Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had plenty of harsh words for the Bush administration, but saved his strongest criticism for the mainstream news media during a lecture Wednesday night at the University of Iowa. “We have a negligent and indolent press that has let down the American people, ” he said to applause from an audience of several hundred people.
“If you don’t have a functional press, you’ll get … well, what we have now,” said Kennedy, who was hoarse after a West Virginia? court appearance and an earlier talk to UI law students.
Kennedy said the decline in news quality dates to the Reagan administration’s 1988 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, a broadcast rule that required radio and television stations to present opposing opinions.
“You couldn’t have had Fox News under the Fairness Doctrine,” said Kennedy. "You couldn’t have Rush and his dittoheads 24 hours a day.” Broadcast deregulation also has consolidated media ownership in the hands of a few multinational corporations, he said. “Their only obligation is to their shareholders,” he said, citing broadcasting’s focus on high-profile crime cases and celebrity trivia. “They have no ideology other than their pocketbooks,” which he thinks leads broadcasters to back conservatives.
“We’ve got the best-entertained and least-informed people on the face of the earth. And you cannot have democracy for very long without an informed public.”
“Look at how many extreme right-wing, really, nutcases they have” on news stations, said Kennedy, citing ABC’s John Stossl, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and others.
He likened Fox’s token liberal, Alan Colmes, to the Washington Generals, the basketball team that serves as the Harlem Globetrotters’ defeated foil every night.
As a result, Kennedy said, an ill-informed public has not raised its voice against the Bush administration’s attacks on the environment. Kennedy offered a brief disclaimer that his environmental work as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeepers and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance was nonpartisan, and that he works with Republicans including his cousin by marriage, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The worst thing that can happen to the environment – and this has already happened to a great extent – is if it becomes the exclusive province of one political party.”
Calling Bush the “worst president ever” on the environment, he said, “you can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context without criticizing this administration.”
The Bush administration is “treating the planet as if it’s a business under liquidation,” Kennedy said, arguing that the short-term profit-taking would be outweighed by long-term costs. “Undervaluing our resources causes us to waste them, Kennedy said. “Polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor.”
“They’ve torn the conserve out of conservatism.”
Kennedy also said Bush has squandered 230 years of international goodwill built up by the previous administrations of both parties. Citing his travels in Europe with his father, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, he said, “We were the most beloved nation on earth and in seven short years they have drained it dry.”
Calling himself a free-market capitalist, Kennedy said the Bush administration’s “crony capitalism” is more akin to fascism and its corporate control of the state. “Privatizing the commons is the first mark of a tyranny,” he said, describing the mercury poisoning of fish from dirty coal emissions. Noting the abolition of hunting rights by the king of England and the subsequent revolt that led to the Magna Carta in 1215, Kennedy said, “If somebody poisons the fish they’re privatizing the commons; they’ve gotten away with something King John couldn’t. A thousand years ago people had a revolution over this.”
Crony capitalism and environmental rule-breaking also threatens Iowa’s family farms, Kennedy said. “These (agribusiness) corporations cannot produce a pound of bacon or a pork chop cheaper or tastier than a family farm unless they break the law. Monsanto, virtually everybody in that company should be in jail as far as I’m concerned. It is dangerous for our country to have an undiversified food supply. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where there’s no family farms in Iowa.”
However, in a brief question and answer session after the speech, Kennedy said he is not a big fan of corn-based ethanol, arguing that sawgrass and other cellulose-based plants make more sense for ethanol production.
The role of environmental regulation is not to interfere with the free market, he said, but rather to establish a truly free market by making polluters pay the true cost for their actions. “We need to hold big government at bay with our right hand, and big business at bay with out left, and that narrow path in the middle is free market capitalism.”
The environmental movement is too often marginalized by the corporate news media as “pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people,” said Kennedy, arguing that the dichotomy “We have to choose between prosperity and protection” is false. “We’re not protecting nature for the spotted owl, as Rush (Limbaugh) likes to say. “We’re protecting the environment because nature is the infrastructure of our communities.”
Kennedy noted the link between campaign contributions from the coal industry and clean air deregulation. “Dirty air kills 18,000 Americans a year. This should be the front-page headline of every newspaper in this country every day. But you won’t read about it here. You’ll read about it in the BBC.” The coal industry is “literally putting down the Appalachian mountains,” he said. “They’ve flattened an area the size of Delaware.” Mountaintop strip mining also costs union jobs in poverty stricken West Virginia, he said.
“I get the same reaction from red state audiences as from liberal college students – except the Republicans ask ‘how come I never heard this before,' '' he said. “Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.”
Without endorsing a specific course or candidate, Kennedy urged action: “We need to take our country back from people who don’t understand what makes it worth fighting for.”
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