[R-G] Izzy Stone, Patron Saint of Bloggers

[Anthony Fenton]

Izzy Stone, Patron Saint of Bloggers
Jun 17, 2008 By Jeff Cohen

It was nineteen years ago this week that I.F. (Izzy) Stone died. The  
legendary blogger was 81.

Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?

Well, yeah, but when I think of today's blunt, fact-based online hell- 
raisers, my mind quickly flashes on Izzy Stone. You may think of Josh  
Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Arianna Huffington. I think of Izzy.

Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we  
associate with today's best bloggers. Like them, he was obsessed with  
citing original documents and texts. But before search engines, Izzy  
had to consume ten newspapers per day - and physically visit  
government archives and press offices, and personally pore over  
thousands of words in the Congressional Record. That's how he  
repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of his day in  
exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War.

Izzy was the ultimate un-embedded reporter. His journalism was  
motivated by a simple maxim that resonates loudly in our era of  
Cheneys and Rumsfelds and WMD hoaxes: "All governments lie, but  
disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same  
hashish they give out."

Month after month from 1953 to 1969 I.F. Stone's Weekly (biweekly  
through 1971) exposed deceptions as fast as governments could spin  
them. His timely and timeless dispatches are gathered in an  
exceptional paperback, The Best of I.F. Stone.

In real time in August 1964, Izzy was virtually alone in challenging  
the Gulf of Tonkin hoax, an imaginary "unprovoked attack" on U.S.  
warships used by the Johnson administration to send several hundred  
thousand American troops into Vietnam. How did Izzy do it? By citing  
international law texts and finding nuggets of truth in the  
Congressional Record of the Senate debate (no C-SPAN then) and in  
contradictory reporting in mainstream publications.

Izzy's expose began boldly: "The American government and the American  
press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the  
American public." He fumed at the credulous MSM: "The process of brain- 
washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for  
newspapermen." Only two senators, Oregon's Wayne Morse and Alaska's  
Ernest Gruening, had voted against the Tonkin Resolution; Izzy noted  
that the press had "dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the antiwar  
speeches of Morse and Gruening."

Like today's online journalistic entrepreneurs, being his own editor  
and boss allowed Izzy the freedom and space to parse out the  
distortions of government in detail. A year before the Tonkin hoax, he  
wrote: "In this age of corporation men, I am an independent  
capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise." While most journalists  
"find their niche in some huge newspaper of magazine combine, I am a  
wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone."

Bloggers battle today's McCarthyites who smear Iraq War opponents as  
un-American abettors of our country's enemies. Izzy battled the  
original Joe McCarthy, in issue after issue of his weekly. Indeed, he  
launched his publication the same month - January 1953 - McCarthy  
became chair of the Senate Operations Committee, enhancing his powers  
of intimidation. Izzy warned prophetically: "McCarthy is in a position  
to smear any government official who fails to do his bidding. With  
such daring and few scruples, McCarthy can make himself the most  
powerful single figure in Congress."

Three months later, he wrote: "The most subversive force in America  
today is Joe McCarthy. No one is so effectively importing alien  
conceptions into American government. No one is doing so much to  
damage the country's prestige abroad. . . .If ‘subversion' is to be  
met by deportation, then it is time to deport McCarthy back to  
Wisconsin."

Not until 11 months later did Edward R. Murrow air his first report on  
McCarthy.

Today, online media critics and bloggers expose the bigotry and  
fallacy gushing forth from Fox News and talk radio and the Rev. Moon- 
owned Washington Times, long-edited by Wes Pruden Jr. They blog about  
MSM being stenographers to rightwing extremists. When racists in  
Little Rock were obstructing court-ordered school desegregation in  
1958, Izzy was on the scene reporting: "A staff correspondent in  
Little Rock quoted the Reverend Wesley Pruden the segregationist  
leader, as saying, ‘The South will not accept this outrage, which a  
Communist-dominated government is trying to lay on us.' This was my  
introduction to a regional journalism which prints such statements  
matter-of-factly."

The Communist-dominated regime referred to by Pruden Sr. was headed by  
Eisenhower.

