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This is from Sam Smith, the Editor of The Progressive Review......PEACE......Scott

UNDERNEWS
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
AUGUST 15 2007
Edited by Sam Smith
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[50 years ago this summer, your editor covered his first story in
Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will offer excerpts from
"Multitudes: The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith," the full version of
which is available on our site]

SAM SMITH, MULTITUDES, By the 1990s, facts had became obsolete in
Washington. They were at best a filler between arguments on TV about
what really mattered -- perception and image. Facts were background
noise at a news conference, multi-colored jimmies on scoops of policy
and just plain annoying in private conversation.

At times I felt trapped in the compound of some bizarre cult of
overwrought rhetoric, infantile premises and manic mythology. There were
no ideas, only a leader; no ideology, only icons; no inquiry, only
arrogant certitude.

It seemed as though both local and federal Washington had been stolen.
Yet, as it turned out, I was also gaining something, something I
couldn't see as clearly as that which I was losing. My very isolation
was forcing me to see my surroundings differently, encouraging me to
discover things I might otherwise had discounted or missed entirely. A
way, the Quakers promise, will open. In the midst of my anger and
melancholy, I only belatedly noticed that it already had.

When I went on a radio station in Idaho Falls -- Mark Fuhrman country --
I heard the host pick out the one sentence in my book in which I spoke
well of the right of jury nullification. Somehow this conservative talk
show host had found that sentence and he introduced me by saying that I
was a supporter of the fully informed jury movement, which had
cross-ideological support but was particular popular in the libertarian
west. I was meant to be on for 20 minutes but we kept talking for an
hour and a half. Some debate but no hostility. I waited for the call
from a right-wing crazy; it never came.

I went on Duke Skorich's show in Duluth. Duke had some tough listeners,
including members of the Minnesota Militia. I was working hard but
having fun, when a guy called up and said, "You know, this fellow in
Washington's got a point; we've got to stop worrying about those gays
and feminists and start worrying about what the corporations are doing
to us."

On Larry Bensky's Pacifica show, a listener began discussing the need to
set national priorities. We can't solve anything without starting at the
right place. I agreed. Then the caller raised the ante: "And the right
place to start is with the problem of extra-terrestrial aliens, don't
you think?"

Larry looked at me as if to say, you're on your own. "Well," I
responded, "My view on that we ought to treat extra-terrestrial aliens
like anyone else in this country. We should welcome them as one more
immigrant group that will add to the strength and character of the
nation."

I was on my own; I felt free to enjoy America again, free to talk trash
or truth to any citizen without having to run an ideological credit
check on them first. Free to speak to them as real people rather than as
the personification of paradigms. Free to discover unexpected common
ground. It's the kind of politics I liked; the kind I think of as bar
room politics: if you can't walk into a bar and hold your own, then you
don't have it down no matter how many op-ed pieces you've written about
it.

I wondered if this was how it was with the Free French, with communists
and Gaulists and everything in between in temporary alliance -- fighting
for the right to fight each other fairly.

In eastern, elite America it was different. I wrote another book - about
repairing politics. Among the more mainstream media, only Weekend All
Things Considered paid it any mind. The book received rave notices in
populist and green publications and an excerpt was printed in Utne
Reader along with an exceptionally kind profile by Jay Waljasper. But
not only did the corporate media not mention it, it was ignored by such
presumably friendly publications as the Village Voice, Nation and the
Progressive.

In part, I knew I was paying the price for my reporting on Clinton. With
an overwhelming majority of the Washington media still solidly on
Clinton's side, it took little more than a few snide comments over lunch
or some phone calls to make one persona non grata in the club they call
the nation's capital but regard as their own.

Only a few times was the hostility overt. Such as the time after I had
appeared on the local NPR station and when I left the studio, the
conservative black host Derek McGinty turned to the station's political
editor, Mark Plotkin, and said, "He's banned" and I was. I later asked
Mark why I had been banned and he said he thought it was for "excessive
irony."

A few friends called in and made McGinty mad by asking about my status.
One caller asked why I had been banned and McGinty denied that it was
because of a particular line of questioning. Said McGinty: "I can't say
that he's not persona non grata, but if he is, it's not for that."

Plotkin would occasionally sneak me on the show when McGinty was on
vacation but the program director, Steve Martin, accosted him one day
and said, "You've been found out. Stop it."

In fact, irony is always risky in Washington. Once, I was on McGinty's
show with the mayor Marion Barry who was complaining about how reporters
always blamed him for all the problems of the city. "I don't blame you
for all the problems," I replied "I just blame you for 23.7% of them."
Marion said, "I'll take that."

Some weeks later, at a party, I told the story to a Washington suit. He
listened absolutely straight faced and then asked, "How did you derive
that percentage?"

Over the next two years I was dropped as a guest by another local news
program. A Washington Post reporter told me casually that, yes, she
guessed I was on that paper's blacklist. There was an end of invitations
to C-SPAN after two appearances were canceled at the last minute,
presumably by someone more powerful than the host who had invited me. My
speech during the first protest over Bosnia was the only one deleted
from C-SPAN's coverage of the event - even a folk singer saying that she
was the "warm-up band for Sam Smith" was left in. I received a long
phone call from the host of a local Pacifica talk show berating me for
what I written about Clinton and I was graced with mocking suggestions
by other journalists that I was a conspiracy theorist and becoming
paranoiac.

It wasn't just the politics that bothered me. I had started out in
broadcasting and still loved that blend of show business and telephone
conversation, reflected in a note I had written a C-Span producer some
years earlier:

"Thanks for having me on your program. Since then I have received 45
letters, 12 phone calls, including a 15-page cure for inflation, several
remedies for other problems (mostly from those who also do not believe
in page margins), three inquiries concerning the name of my automobile
insurance company, an annotated listing of every point I made, one piece
of hate mail and a viewer who wrote 'Shame! Shame!' for my failure to
mention plebiscites."

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