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| Rise Up: yet another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma pix, this a view of Pugnetti Park shortly after it was taken over by the movement in early October 2011 and temporarily renamed Occupation Park. One of these days I will assemble all this work into an extended photo essay. From the hopeless perspective of the present, the optimism of those days is as poignant as the naivety my 23-and-24-year-old self displayed in dealing with two of the many forms of unofficial USian press censorship, described below. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. Click on picture to view it full size. |
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RALPH NADER, FOR whom I have never
voted but for whom I have the greatest respect, has written for
Reader Supported News a denunciation of President Barack Obama
that will undoubtedly be noted by historians as the most bravely
outspoken such commentary
by any public figure to date.
Hence I urge all of you not just to
read it but to disseminate it as widely as possible and communicate
your approval to RSN, even if only with a word or two, as in
the traditional “Yes man yes!” by which we long-ago beatniks used
to shout our approval of exceptional poetry or music. My own
applause is already included in the associated comment thread.
That said, in the interest of full
disclosure and as a long-overdue expression of gratitude, I should
acknowledge I owe Nader a big debt of thanks. In 1964 he entrusted me
with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe
at Any Speed, his exposé
of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile
manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety.
At the time I was the sports editor and
one of three news-reporter/photographers for The Oak Ridger, a
small but notably excellent East Tennessee daily. It was in
acknowledgement of all these roles I had been assigned to interview
Nader about his research. Not only had I added car stuff to our
sports coverage – I was then the proud owner of a 1958 Porsche
super-coupe – I had also demonstrated a knack for unusual news
stories, and Nader's findings felt like the biggest scoop of my
career to date. But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day.
It was killed by Managing Editor Dick Smyser, who in one of those
indicative ironies of USian history was also the chairman of the
Associated Press Managing Editors' Freedom of Information Committee.
It was my second bitter schooling in
the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath
the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it
was memorably painful because I had expected better – much better –
from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives,
Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had
been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's
continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal
oblivion.
That
episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The
Journal since September 1957,
first as a part-time sports
stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop
out of college and sign up for a six-year hitch in the U.S. Army. In
September 1962, having served 18 months in Korea and finished my
required three-year term of active duty, I returned to Knoxville and
was immediately rehired by The Journal
as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and
my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he
believed I was destined for The New York Times or
some equally prestigious publication.
But on
2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox
County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and
women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I had
been there, had been arrested and on the strength of my press card
subsequently released, and now – naive idiot that I was – I
believed I could convince Journal
Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests
were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a
deliberate atrocity. Soon Smith and Evans concluded I was what in the
parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” –
probably a Communist as well – and Smith had me re-arrested in his
newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper.
My termination notice was a maliciously
slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big
Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's
Völkischer
Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at
the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning
during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South
Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly
conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal
sportswriter.”
There was of course neither orgy nor
drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden
party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights
activists, young local professionals and business executives as older
students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline
Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT
and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin.
Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples
were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the
floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because
during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were
nothing more than fabrications of the fearful, vindictively
pornographic southern mind. Such is the obscenely racist envy
implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches and white,”
then answers, “nothing.”
That the raid occurred just as the
local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated churches were
pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly
coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil
Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had
been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT,
the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of
The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to
facilitate purging the university of anyone the local Ruling Class
deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.”
Southern warned me that because I was
the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually
occurred – he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the
segregationist ointment” – my own life was in danger. Not many
days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor
apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted
by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class
skill with a handgun – a story for another time. For now suffice it
to say dear Brunhilda quickly got to the meat of the problem, bit the
malefactor in his blue-jeaned crotch, seized him by his cock and
balls and dragged him down from the window just as I was aligning my
sights to shoot him between the eyes.
Meanwhile Marion
Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had
arranged for me to cover the story for a local African-American
weekly. But that report too was intrusively censored, not by blacks
but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality
members Steve Wagner and Phillip Bacon, who claimed they feared
accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would
discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.” Thus to my eternal
regret I allowed them to cut several key passages from my original
draft. These included a word-for-word account of my confrontation
with Smith, in which he made it clear my alternatives were either to
fabricate a lie describing an imaginary sex orgy or suffer the
consequences; details of the police assault on a Latin American
diplomat who was a guest at the party; and a brief description of the
attempt on my life that arguably confirmed Southern's hypothesis of a
Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid. The
following, under my own byline, is what remained after Bacon and
Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of
The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:
Although The
Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff
member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held
for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm
Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon
police and sheriff's reports.
That those reports were something
less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions
Court.
This writer, at the time a sports
reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was
subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a
Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours
later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor
Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the
arrests...
Included in this writer's report
would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper
despite the number of persons present and information that police and
deputies had acted without grounds...
Those taken to city jail, where
there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can
challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness,
but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were
charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...
Cases against those charged by Knox
County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court
cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles
Kelly and will be heard in October.
Included on the city docket is
Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has
filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he
was slapped by police officers...
The only uncensored coverage of the
arrests was provided by TASS – Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo
Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph
Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda,
as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also – or so I was told
by several UT students – broadcast in English by Radio Moscow.
Given the often prurient hatefulness that defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's
bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases
had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The
Journal's continued slanders
were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, before The Oak Ridger came to my rescue, I had feared my
journalism career was over.
Which
brings
us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he
was in Oak
Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league
connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel. My
boss Dick Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader, exactly
where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned
Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to his sister's
apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's
Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.
Nader
doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the
region's characteristic racism, I assured him it would.
Then I
drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on
Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and
hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead
said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' – that's how Ralph
Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The
second graf laid out Nader's credentials – a Harvard-educated
lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s –
and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's
Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes – six double-spaced
typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.
Despite
the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a
sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of
reporting. But – perhaps not the least because Smyser himself drove
a sherbet-green Corvair – the story evoked not the anticipated
thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to fury. It was
one of two times he actually raged at me, startling the entire
five-person staff by shouting his denunciations the length of the
newsroom. (His one other tantrum, this in face-to-face mode, was his
response to my rejection of the ballistic impossibilities set fourth
as gospel by the Warren Commission.) All in all though, Smyser was a
superb editor, one who taught me a great deal about reporting. Even so, my memory still flinches at how he grimaced as he
dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin
that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was
disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as
a cat turd.
When I
phoned Nader and apologetically told him there would be no story, he
nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I
was the one who should have thanked him – not just for all the time
he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars,
but for the lesson in journalistic reality.
Such
is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible
restrictions so effective, no
official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably
reminiscent of a slogan in George Orwell's 1984:
“ignorance is strength.”
LB/8
September 2013
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