Daniel Ellsberg testifying before Congress about the Vietnam War in 1971: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Can a song change the world? A news story? What about a leak?

Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers to newspapers in 1971 — an act that rippled through American life for decades in the form of a distrust of government over its lies about the Vietnam War and ushered in a new era of aggressive investigative journalism — recently announced that he has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. In recent years, he has engaged in activism against the use of nuclear weapons.

Now 91, Ellsberg clandestinely copied a secret military report during the Nixon years, a 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War. When it was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Nixon administration sued to stop publication. But the Supreme Court at the time defended the First Amendment right of a free press against prior restraint of publication.

It changed the world at the time. The papers produced a wave of anger at the U.S. government for having lied about the conduct of the war, which was already unpopular. At the time, Ellsberg faced numerous charges, including violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Charges were dismissed in 1973, however, because of government misconduct, and of course President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace after bringing the war to an end.

In 2021, Ellsberg revealed that the government had drawn up plans to attack China with nuclear weapons during a crisis over the Taiwan Strait back in 1958.

These days, with a new Cold War developing between the United States and China, and Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine with Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons — as well as all the news of impending doom about climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation — Ellsberg faces the end of his days with a good deal of trepidation about the future of democracy and human life on Earth.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ellsberg was asked:

Q. As you look around the world today, what scares you?

His Answer?

“I’m leaving a world in terrible shape and terrible in all ways that I’ve tried to help make better during my years. President Biden is right when he says that this is the most dangerous time, with respect to nuclear war, since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s not the world I hoped to see in 2023. And that’s where it is. I also don’t think the world is going to deal with the climate crisis. We’ve known, since the 2016 Paris agreement and before, that the U.S. had to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That’s not going to happen.”

So I am not the only one who has been warming about these threats for years on end. I think perhaps my friends, fans and followers on the web and Facebook may get tired of all this gloom and doom, so I try to find more positive things to report on and write about whenever I can, to find ways to provide hope for the future. It’s not always easy.

As I face my own mortality with aging and my own health issues, and all through the coronavirus pandemic and four crazy years with Trump in the White House especially, at times I can’t help but think back on times when I did my best to provide road maps for change. Even as famous as Ellsberg became, people don’t seem to listen to him any more than they listen to me, or any of the politicians who have also issued warnings and tried to form policies to help.

Back in the hellscape year of 2020, the American people rallied like never before and stopped Trump from getting a second term in the White House, and elected Joe Biden president, who had an incredible couple of years before the Dixie Caucus took back control of the House.

Even out of office and facing potential arrest and charges, Trump still gets more attention than Biden, and the press continues to criticize Biden as if he was as bad as Trump because of the misinformed definition of objectivity they still operate under for the sake of capitalism like we all did back in the 20th century.

As I reflect on my time here on this blue planet and the work I’ve done to both send up the red warning flag of danger and offer potential solutions, I can’t help but think back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I had such an incredible run covering the environment for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast. I learned how it was done then — breaking and investigating news stories and getting the public to move in the right direction to win battle after battle.

Then I had hope of influencing the formation of a better press through academic research. For two years, I learned and then pioneered a field of communications research into media effects on public opinion. In 1995, I published a Master’s Thesis on this subject, the first study to ever develop a quantitative methodology into how press coverage influences public opinion on environmental issues.

Public Attitudes and Press Coverage of the Environment, 1968-1996

But I faced much skepticism in academic circles to this research, and even had to fire one of my Master’s thesis committee members who was prepared to argue against my findings and vote against me. I replaced him with a more knowledgeable and sympathetic member from outside the School of Communication in the Education Department. Dr. Jim Taylor is retired now, and no longer active with the Sierra Club where I first met him, but is still connected with me on Facebook so I’m sharing this story with him. Maybe he would like to comment.

I went on to teach journalism in Georgia and then Tennessee, where I tried to continue this research. I even put up the first environmental journalism website in 1996, and co-taught a course in it. But again I faced academic skeptics and detractors, who ambushed my research and future plans to finish a doctorate degree and continue this mission as a college professor.

