We talked about that with Rick Perlstein, author of <i>Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America<\/i>. Here he is <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/counterspin\/rick-perlstein-on-conservatives-amp-martin-luther-king-sarah-olson-on-watada-subpoena\/\">talking<\/a> with <b>CounterSpin<\/b>&#8216;s Steve Rendall, who asked him how Martin Luther King was seen by conservatives.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5585029\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/RickPerlstein.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5585029\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/RickPerlstein.jpg\" alt=\"Rick Perlstein (photo: Simon &amp; Schuster)\" width=\"350\" height=\"175\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Rick Perlstein: &#8220;Conservatives reinterpreted that to mean that&#8230;anyone who breaks a law, you can lay to the responsibility of Martin Luther King.&#8221; (photo: Simon &amp; Schuster)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Rick Perlstein:<\/b> They hated him. Basically, Martin Luther King\u2019s fundamental idea was that some laws are so unjust that we should disobey them and risk the consequences and absorb the blows with love and kindness. And conservatives reinterpreted that to mean that if you don\u2019t like a law, you don\u2019t have to obey it, so anyone who breaks a law, you can lay to the responsibility of Martin Luther King, who told people to be lawless.<\/p>\n<p>And there were some pretty stunning examples of that. Even to the extent that people almost blamed him for his own assassination. Ronald Reagan said that this is just the sort of \u201cgreat tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they break.\u201d And basically saying, well, if you say that people should be civilly disobedient, well, maybe that\u2019s what James Earl Ray was doing.<\/p>\n<p><b>Steve Rendall:<\/b> Well, just to be clear, the supposed liberal media was not exactly friendly to King, either, much of the time. Give us a couple of examples of that, if you will, as I know you recounted them.<\/p>\n<p><b>RP:<\/b> Yeah. Well, the <b>New York Times<\/b>, when King was in Birmingham in 1963, which is really the touchstone of the real veneration of King. I mean, he won the Nobel Prize, basically, for his crusade in Birmingham.<\/p>\n<p><b>SR:<\/b> And his \u201cLetter From a Birmingham Jail\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/okra.stanford.edu\/transcription\/document_images\/undecided\/630416-019.pdf\">included<\/a> that argument for civil disobedience.<\/p>\n<p><b>RP:<\/b> That\u2019s right. And one of the people he was tacitly responding to was institutions like the <b>New York Times<\/b>, who said, well, there\u2019s a new mayor coming in in Birmingham, and we should give him a chance to accomplish what you\u2019re trying to accomplish in civil disobedience, through the normal bureaucratic administrative channels, and why are you being so impatient? And in fact, he called his book on the Birmingham crusade <i>Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/i>. The liberals were the people who said, basically, you should wait, you should be more patient.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> The <b>Washington Post<\/b>, for its part, sniffed, after King&#8217;s \u201cBeyond Vietnam\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu\/encyclopedia\/documentsentry\/doc_beyond_vietnam\/\">speech<\/a>, \u201cKing has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people,\u201d while <b>Life<\/b> magazine called it \u201ca script for <b>Radio Hanoi<\/b>.\u201d Liberal media have, in their own way, been as vigorous as the right in their reinventions.<\/p>\n<p>Even the love of King is sometimes problematic, as in 2013, when <b>CBS<\/b>\u2019s Bob Schieffer basically <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/face-the-nation-transcripts-june-16-2013-mcdonough-and-rogers-on-nsa-surveillance\/5\/\">used him as a stick<\/a> to beat Edward Snowden with:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Some of the people I admire most took on the government\u2014men and women who led the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. They are true heroes. I\u2019m not ready to put Edward Snowden in that category.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Schieffer went on to add: &#8220;The people who led the civil rights movement were willing to break the law and suffer the consequences,&#8221; making you wonder what criteria exactly he&#8217;s working with.<\/p>\n<p>It was liberals like the <b>New York Times<\/b>&#8216; Maureen Dowd who <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/maureen-dowd-sets-martin-luther-king-straight-on-how-freedom-is-won\/\">took issue<\/a> with the movie <i>Selma<\/i>, suggesting it misrepresented the history and the heroes of the civil rights movement. We <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/counterspin\/laura-carlsen-on-mexican-violence-jim-naureckas-on-selma\/\">talked <\/a>with FAIR&#8217;s own Jim Naureckas about the backlash.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5585030\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/JimShedd-e1485277965330.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5585030\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/JimShedd-e1485277965330.jpg\" alt=\"Jim Naureckas (cc photo: June Naureckas)\" width=\"350\" height=\"197\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Jim Naureckas: &#8220;There\u2019s a real discomfort with the idea that the white, powerful and\u2014notably\u2014liberal authority figure is not the moral center of the story, that he has something to learn from Martin Luther King.