The endorsement: Larry Flynt
"I don't watch it to see what I can get from it. I watch it to see what they leave out."-- pornographer Larry Flynt, on television news.Publishing pioneer Flynt has evolved into one of the most important media critics of his time. The founder of Hustler was already an historic First Amendment figure after a legal judgment against his porn magazine in favor of evangelist Jerry Falwell regarding an offensive ad parody was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988.
But in the 20 years since, Flynt has done much valuable work that the mainstream news media has failed to do. During the Bill Clinton impeachment hearings of 1998, Flynt succeeded in exposing the hypocrisy of some of the president's Congressional prosecutors. He offered a million dollars for evidence of sexual affairs with Republican lawmakers and then published the results, leading to the resignation of Louisiana Rep. Bob Livingston, at the time the incoming House Speaker, which would have made the Congressman third in line to the presidency. Livingston responded to the publication of "The Flynt Report" by referring to Flynt as "a bottom-feeder," to which Flynt remarked, "Yes I am, but look what I found when I got down there."
Later, more importantly, and while the traditional newsmedia was busy cheerleading President Bush during the launching of war on Afghanistan, Flynt sued for his magazine to get reporting access during the execution of combat missions in Afghanistan. Though frontline war access had been commonplace for American news outlets from the founding of the Republic through the period of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon in 2001 had limited access on such missions to humanitarian groups. The case of Flynt v. Rumsfeld was eventually thrown out by a district judge in 2003, but the publisher's court action had a positive result as the courts affirmed the press' First Amendment right to be present on the battlefield. Government attorneys had argued that the media had no constitutional right to battlefield access. During the subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003, tradional news media reporters were embedded with the fighting forces, though the conventional thought more than five years later is that most were cowed by the Department of Defense into promoting the war. Representatives from Flynt Publications (LFP) have never been allowed access.
Who else is fighting these media blackouts besides Flynt, the populist smut-peddler? The Pentagon has maintained a ban on the photography of returning dead bodies from the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A second round of Abu Ghraib photos have never been released to the public. The images, according to NBC News reports, include "American soldiers beating a woman to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys." The Freedom of Information request filed for the release of the pictures was filed not by a news organization, but by the American Civil Liberties Union and an organization called the Federation of American Scientists, and those requests have been continually rebuffed, obviously to prevent further erosion of public support for the war on Iraq. The first round of photos from Abu Ghraib had caused a steeper immediate decline in the approval ratings of the Bush Administration than any other single, isolated event.
The film documentary, "Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone," is must-viewing on the life and times of the man. It's been available for rental on Netflix for several weeks (I watched it with pleasure last night), and it will be aired next on the cable television channel, IFC, Saturday, November 22nd, at 6:45pm central time.
posted by CM @ 10:59 AM
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