David Barsamian is full of quotes. Among his favorites is Samuel Huntington’s “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight, it begins to evaporate.”
Barsamian will tell you, in words rife with sarcasm and wry humor, that the media are the ones pulling the curtains.
At a recent Town Hall lecture in Seattle, he tossed out phrases like “Presstitutes,” “Lapdogs with laptops” and, my personal favorite, “Press corpse.”
“It’s an art, really,” he told a chuckling audience. “Dead bodies posing as journalists.”
Barsamian is a journalist himself, one who is highly critical of nearly all mainstream news sources for failing to question the status quo, distorting and ignoring alternative views, and not only buying into but also becoming part of “corporate crap.” He believes journalist Finley Peter Dunne’s old notion of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable has been turned on its head.
So in 1986, he founded the hourlong public-affairs radio show called “Alternative Radio,” which continues today and is offered free to all public radio stations in the U.S. His work as an independent investigative journalist has earned him the ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award, among other boastings (including being deported from India, likely for his reporting on largely unreported human rights violations in Kashmir).
It’s no surprise that he is a wealth of excerpts and passages. He is known for his interviews with hundreds of activists, thinkers, writers, artists and historians who run against the grain, especially Noam Chomsky. Many of those conversations have been folded into books, such as “Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire.” By the time he arrived in Seattle for his lecture, Barsamian was on the tail end of a Northwest tour with seven speaking engagements in eight days.
He was exhausted, sporting a raspy voice in addition to his ironic “Homeland Security” T-shirt. But he still spoke with passion and unapologetic fervor about U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, global warming, capitalism, democracy, terrorism, income inequality and, above all else, the use of media across the globe as a propaganda arm.
He spoke from his home base in Boulder, Colo., despite several warnings that these topics “make his blood boil,” and that I might need to move the receiver away from my ears. Still, even at Town Hall, he ended on a high note and a call to action. This time, it was a translation of a poem by Ahmed Faiz:
“Speak, your lips are free. Speak, it is your own tongue. Speak, your life is still yours.”
Rianna Hidalgo: I wanted to start with “Alternative Radio,” which you founded in the ’80s. What was going on in your life at that point, and what fueled your desire to start it?
David Barsamian: I was a volunteer at KGNU, the community radio station in Boulder, and I began the program called “Ganges to the Nile” and another program called “Hemispheres.” I was developing my skills as an editor, narrator, writer, producer, interviewer, all those things, and I was very unhappy with the state of the media in the United States, particularly the fact that people I admired very much and thought should have a wider audience were virtually not to be found anywhere — of course not in the corporate media but not even in the so-called alternative media. I’m talking about people like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad, Howard Zinn, Helen Caldicott, Angela Davis. People who I believe really need to be heard because of their radical, progressive ideas that were so relevant then and continue to be relevant now.
So, on a whim and with not much background or encouragement, I said, I’ll take a chance and see what happens and that was the beginning of “Alternative Radio,” which is gonna be celebrating its 30th anniversary soon.
R.H.: The people you mentioned — what drew you to them?
D.B: Well, there’s so much crap in the corporate media. I mean, much of it is just sheer escapism, from the latest Jenner operation to a Kardashian divorce to a Madonna adoption to a Justin Bieber arrest.
The media function as a weapon of mass distraction, a WMD. I think it poses a serious health hazard for the communication needs of citizenry in a democratic society, and we need to have ideas and perspectives that cut through all the garbage about American Exceptionalism and, you know, “We are the city on the hill” and “God’s gift to humanity” and all of the jingoistic nationalism.
I was just in the Boulder post office, and there’s a huge line there today because there’s a shortage of clerks. Workers have been laid off or volunteered to retire early, and I thought to myself, this country can build aircraft carriers that are worth billions and billions of dollars but can’t staff a post office; cannot provide universal, free health care (or) universal, free education from kindergarten right through to university; cannot take care of the environment and cannot take care of its poor people.
R.H.: The list of issues you bring up is long. Is there a current event that you think we should really be paying attention to?
D.B.: First and foremost has to be the ecocrisis, because that will have enormous planetary consequences. We’re treating Mother Earth like a dumpster, like a garbage can, and we keep defecating upon her.
It’s going to have extremely dire consequences for the future. That, I think, is something that I talk about no matter what the topic is that I’m asked to speak on, because it is threatening our very existence.
The number of species that are disappearing is at a record rate, the rising temperatures threaten coastal regions and island communities all over the world. The extreme weather that is being experienced throughout the world is directly connected to the fossil fuels being pumped into the atmosphere, resulting in the heating up of the Earth’s water and air temperature. So, again, the consequences have to be acknowledged and dealt with in an urgent manner.
R.H.: Can you take an example of a current event and flesh it out a bit? What have you observed about the way the media has covered it?
D.B.: Let’s stick with poverty, which I think is a huge scandal in this incredibly rich country where wealth and income is concentrated in just a sliver of the population, and that’s accelerating, not decreasing.
Since Obama announced the recovery from the Great Recession, 95 percent of all income gains have gone to the 1 percent. So people are running full speed just to stay where they are and many of them are falling behind.