&#8221; (cc photo: June Naureckas)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Jim Naureckas:<\/b> It <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/media_criticism\/its-critics-of-selma-who-are-distorting-civil-rights-history\/\">started out<\/a> with some people closely associated with Lyndon Johnson. The director of the LBJ Presidential Library was upset because the film depicted the relationship between LBJ and Martin Luther King as \u201ccontentious.\u201d And then Joseph Califano, who was a top domestic advisor to Johnson, said in the <b>Washington Pos<\/b>t that it \u201cfalsely portrays Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King.\u201d From there it went on to a number of pundits who chimed in. For example, Richard Cohen, the <b>Washington Post<\/b> columnist, denounced the film as \u201ca lie that tarnishes Johnson\u2019s legacy to exalt King\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> Richard Cohen, <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/uncategorized\/racism-and-richard-cohen\/\">not known<\/a> for his famous trumpeting of African-American rights. Well, it\u2019s not a documentary, to be clear; it\u2019s a fictional film, right? But still, what about this problem that it misrepresents the relationship between LBJ and Martin Luther King?<\/p>\n<p><b>JN:<\/b> Well, the film does take some liberties with the chronology of things. But if you were to see the film and then to read these op-eds, you would get a more accurate depiction of history from the fictional film than from the supposedly factual op-eds.<\/p>\n<p>For example, the idea that the relationship between Johnson and King was not contentious, and that King and Johnson were not at odds, is belied by the actual tapes that were made by Johnson in the White House. There\u2019s one tape where he is talking to Bill Moyers, who was an aide as well, and Johnson says of King, \u201cHe better get to behaving himself or all of them are going to be put in jail.\u201d Well, that sounds pretty contentious.<\/p>\n<p>What he\u2019s upset about is the fact that there were sit-ins at the Justice Department and the White House protesting the fact that the federal government was not doing anything to protect marchers who were trying to go from Selma to Montgomery to protest the lack of voting rights. And you have to wonder, if the relationship between Johnson and King was so harmonious, why are civil rights activists sitting in at the White House?<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> Hoover was his guy as well, right?<\/p>\n<p><b>JN:<\/b> Right. Hoover was the chief of the FBI under Johnson, and Johnson reaffirmed his place there. In the film, Hoover is depicted as sending sex tapes to Coretta Scott King in an effort to discredit him. The critics have been very upset that the movie implies, but doesn\u2019t really say, that this was Johnson\u2019s idea.<\/p>\n<p>The actual historical record shows that when Hoover\u2019s FBI sent particularly incriminating tapes to the White House, they were seen by Johnson\u2019s top aide. This is Walter Jenkins, his closest aide for like 25 years. In a memo to Hoover from one of Hoover\u2019s aides, it says, \u201cJenkins was of the opinion that the FBI could perform a good service to the country if this matter could somehow be confidentially given to members of the press.\u201d So the idea that Johnson was willing to use incriminating information about King against him is not made up by the filmmakers of <i>Selma<\/i>; it\u2019s part of the historical record.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_31542\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/MLK-LBJ-Selma1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-31542\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/MLK-LBJ-Selma1.jpg\" alt=\"MLK (David Oyelowo) and LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) in Selma.\" width=\"350\" height=\"210\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>MLK (David Oyelowo) and LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) face off in<\/em> Selma<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> Well, it isn\u2019t, in your view, just that these critics are getting the history of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King wrong. You think they\u2019re getting the movie wrong in a way, too, that it\u2019s really \u2014 it\u2019s not about smearing Johnson really at all.<\/p>\n<p><b>JN:<\/b> Yeah. I think that there\u2019s an expectation from Johnson\u2019s associates that this movie should be a celebration of Johnson, with him as the hero of the civil rights movement. And by making the character of Johnson \u2014 he\u2019s not an unsympathetic character, he\u2019s not an opponent of civil rights. He\u2019s someone who is telling Martin Luther King that the time is not right just then for a Voting Rights Act, that they ought to wait, which is actually what the historical Lyndon Johnson actually said to the historical Martin Luther King. He said, \u201cI\u2019m going to do it eventually, but I can\u2019t get voting rights through in this session of Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And the movie is really the story of how King, through the civil rights movement, through demonstrating the nastiness of racist violence in the South, captured the national attention and convinced Lyndon Johnson that this was, in fact, the time to have a Voting Rights Act that would give blacks the political power that would enable them to get justice when they were subject to violence.