While waiting for Ben and/or Jerry!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2014

You can play this game too: When we started this site in 1998, there were virtually no liberal organs.

Salon was a serious site at that time. It often presented good liberal journalism. But there were very few liberal organs, and this was the major problem:

Within the world of career journalists, careers went through the major news orgs like the Washington Post and the New York Times.

That’s why Gene Lyons’ book about Whitewater got disappeared. The book was published and promoted by Harper’s, but it bore this title:

“Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.”

You’re not allowed to say that! By “the media,” Lyons mainly meant the Times and the Post—and careerists weren’t willing to go there.

(For Lyons' new column on this topic, click here.)

We started this site in March 1998. We had no idea what we’d be tracking one year later.

Sure enough, though, there it was! In March 1999, the press corps’ war against Candidate Gore broke out. We discussed it in detail from Week One.

The lambs have never followed.

It’s very hard for people to grasp the size of the press corps’ code of silence. For liberals, it’s sometimes hard to grasp a related fact—some of our biggest liberal heroes were star players in the war which sent George Bush to the White House.

Some of them sat around and watched. The rest were active players. But right to this day, no one has been willing to discuss the way this war actually worked.

At our companion site, How He Got There, you can read the remarkable history of that war against Candidate Gore, up through the Love Canal disaster of December 1999.

The work is detailed and accurate. And, in a word, it’s astounding.

At that site, you can read the real history of the way Candidate Bush reached the White House. It would take a fool to deny the way it worked—or a professional journalist.

Isn’t it time that Ben and Jerry decided to sponsor that lapsed project? Most of the research for the remaining chapters has been done. But at some point, it simply became too painful to continue with all the work in the face of all the silence.

(Absolutely no one shuts up the way our “journalists” do.)

Isn’t it time for Ben and Jerry to put us back to work on that historical project? We’d even settle for Ben or Jerry! Or for some other sponsor!

Waiting for Ben and/or Jerry may turn out to be like waiting for Godot. In the meantime, if you want to kick in, we can’t stop you from that.

We’re going to pitch you for several weeks, explaining the state of the world in the process. In the meantime:

If you want to donate to this site, you can just click here.