They’re not even keeping pace with the cost of living. Now on the issue of poverty, there’s no talking about the connection with the economic system. In fact, you cannot even mention capitalism when talking about poverty. …
R.H.: (The economic recovery) was announced with very little interrogation by the corporate media. The question to ask is, who benefits from these economic policies?
D.B: You don’t even see those questions ever posed at all in the corporate media, even in much of the alternative media. They’ll focus famously on some welfare queen driving a Cadillac, exploiting the system, getting multiple checks.
First of all, that whole thing was invented by Ronald Reagan — the Great Communicator. It became part of the folklore that, well, poor people — maybe there’s something in their genes, maybe it’s in their lack of values — another obscene term that makes my blood boil.
R.H.: You said in all this there are some bright spots in the gloom and doom. Where would you suggest people turn to for their information?
D.B.: They should turn to independent radio programs like “Alternative Radio.” They should turn to “Democracy Now.” They should turn to The Intercept, which Glenn Greenwald, a wonderful independent journalist, is directing along with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras and Liliana Segura and others. Murtaza Hussain is part of that — he’s a Canadian journalist based in Toronto. There are excellent books coming out, largely from Haymarket Books in Chicago but also from The New Press in New York. There’s lots of excellent websites. Al Jazeera TV in English is widely available now. They’ve produced and are producing a series of excellent documentaries called “Fault Lines” — really top-notch stuff that you don’t find anywhere else.
R.H.: What advice do you have for people who still want to participate in politics and still want to do something, given that you call our options for political candidates “cyanide” and “arsenic”?
D.B.: Yes, that question comes up everywhere. And I think the area where citizens can get involved is at the city council level. So, for example, Kshama Sawant, the first socialist elected in the United States in decades and decades, right there in Seattle.
It’s possible to get on school boards and local elections and create grass-roots movements through societal organizations. That puts pressure on people at the top. Change is going to come, historically, as Howard Zinn said, from the bottom pushing up; it’s never come from the top. The top will take credit for any change in any new law, as JFK did and LBJ did around the Civil Rights Movement, but they were under tremendous pressure from movements of people in the street demanding social justice, just as we see again today with the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements.
R.H.: You talked a lot about whistleblowers in your Town Hall lecture: Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden. You call them heroes, but there are those who call them traitors.
D.B.: Well, those are highly charged terms — they’re very pejorative and slanderous. I think treason is in the eye of the beholder very much like terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. So, whereas Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. and others for years and years were regarded as terrorists and regarded very negatively by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, today they are regarded as heroes and almost saintlike.
So it’s a constantly moving definition, and I think what Snowden did really harkens back to Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which kind of blew up the whole U.S. propaganda effort, that people had been fed a slew of lies and distortions.
I think Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have done a great public service in making available information about what government policy is really about. In Snowden’s case, unmasking the greatest surveillance dragnet in the history of the world. People simply did not know that their text messages and emails and phone calls were all being not only traced but collected and stored without their permission. I mean, again, a clear violation of the Bill of Rights and the expectation of privacy.
If Obama had any cojones, he would take the Nobel Peace Prize that he was given in 2009 and give it to Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, eliminate Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence, restore Edward Snowden’s passport so that he can travel to the United States and drop all charges against Snowden.
R.H.: If you could get all of America’s future journalists in a room, what would you want to say to them?
D.B.: Be skeptical. Challenge existing assumptions. Do not accept at face value any official story. And always ask the question: Who benefits? Who benefits from these proposals or these policies?
Think outside the box. Be independent, the way young people are very independent when they want to distance themselves from their parents. They’re constantly asking, “Why?” (to the dismay of their parents, probably). Why, why, why? That is really critical because the media is somewhat good at answering the who, the what, the where and the when, but they completely fail on the why.
Without understanding the context and the background and the history and the politics and the culture, you’re kind of left in left field.
R.H.: At your Town Hall lecture, you shared a poem with the audience about your parents living through the Armenian genocide, because you said you want them to know where you’re coming from. How does that past and that history shape the work that you do?
D.B.: Well, it was a huge shadow growing up in New York in the 1950s. It was always in the background but it was never really spoken about in any clear terms. It was: “Something terrible happened, there was this huge atrocity,” but no one was really willing to talk about it. It was kind of a survivor’s guilt as they call it, and I wanted to find out more about that history and why the Armenian genocide was virtually invisible; why it was not talked about, much less acknowledged.
So that led me to an informal study of politics and history.
I was a voracious reader, whatever I could get my hands on. I would read and spend lots of time at the Webster branch of the New York Public library on 78th Street and York Avenue, which I loved to go to for three reasons: First of all, they had books, and we didn’t have any books at home because my parents weren’t very literate, it was well lit and there were no cockroaches. So I liked going to the library, and that background, that history that was never really acknowledged, was a huge influence on me and it continues today.
People ask me, you know, how is it to interview Noam Chomsky or some of these other people that I work with like Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva and Tariq Ali. It’s a cinch, by the way, compared to interviewing your mother and other family members trying to get them to describe unbelievable horrors. The hardest interview I ever did was with my mother.
Reprinted from Street Roots’ sister paper Real Change News in Seattle.