ABC’s Nightlie

On June 30, ABC’s Nightline ran a featured story about how 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan became the symbol of Iran's struggle which can serve as a paradigm for the big lie.

The death of Neda Agha-Soltan is tragic, of course, and should be lamented by everyone, but using it to cast aspersions on the government of Iran is nothing more than disingenuous propaganda. No one knows who shot her. Nightline made the shooter out to be a supporter of the government, but until the shooter is identified, that claim has no justification. Yes, she may have been shot by a supporter of the government, but she may have been shot by someone just like John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway sniper. She may have been shot by someone paid by Mossad or even the CIA. She may even have been shot by a supporter of Mir Hossein Moussavi who needed a martyr for his cause célèbre. Nobody knows!

Of course, Nightline implied that tragic events like this only occur in nations with authoritarian governments, those governments that make up an axis of evil. Such events could never occur in America, a virtuous, humane, constitutional democracy that guarantees its citizens the rights to peacefully assemble and to petition the government for a redress of their grievances. So, I presume, the brutal suppression by U.S. Army troops under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton of the Bonus Expeditionary Force of 43,000 veterans and their families in 1932 never took place. And I presume that Alabama’s suppression of the Birmingham campaign in the early 1960s never happened either. And, of course, there is the infamous May 4, 1970 massacre at Kent State in which the Ohio National Guard killed four and wounded nine anti-war demonstrating students. I presume, too, that it never happened.

No one knows who shot Neda Agha-Soltan, but we know who Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton, Eugene "Bull" Connor, and the members of the Ohio National Guard were; yet none ever bore any consequences for their actions. Why? Because in America, things like that just don’t happen, and when they do, we merely erase them from our minds and history. So the truth becomes a lie and the big lie becomes the truth.

That nightline would so blatantly promote this big lie is proof that America lacks a mainstream press. What it has is a mainstream cess, as in “cesspool.” What is most troubling, however, is that none of the self-proclaimed “journalists” who work in this cesspool displays any shame. They all deserve to be flushed. As America slides into third-world status, America’s mainstream journalists will have to bear much of the responsibility for it but they won’t take it.

Before the piece ran, the anchor, Terry Moran, I believe, warned that it was “disturbing.” Indeed it was but not in the way that Mr. Moran meant. It disturbed me enough to post this piece.

©2009 John Kozy