LIBERAL MEDIA? BAH, HUMBUG!

If I ever hear the term "liberal media" again after this presidential election I think that, despite my advancing age, I will have to throttle the son of a bitch who says it.

The "media" today is largely corporate owned and in the case of the print media largely owned by investment bankers or companies heavily indebted to investment bankers who are nearly all, by definition, very conservative.

And if you don't think the money is calling the shots on the way things are covered and that that money is anything but either right leaning or flat out right-wing sympathetic you're crazier than an outhouse mouse.

As a result, March-Hare-mad billionaire Donald Trump is allowed, particularly in the electronic media, to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants without question or challenge. Not only is It positively disgusting, but it is enabling the bigotry, hate and fear that he spews to already alter the character of the nation and a large number of its people.

If today's media moguls think that some how after the election they will be able to control Trump and keep him from carrying out his ego-based, insane, fascist agenda that will destroy this country and likely lead to a third -- and this time nuclear -- world war and possibly a second civil war, they are dead wrong and 65 to 80 percent of us will wind up just plain dead.

For nearly 45 years, I was proud to be a member of -- and for many of those years a leader, as the editor of three different daily newspapers, of a small segment of -- the U.S. media.

Yes, throughout that time I was, and still am, a liberal, but I kept my personal politics out of the way the newspapers I was in charge of covered news. (It should be noted that I worked for nine newspaper during my career and only one, the Louisville Courier Journal & Times, was owned by liberals.)

As an editor, I also struggled -- for the most part effectively -- against the efforts, even then, of conservative owners and/or publishers to bend the news to their liking.

When it comes to the term "liberal media," let's be totally honest. Even when print media was largely privately owned, the owners were wealthy and mostly conservative. Then, they started selling off their newspapers to corporations, which were/are mainly conservative. The electronic media has pretty much always been under conservative corporate ownership. Essentially, "liberal" has played an almost non-existent role in media ownership in this country for decades.

During most of my nearly 45 years in the daily newspaper business, most of the top news executives that I've known of being fired for political reasons were let go not because they were too conservative, but rather because they were regarded by those whose money controlled their medium as being too liberal.

Now, with all of the nation's "mainstream," traditional media in general in financial decline, and newspapers in particular suffering, it seems to me that the money interest that are in control of most media outlets -- particularly electronic -- are being allowed by job scared news executives to dictate, subtly or even overtly, the manner and nature of political coverage for this election. It seems that virtually every network news cast begins with the words "Donald Trump today..." And what follows is video and/or audio of Trump rattling off a litany of hate, racism and bigotry unfettered by questions.

From that manner and nature of the coverage, it seems quite obvious, at least to me, that the money behind the media has settled for and is embracing the idea of Donald Trump, who appears to be as certifiably nuts as Adolf Hitler, as America's president/fuhrer.

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MURDER OF 2 LAS VEGAS POLICEMAN BY APPARENT RIGHT-WING FANATICS AGAIN BRINGS BACK MEMORIES OF DISTURBING INTERVIEW

As we learn more about the apparently extreme right-wing, anti-government political leanings of the husband and wife shooters who brutally murdered two Las Vegas policeman as they sat eating pizza for lunch on Sunday, I can't help but again think back to an interview I conducted in 1971 as a young reporter at the The Louisville (Ky.) Times over breakfast with William C. "Wild Bill" Sullivan, who was then the head of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI and the No.3 man inside the bureau.

The last time this disturbing interview came to mind was immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing more than a year ago, when, frankly, I feared that it had possibly been the work of right-wing domestic terrorists like those who planted the truck bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995. As we all know now, that was not the case and the bombing has been blamed on brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,  two Muslim transplants who came to the United States from Kyrgyzstan in the old Soviet Union.

