Dennis Kucinich: The Invisible Man, the Prohibited Message

A Black Agenda Radio commentary

by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

"If they don't report something, it might as well not exist."

The corporate media boycott of Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign is in full swing. No, you can't hear the boycott - that's the whole point. The intention is to create a great silence, to pretend that something doesn't exist. The media boycott of Congressman Kucinich's campaign is very much like the banking practice of redlining, in which the captains of finance capital draw lines around whole neighborhoods, pretending they do not exist. This non-fact then becomes reality, as the neighborhoods are starved of investment and fall into inevitable decay.

The redlining of Dennis Kucinich by the gangsters of corporate media is designed to create a great wall of silence around the only candidate who is genuinely opposed to U.S. imperial policy - not just to the Iraq war and occupation, but to the imperial imperatives that created the war and will give birth to endless American aggressions in the future, if not stopped. Kucinich is also the only candidate who would halt the war on American standards of living, by repealing the trade policies that have sucked U.S. workers into a forced race to the bottom of a global wage scale, in order to serve the likes of Wal-Mart. That, too, is cause for imposing an organized silence on the Kucinich campaign by the corporate media. If they don't report something, it might as well not exist.

Dennis Kucinich is also the only presidential candidate who stands for real universal health care, rather than the phony schemes promulgated by the rest of the Democrats - con jobs that are in fact subsidies for huge health, insurance and pharmaceutical corporations. But you won't learn that from the corporate media. Silence is golden, and none of them are going to mess with the gold.

"Dennis Kucinich's campaign has been redlined, ghettoized, shunted off to a purgatory of non-coverage - non-existence."

So Dennis Kucinich's campaign has been redlined, ghettoized, shunted off to a purgatory of non-coverage - non-existence - so that we can't speak with our fellow citizens in any rational way about the war in Iraq, the global forced march to the bottom of the economic order, or America's failure to care for the health of its own people. These are prohibited topics. Dennis Kucinich is the man who isn't there.

Instead, we are led to believe the lie that the Democratic anti-war candidate is Barack Obama - who has in fact made it indisputably clear that he is pro-war, that he supports U.S. imperial policy, but would just like to make it less "dumb" - whatever that means. Obama is allowed to pretend that he is for universal health care, when in reality his proposal would only line the pockets of the rich people who profit from death.

By redlining Dennis Kucinich, the corporate media are lobotomizing the American political dialogue.

They are not in the news business - they are in the business of imposing silence.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.

BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be reached at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com.

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