Izzy loved to tell the story of how he found - hiding in plain view in  
different editions of the New York Times - one-paragraph "shirrtail"  
wire stories indicating that our country's first underground nuclear  
test in Nevada in 1957 was detected in Toronto, Rome and Tokyo. Months  
later, just as hawks in Washington were preparing to attack a test ban  
treaty with the Soviets on the basis that nuclear tests could not be  
detected more than 200 miles away, Izzy found a seismologist in the  
Commerce Department who told him the test had also been detected as  
far away as Alaska and Arkansas. Izzy's reporting obstructed the  
government's lie before it could get its shoes on.

Starting out in his teens, Izzy was a daily reporter, editor and  
columnist. After moving to D.C. in 1940 to become Washington editor  
ofThe Nation, he exposed U.S. corporations still doing business with  
Hitler's Germany. He was one of the first to sound the alarm about the  
Nazi holocaust, referring in 1942 to "a murder of a people." An anti- 
racist, he battled the all-white National Press Club over exclusion of  
black journalists.

Izzy's cantankerousness and "hound-dog tenacity" - in the words of his  
biographer - would make even the most stubborn blogger blush.   
Although he was a lifelong progressive, his journalistic hallmark was  
independence: "I felt that party affiliation was incompatible with  
independent journalism." His writings show deep admiration for  
Franklin Roosevelt, yet his article on FDR's death criticized his  
"deplorable disrespect for the constitutional amenities" in resisting  
a reactionary Supreme Court that knocked down one New Deal bill after  
another.

He wrote books passionately supporting the birth of Israel, but  
strongly criticized it for mistreatment of Palestinians. He advocated  
peace and negotiations with the Soviet Union, while increasingly vocal  
in denouncing its rulers: "The worker [in Russia] is more exploited  
than in Western welfare states."

He despised racists, but fought for their free speech rights, and  
everyone's: "Once you put ifs and buts in the Bill of Rights, nobody's  
civil liberties will be secure.'' That he marched to his own drummer  
can be seen in his dispatch from the 1963 March on Washington for  
civil rights, in which he criticized "respectables" for muting "Negro  
militancy" into support of JFK's inadequate program, and referred to  
Martin Luther King as "a little too saccharine for my taste."

Born of immigrant parents, Izzy was an American patriot who worshipped  
the Bill of Rights: "You may think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but  
I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive."

And he worshipped our country's tradition of press freedom: "There are  
few countries in which you can spit in the eye of the government and  
get away with it. It's not possible in Moscow." But Izzy was never na?  
about American traditions that threatened freedom, and he had a 5,000- 
page FBI spy file to prove it.

Today's muckraking bloggers are often belittled for working from their  
homes, far removed from the corridors of power. Izzy worked out of his  
home. If he were alive, he'd be applauding the Josh Marshalls and  
other independents, urging: Keep your distance from power.

I made no claim to inside stuff. . . I tried to dig the truth out of  
hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as  
accurate as possible. . . I felt like a guerilla warrior, swooping  
down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least  
expected independent inquiry. The reporter assigned to specific beats  
like the State Department or the Pentagon for a wire service or a big  
daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have  
large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and  
shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out  
of line. . . But a reporter covering the whole capitol on his own -  
particularly if he is his own employer - is immune from these pressures.

Imagine the obstacles Izzy faced - did I mention his impaired eyesight  
and hearing? - launching a weekly and finding an audience at the  
height of McCarthy's witch hunts (even at $5 for an annual  
subscription).

Far fewer obstacles face today's bloggers who seek to follow in Izzy's  
footsteps - blessed as they are with relative freedom and this awesome  
research and outreach tool known as the Internet.

As these upstarts speak truth to power, I see Izzy Stone watching over  
them, from the heavens.



Jeff Cohen is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at  
Ithaca College. He first saw I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly at a D.C. peace  
march in 1969. Soon after Cohen launched the media watch group FAIR in  
1986, Izzy Stone signed on to its first formal protest, a telegram to  
ABC News on the exclusion of progressive voices.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3526