The Eco-Terrorist Menace

Spokane's George "Me? Term Limits? Did I Say Something?" Nethercutt (Liar-WA) introduced a Congressional bill June 13 requiring a minimum five-year mandatory prison sentence for eco-terrorists. The resulting media coverage proved every point ETS! has made, both in Maria Tomchick's article last issue on media coverage of the ELF bombing at UW, and previous reports by Geov Parrish and Rick Giombetti on the FBI's use of property damage as a way to spread fears of "terrorists" and build public support for curtailed civil liberties.

Fairly representative was a dispatch from a moderately conservative web news outlet called CNSNews.com: "Legislation Would Combat Eco-Terrorism." The piece, true to form, quoted only present and former government members critical of the "terrorist" threat--not environmentalists or neutral observers--and casually equated property damage with violence against persons. The unquestioned assertions of the state are baldly propagandistic, as in this clumsy sequence:

The FBI recently warned that ELF is growing more violent. In fact, the FBI said it considers ELF one of the nation's most dangerous terrorist groups.

Although no one has been hurt in the group's four-year spree of violence, Nethercutt said it's only a matter of time before it happens.

In these pithy three short sentences, we learn--with absolutely no justifying facts presented (because there aren't any)--that ELF is growing more violent, that its violence is "in fact" among the nation's "most dangerous," and that it will eventually hurt someone (adding a qualifying "although" to the contra-indicating fact). ELF started by burning things; it's still burning things. As its record of avoiding harming living things lengthens, the chance that "it will eventually hurt someone," statistically decrease. But never mind. The FBI comment also implies that there is a coordinated ELF "strategy" that calibrates its level of violence, when the group, as anyone who pays attention is aware, hardly engages in centralized planning. And, of course, there was no number of actual incidents given, so readers couldn't learn that the actual "threat" is, compared to the incidence of most crimes, ludicrously inconsequential.

The ELF fear-mongering, however, was only a warmup to additional comments from former Wyoming senator Malcolm Wallop, "speaking at an `eco-terrorism' conference on Capitol Hill," which threw in with ELF another "terrorist" group: the Rainforest Action Network. RAN, we learn from Wallop, "wants America's huge wood and paper demands to be supplied by recycled and non-wood sources"--and this is the only justification given for labelling RAN eco-terrorists. Those violent recyclers! Unlike ELF, RAN is right in the phone book--but nobody bothered to call for a comment. CNSNews.com wasn't interested. Perhaps they were busy trying to figure out how to work the Sierra Club into the picture--or talking to the advance crew from 60 Minutes.

Thanks for the Memories

On Sunday, June 10, the Seattle Times ran a story in the top center spot on the front page of its Local News section entitled "They were busing's guinea pigs in '78." The topic was school desegregation and mandatory busing in Seattle from 1978 to 1989. (A process begun a full decade after most public schools in the South had desegregated.) The story focused not on facts, but on interviewing two women--one white and one African-American--who hated being bused across town.

The author, Stuart Eskenazi, struggled to make mandatory busing seem bad. But a careful reading of the article reveals that busing was not the problem. The problem clearly was a lack of resources for schools in minority areas (just as it is today). The school district simply bused students around, but provided little help in integrating the schools once they became desegregated.

In the same issue of the Seattle Times, a second and more truthful story about the same topic appeared, but not in a prominent position. All the way back in the Arts & Entertainment/Scene section, at the very bottom of page J1, was Stuart Eskenazi's other article, entitled "The Legacy of Busing, 20 years later." In a lighter, more reminiscent tone, the author discussed his own positive experiences with school desegregation when he attended Franklin High School 20 years ago. He then names many people who had positive experiences and have maintained a wide group of mixed-race, cross-cultural friendships to this day.

The contrast between the two articles is alarming. The negative "guinea pigs" article focuses on two women, one of whom (a white women named Corrine James) seems to be racist. "To this day, I have no close minority friends whatsoever--zero," she asserts. Near the end of the article the author writes about James: "Some of her angst may have been the product of an overactive mind. Two of every five Rainier Beach students were white when James was there." So where's the story?

Buried deep within the "guinea pigs" article is the story of a Cuban-American woman who had loads of fun attending Ingraham High School in North Seattle. This is the real story, but most readers won't have the time or patience to read that far.

By focusing on two women who were the exception and not the rule, the paper reaches for a myth: mandatory busing is divisive, desegregation is bad. The placement of these two stories reflects the conservative bias of the editorial staff of the Seattle Times and its publisher.

Meanwhile, on the op-ed page, the Times--like every other major media outlet in Seattle--refused to acknowledge, in the uproar following Aaron Roberts' death, that racism is a problem in Seattle. Hmm.