Anderson points finger at media
Ross “Rocky” Anderson called for action Friday afternoon, telling students the media have oppressed society and supported a corrupt government.
USU students need to band together and join a movement to rid the U.S. from corruption, he said in a Media Morris Society Lecture sponsored by the journalism department.
“This is an important conversation for journalists and journalism educators,” Department Head Ted Pease said. “But even more important for citizens in general during an election year.”
Anderson said the media have enabled social injustices.
“We have two categories of people in this country,” Anderson said. “A two-tiered system of justice and a two-tiered financial system and in large part that has been enabled … because of a media that has lulled the American people along.”
Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City and presidential candidate for the Justice Party, spoke in the Eccles Conference Center to a group of about 100 students and members of the community.
He said the news media have either misinformed or neglected to inform the public on important topics, particularly climate change.
“Throughout all of these debates the words ‘climate change’ never were mentioned. And yet that is going to be the greatest crisis you all face in your lives,” Anderson said.
The reason we don’t hear about such an important issue is because of the media attempting to remain impartial, he said. A majority of the scientific community agrees that there has been a climate shift but the media doesn’t report it because a few scientists disagree, he said. He feels that people are being confused.
“To strongly identify one’s status as an American is easily confused with conforming to the government’s interpretation of what being an American means,” Anderson said. “The Bush and Obama administrations have been keenly active in promoting a vision of American identity or patriotism as uncritical acceptance of the government’s policies and practices.”
Anderson said the aforementioned administrations used this conformity to condone unconstitutional actions like torture and murder.
“These administrations have been keen to use this conception of identity as a cudgel against dissent, especially when the administrations’ actions abuse the public’s trust,” he said. “All too often the media have simply taken the government at its word and cultivated a mentality of ‘my country, right or wrong.'”
Anderson said this same mentality has led many Americans to stick with either Democrats or Republicans regardless
of any wrongdoings they see. Andersen said one example is drone strikes sent by President Obama killing many innocent people alongside suspected terrorists.
“We’ve got all these Democrats standing up blindly behind him saying, ‘He’s our guy. He’s on our team,'” Anderson said. “They just totally forfeit any claim to principle because if that had been George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld … Democrats would have been holding congressional hearings.”
Anderson said regular citizens need to act together and make the government change.
Anne Shifrer, a Logan resident and one of Anderson’s supporters, said she liked the way he “exposed a network of misinformation” but wanted to know more about the present. She believes corporations are obstructing the government.
Shifrer said she won’t stop supporting Anderson, though she still believes he could have focused more on what he could do to change things.
“I love his progressive ideas,” she said. “Getting tied up in the misrepresentations of the past, that’s great that we do that, but there’s an urgency to be looking at the present situation.”
Alayna Leaming, a journalism student at the university, agreed with Shifrer.
“I was expecting him to talk more about the election than he did,” Leaming said. “But because of my media smarts class I agreed with a lot of things.”
– addison.m.t.hall@gmail.com