Not to be deterred, I knew I could have more influence as a journalist anyway, publishing in newspapers, magazines and on the web instead of obscure academic journals full of bad writing and small time research.

So I used what I had learned to try to continue making a difference as a reporter and writer.

After a few years of this, with newspapers and magazines in trouble financially, I went independent on the web. Then with some time on my hands a few years into this experience, I put my experiences and knowledge into a book, which has continued to be ignored by what’s left of the mainstream establishment press and media.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

The fair and balanced press model developed for economic reasons in the 20th century still holds sway, even as more converts to my point of view popup from time to time, none giving me any credit for my early ideas about how this could and should work.

Many others have become famous for issuing similar warnings about the environment, including Bill McKibben, Bernie Sanders and Greta Thunberg, to name a few.

Some people listen, and vote on the basis of the warnings. But far too many millions of people are not hearing the message, not believing it, or simply choose to ignore it to live out their selfish lives as if none of it matters.

Back when I was doing my academic research, I had no idea that in a few years Rush Limbaugh’s radio influence on public opinion on the right and then Rupert Murdoch’ s development of the right-wing fake news infotainment channel Fox News would end up having far more influence on public opinion than anything that had come before — in an entirely negative direction for democracy and the planet.

I’ve tried to encourage some of my former academic colleagues to study this and prove once and for all that media in fact can have a massive influence on public opinion — for good or ill. They still won’t do it. The press and the academic community it supports does not want to face the liability that they could make a difference and turn public opinion in any direction they want — if they just admitted it and got on with it.

The power of media and marketing is well known when it comes to the selling of products and services. If it can be used to sell more Coke than Pepsi, more Budweiser than Miller, or more Fords than Teslas, why can’t we use it to save democracy and human life on Earth?

If it can be used to get the likes of Donald Trump elected president and keep him out of prison for all his crimes against democracy and humanity, why can’t it be used to lock him up and stop him from running for public office ever again?

Tesla himself had some ideas about how to create cheap energy and a directed energy weapon that might have made world war “unthinkable.” But the capitalists ignored him too, because they couldn’t figure out how to make a private fortune by funding them and bringing them to market.

Could a film make a difference? I’m in the process of trying to figure that out.

How about a song? What if everybody could hear and be inspired by this? They often play versions of it on West Virginia Public Radio’s “Mountain Stage Radio Show,” which I sometimes listen to from the NPR app on my iPhone while sitting outside in a campsite. I would like to rewrite some of the words and do a version of it myself, if I could find the right band.

I don’t know if a god is watching us or not. I have my doubts. Or if alien life on another planet is watching us, and whether they would have sympathetic or harmful intent in mind if we were to ever meet.

“From a Distance” is a song written in 1985 by American singer-songwriter Julie Gold. Nanci Griffith, found out about it and recorded it first for her 1987 album, “Lone Star State of Mind.” The song has been covered many times, the most successful version a major hit by Bette Midler hit in 1990.

Lyrics

From a distance, the world looks blue and green
And the snow-capped mountains white
From a distance, the ocean meets the stream
And the eagle takes to flight

From a distance, there is harmony
And it echoes through the land
It’s the voice of hope
It’s the voice of peace
It’s the voice of every man

From a distance, we all have enough
And no one is in need
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease
No hungry mouths to feed

From a distance, we are instruments
Marching in a common band
Playing songs of hope
Playing songs of peace
They’re the songs of every man

God is watching us
God is watching us
God is watching us
From a distance

From a distance, you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance, I just cannot comprehend
What all this fighting’s for

From a distance, there is harmony
And it echoes through the land
And it’s the hope of hopes
It’s the love of loves
It’s the heart of every man (every man)

It’s the hope of hopes
It’s the love of loves
This is the song for every man

And God is watching us
God is watching us
God is watching us
From a distance

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