Comment E-mail Print Bio Archives

Page 3 of 4

In a Huffington Post commentary on the personnel in the Obama Administration, Ayers said he would have preferred Goodman as President Obama's press secretary.

It was after accepting the award that Greenwald and Goodman appeared on the public television program, Bill Moyers Journal, hosted by the former Johnson Administration official involved in processing and disseminating derogatory personal information about civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ironically, Goodman's speech accepting the "Izzy Award" was full of favorable references to King, about whom Moyers had collected information to discredit.

Taboo Topics

The failure by Greenwald and Goodman to bring up these topics with Moyers may have something to do with the fact that the former aide to LBJ, a longtime fixture on public television, is involved in efforts to fund left-wing or "progressive" so-called "independent media."

The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, whose President is Moyers, gave Goodman's production company $150,000 in 2006, while Salon.com has been funded by Schumann through the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, according to the group's 2006 IRS report.

Other organizations supported by the Schumann Center include Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting ($500,000), which was founded by Jeff Cohen, the director of the Park Center for Independent Media; the Free Press ($1,250,000 in 2007, $600,000 in 2006, and $600,000 in 2005); and Media Matters ($500,000 in 2005).

The Free Press is the organization funded by George Soros that stages annual "media reform" conferences. (web site) One of the featured speakers at the 2007 event was none other than Bill Moyers, who served on the board of the Soros Open Society Institute in 2005.

The Rebuttal

Rather than directly dispute the evidence of Stone's service to the Soviet Union, Greenwald cited some alleged anti-Soviet statements once made by Stone, when he apparently had a falling out with the Communist dictatorship, as well as an article from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Greenwald went on: "Izzy Stone was one of the only journalists in America to challenge the government's lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to oppose the Vietnam War from the start, and to relentlessly highlight the pernicious poison of the McCarthyite witch hunts, which are alive and well in the marginalized and irrelevant fringes of the Right, such as Commentary and AIM."

In one of several articles that AIM published about Stone, we noted that "I.F. Stone postured as an independent writer whose mission was to expose corruption in U.S. policies and the U.S. Government. When North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950, he tried to bolster the false Communist allegation that the United States and South Korea had started the war. During the Vietnam War, he became an icon of the anti-war movement. His writings mirrored the Communist propaganda line, but there was never any proof that he was a communist agent. After his death, the evidence came out. Decoded cables from the National Security Agency, known as the Venona intercepts, conclusively demonstrate that Stone was taking money from the KGB during many of the years he was publishing his newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly. One of the documents describes his recruitment by the KGB. In addition, FBI files released to Accuracy in Media through a Freedom of Information Act request state that an informant within the Communist Party USA had identified Stone as a member in the 1930s."

>> Continued -- Page 1 2 3 4