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> Well, and on that point, the film <i>Selma<\/i> was made before Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, before the whole Black Lives Matter movement. But it sort of feels like some people may be finding contention in any expression that doesn\u2019t pose white people, essentially, as the solution for black people\u2019s problems, or that locates agency outside of traditional power sources. Do you think at all that some of that\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n<p><b>JN:<\/b> I do. I feel like there\u2019s a real discomfort with the idea that the white, powerful and\u2014notably\u2014liberal authority figure is not the moral center of the story, that he has something to learn from Martin Luther King, that Martin Luther King is showing him the urgency of doing something about racism and racist power. And at a time when there are African-Americans in the streets again calling on the people of America to do something about racist violence, it is striking how much hostility this film has gotten.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> On the 50th anniversary of King&#8217;s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, <b>Time<\/b> magazine ran a big glossy <a href=\"http:\/\/content.time.com\/time\/onedream\/\">interactive feature<\/a>, which nevertheless didn&#8217;t change the fact that the magazine had no black correspondents. Corporate media would like to be judged by their professed intentions when it comes to racial justice\u2014but action, and inaction, speak more truly.<\/p>\n<p>For example, the Movement for Black Lives announced a week of events under the rubric Resist and Reclaim MLK. Explicitly inspired by the Poor People&#8217;s Campaign King was working on at the time of his murder, the campaign linked King&#8217;s work with current struggles around Islamophobia, deportation, environmental defense, labor, gender justice, and student and youth issues. A press corps interested in exploring King&#8217;s actual ideas or legacy would have devoted more than the near-zero attention that that campaign received.<\/p>\n<p>The treatment of present day protest was the topic last October with Brandi Collins from Color of Change. We <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/brandi-collins-on-black-lives-surveillance\/\">talked<\/a> about\u2014speaking of J. Edgar Hoover\u2014the fact that activism happens on social media that are vulnerable to surveillance and obstruction by the state.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5583174\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/BrandiCollins2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5583174\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/BrandiCollins2.jpg\" alt=\"Brandi Collins\" width=\"350\" height=\"197\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Brandi Collins: &#8220;They say things like, well, if Martin Luther King was alive today, he would never stand for this. And conveniently forget that when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive, he was called by the FBI..one of the biggest threats to our country.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Brandi Collins:<\/b> We actually have a number of campaigns right now that we\u2019re running around <b>Facebook<\/b> and <b>Twitter<\/b> and their relationship with these companies. And one of the things that\u2019s recently been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aclunc.org\/blog\/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target\">turned up<\/a> by ACLU in Northern California, who we\u2019ve been working with, is that <b>Twitter<\/b> has had a partnership with Geofeedia. We also\u2014one of our FOIA requests that came in reaffirmed that they have a relationship with Media Solar. But these companies market themselves as being able to target, track and give law enforcement information about activists based on their social media accounts, and touting the relationship that they have with <b>Twitter<\/b> and <b>Facebook<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>It never ceases to fascinate me how we have leaders in Mark Zuckerberg and in Jack Dorsey who constantly go out and talk about how much they care about the Movement for Black Lives. We know that this 21st century movement has in some ways been powered by these platforms, and they know that as well. And so they continue to benefit off of black pain, as one would say, without actually doing anything to prevent black folks from being targeted by law enforcement, and in fact having a relationship to make that easier. Or doing anything about, for example, the online bullying that many of these activists also endure, which is another issue we\u2019ve been working on.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> It wasn\u2019t a coincidence that the <a href=\"https:\/\/ccrjustice.org\/home\/what-we-do\/our-cases\/color-change-v-department-homeland-security-and-federal-bureau\">lawsuit<\/a> that Color of Change and CCR filed about FBI and Homeland Security surveillance, that that came on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. There are certainly analogs, of course, between the Panthers and the Movement for Black Lives, but there\u2019s also this thing called COINTELPRO, and it seems as though it\u2019s almost an unbroken legacy. I wonder, what would you tell listeners, or have listeners know, about the connections between history and today?