But now, in the wake of the Las Vegas murders, I find that the memories of that interview are haunting me again, particularly when I think about how much more vocal and visible the anti-government, right-wing fringe has become through demonstrations like those at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada in April. Among those who came armed to help "protect" scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy from the federal government was Jerad Miller, who with his wife Amanda, murdered Las Vegas police officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, at a CiCi's pizza parlor and then killed a civilian at the Walmart across the street before taking their own lives.

The evening prior to the 1971 interview, Sullivan delivered a speech that I covered. Before the speech, I had made a request for the interview which Sullivan granted for the following morning in the restaurant at his hotel in downtown Louisville. When I arrived, Sullivan was sitting at a table with two other agents, both from the Louisville FBI office. I introduced myself and when Sullivan invited me to sit, the other agents got up and moved to another table, where I sensed they were keeping a careful eye on me.

A Massachusetts native, Sullivan resembled and sounded very much like James Cagney, one of my favorite movie stars.

At first, I felt a little uncomfortable. Here I was, a reporter with long hair and drooping, Zapata mustache, a little more than a year out of college where I had participated in numerous anti-Vietnam War protests and had built a healthy distrust of the FBI and suspected that they probably had a similar distrust of me. But Sullivan quickly put me at ease -- probably a skill he learned from his interrogation techniques.

For more than an hour we conducted a wide ranging interview on a variety of topics of interest to both of us. I was fascinated by the man because of the history of his work with the FBI, particularly in the area of counter intelligence, which he began to specialize in almost immediately after joining the bureau shortly after the start of World War II when he was dispatched to Spain as a counter-intelligence officer. During the war he chased Nazi spies. Afterward, from the 1940s into the 1950s, he headed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to ferret out the alleged Communists among us and, at the same time, led the bureau's efforts to crush the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan -- an activity he felt a strong commitment to. In the 1960's, Hoover had Sullivan turn his counter intelligence skills against the Civil Rights movement, including the secret wire tapping of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, an effort that he admitted to me he had little stomach for. For more than two decades, his career in the FBI had been dedicated to chasing down the nation's enemies, both real and perceived, on both the right and the left.

Finally, as the interview wound toward a conclusion, I asked: "Given your experience, if there was ever really a threat to the nation's government as we know it, where do you think it will come from, the right or the left?"

He collected his thoughts for a moment and then spoke.

"I don't really see the left as a threat," he said. "The 'left' as we know it today is made up of some well-meaning, but largely ineffective politicians and bunch of over-educated college students who will eventually grow up to be bankers and stock brokers and will moderate their views. Basically, the left is a just bunch of socially concerned wimps.

"If there is ever to be a real threat to our government as we know it, to the Constitution, to our liberties and the principles we hold scared, it will come from the right. There are people there with serious money and more power than you might expect. They have the potential to be ruthless and they know the issues that can be raised to swing the fearful and ignorant to their side," he said, concluding the interview.

Although I was surprised by his candor, his views -- which he had taken to frequently expressing even though they ran counter those held by his boss -- apparently did not go unnoticed by Hoover. Despite their years of friendship, several months after our interview Sullivan arrived at the FBI headquarters in Washington one morning to find his nameplate removed from his office door and his tenure with the bureau terminated.

In the following years, he became steadily more publically critical of Hoover and his counter-intelligence activies -- dubbed COINTELPRO -- including testimony critical of the bureau and Hoover before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975.

Sullivan died in November 1977 when he was accidentally shot in the neck by a hunter, who said he mistook the former FBI agent for a deer, despite the fact that his rifle had a powerful scope, as he walked in the woods near his home. His death has long been considered by some to be "suspicious."

In his obituary, The New York Times described Sullivan as "the only liberal Democrat ever to break into the top ranks of the bureau."

Over the 43 years since that interview, Sullivan's words of caution regarding the extreme right have come back numerous time to haunt me. They did so in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the bombing at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics in 1996 and in 2010, when a disgruntled government hater flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas.

Now, in the wake of the Las Vegas shootings, the Sullivan interview is again as fresh in my mind as it was moments after it was concluded in 1971.

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