<\/p>\n<p><b>BC:<\/b> Interestingly, I\u2019ve been reading this book <i>News for All the People<\/i>, written by Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres. And one of the things they talk about in the book was that when Fred Hampton was being assassinated\u2014and a lot of research has shown now that the police and the FBI were working hand in hand to target him, and that it was in fact an assassination by the government against a leader in the Black Panther Movement\u2014they actually worked with AT&amp;T to cut off all the phone lines, so that nobody was able to call in or out of the house before they went in. And, in fact, that became a moment which led to the discovery of COINTELPRO. And once the government was called out and publicly shamed about this, they, quote unquote, \u201cdismantled the program.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But I feel like what we\u2019re seeing right now, and the level of surveillance, how that\u2019s being used, some of the technologies\u2014for example, facial recognition technology is another thing that we FOIA\u2019d and looked into, and it turns out that 80 percent of the people in the FBI\u2019s facial recognition database don\u2019t even have a criminal record or any interaction with the law. It\u2019s disproportionately targeted and used and deployed in black communities. And it also is not good enough technology to accurately identify black folks, so they misidentify black folks at a significantly higher rate than other groups.<\/p>\n<p>And so when you look at all of this, and you see all the ways in which technology is coming together, and this line between mass and targeted surveillance is being erased, particularly as it pertains to communities of color, what you see is actually scarier than what was happening in COINTELPRO. There\u2019s a clear through-line in how the government continues to act and chill movements for justice, but I think where we\u2019re heading now is something that could be even worse than what was experienced 50 years ago. And so we filed the lawsuit at this time, not just to remind people of where we were, but also what could be coming on the horizon if we don\u2019t act now.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> It\u2019s very important to say, when you look at the documents, you see law enforcement referring to activists as \u201cthreat actors,\u201d you know, and these terms that are very much associated with terrorism. And when it\u2019s Martin Luther King Day, everyone talks about protest, and it\u2019s this American value, your ability to protest and to speak your mind. When people actually do it, we get a different kind of vibe, and what we\u2019re seeing it seems is this conflation of protest\u2014 \u00a0legal, peaceful protest\u2014with crime and with terrorism. We can see that from law enforcement, but I worry when we also see that in kind of the public conversation, the idea that it\u2019s OK to monitor protests because they are somehow threatening, inherently.<\/p>\n<p>And that seems to me like this core conflict about what do we really value? Everyone says they love the First Amendment, just don\u2019t try to exercise it, it seems.<\/p>\n<p><b>BC:<\/b> Right. It\u2019s fascinating, right? Because even when we talk about \u2014 it\u2019s so interesting to hear people talk about MLK today with this level of reverence, and they say things like, well, if Martin Luther King was alive today, he would never stand for this. And conveniently forget that when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive, he was called by the FBI, you know, the most dangerous man in America, or one of the biggest threats to our country. And that\u2019s how he was treated. And he had a huge file on him, as did Cesar Chavez, as did a number of people in the environmental justice movement and the Second Wave of feminism.<\/p>\n<p>So what we\u2019ve seen throughout history is the role that the media has played when convenient in forwarding a police PR narrative that reinforces the need for surveillance in our community and conflates safety with surveillance, in ways that I think everybody should find alarming. And so you take a movement, now, the Movement for Black Lives has been very clear that they are for freedom, that what they are talking about has nothing to do with killing police or terrorizing our community, and yet the fact that police officers across the country are being trained to see these activists as terrorist threats speaks volumes.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> That was Brandi Collins from Color of Change. Before that, you heard FAIR\u2019s Jim Naureckas, author Rick Perlstein and author\/correspondent Gary Younge.<\/p>\n<p>This piece was reprinted by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/misremembering-king-rewrites-the-presss-own-role-in-history\/\">FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The January 20, 2017, episode of CounterSpin was a special featuring archived interviews about corporate media and Martin Luther King. This is a lightly edited transcript. Martin Luther King called for a &#8220;radical redistribution of political and economic power.&#8221; (photo: NASA\/Wikimedia) Play Stop pop out X MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [ { name: &#8220;1. CounterSpin The Media [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-291582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}