Mass-media spin doctors downplay jury verdict.
2/17/2000
The View from Marrs by Jim Marrs challenges bureaucratic secrecy and the status quo. Big Media watch out!
The banner headline in The New York Times read "Government Conspiracy Charged in King Death". The Washington Post front page cried, "Memphis Jury Ties King Assassination to Government".
With this imprimatur by the nation's leading journals, the story of who really killed civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King was passed by the Associated Press A wire to every news organization across the country. Soon everybody was talking about it.
Reporters from newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations around the world flocked to Memphis for interviews with jury members, the judge, and attorneys on both sides of the wrongful death civil suit filed last year by King family members against Loyd Jowers. An ailing Memphis café owner, Jowers in 1993 said he was part of an assassination plot.
On December 8, after hearing nearly a month of testimony, the racially mixed jury took less than two hours of deliberation to conclude that King was assassinated by a plot involving Jowers, organized crime and government agents rather than the late James Earl Ray acting alone. Prior to his death, King family members met with Ray and announced they believed in his innocence.
History was reversed. The Justice Department, which had already launched a review of the case last year, announced it would broaden its investigation in light of the jury's findings. There were repeated calls in Congress for a special prosecutor. On January 17 (Martin Luther King Day), angry demonstrators in more than a dozen cities demanded a full and truthful probe of King's death. Many added calls for a serious review of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers.
Ooops! Wait minute. None of this actually happened, did it?
But it is instructive to consider what did happen. All of the facts above are true, only the reaction of the major mass media has been changed. It is a clear and graphic example of the power of the mass media to control how the public should think about any given issue.
The New York Times, America's "newspaper of record," buried the King jury story on page 25 of its December 10, 1999, edition. The front page carried a story concerning weight loss methods of Chinese women. The Los Angeles Times followed suit, placing the story on page 24.
The New York Times article even added a bit of editorial comment by stating that a vast conspiracy had been "alleged but not proved". U.S. News & World Report termed the whole affair "a curious conspiracy". Rather than report on the testimony which convinced jurors that Ray was not King's true assassin, the prestigious news magazine chose to quote King biographer David J. Garrow who had not attended the trial. Garrow disdained the jury's verdict as "almost meaningless" and sneered "anyone who doesn't accept Ray as the gunman is from Roswell, NM".
Both the Times and Post trotted out former Wall St. attorney Gerald Posner to explain to their readers that the jury's decision was "but a ploy to obtain a judicial sanction for a convoluted conspiracy theory embraced by the King family," one which would "only diminish their standing as the first family of civil rights and permanently damage their credibility."
Posner, author of a biased book portraying Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of JFK, also wrote Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both books were heavily publicized and widely quoted by the establishment media and both were rushed into print to coincide with the 30th anniversary of both assassinations. Posner said his work on the JFK assassination enjoyed the "full cooperation of the CIA".
William Pepper, attorney for the King family in the wrongful death suit, also wrote about the King assassination and was attacked for his effort. U.S. News characterized him as "a man prone to bizarre conspiracy theories". Posner blasted Pepper as an attorney who previously represented Ray and only joined the civil suit to publicize his book, Orders to Kill.
In a letter to The Washington Post, which received nowhere near the widespread distribution of the Posner opinion piece, Pepper offered responses to Posner's allegations.
After criticizing Posner as one who "did not go near the courtroom and heard none of the powerful evidence," Pepper said, "Posner is right that I have represented not only the King family but also James Earl Ray. What he doesn't mention is that I was a friend and associate of Martin King from 1967 until his death, and until Ralph Abernathy asked me to go to the prison and interrogate Ray, I believed that the right man was in prison. After looking at the evidence and conducting a private investigation for 10 years, I came to believe that Ray was an unknowing patsy and agreed to represent him in 1988."
While Posner claimed the object of the King suit, Jowers, was "considered to lack credibility by every local, state and federal prosecutor who has looked into the matter," Pepper said that government-paid prosecutors "are terrified about what (Jowers) has to say and have never interviewed him about his role in the assassination."
"Jowers has laid out his role in detail to Dexter (Martin.s son) and Andrew Young, whose testimony was part of the evidence the jury heard," Pepper added.
Where Posner wrote that King's family "quickly were persuaded that Pepper's theory was right," Pepper noted that the family "considered all of the issues before contacting me".
Posner claimed the King death was reviewed by Memphis prosecutors in 1998, who found "Ray was the assassin, and there was no larger conspiracy". Pepper countered that "the quality of that investigation may be summed up by the testimony of the lead investigator at the trial. I gave him the names of 23 critical witnesses from who the jury had already heard. He had heard of only two. Some investigation."
According to Posner, the whole trial was merely an attempt to capitalize on King's death since "The family already had sold the film rights on King's life and death to film director Oliver Stone, whose JFK embraced a similarly widespread government murder plot." Pepper countered by stating, "...the Warner Bros' Project was dropped more than a year and a half ago, long before there was any thought of this trial."
Two very pertinent facts not mentioned by Posner were that the King family asked only for $100 in damages as their purpose was to bring the assassination case before a jury, not a carefully-selected federal panel, and that trial Judge David Morphy had agreed with the jury that King's assassination was too complex for the work of one man.
After hearing from nearly 70 witnesses, both judge and jury concluded that the evidence of government involvement in the case was "overwhelming".
Other critical facts that emerged from the jury trial were conveniently either ignored or downplayed by the mass media. Carthel Weeden, captain of the Memphis fire station which overlooked the motel where King was killed, testified that on that day, he was asked to take Army photographers to the roof of the station so they could photograph the entire assassination. Other witnesses told how King's police protection was suddenly withdrawn just prior to the shooting and TV Judge Joe Brown, who previously had presided over hearings for Ray, described how the telescopic sight on the rifle allegedly used by Ray was not aligned with the barrel, making the sight useless for accuracy.
"The King family considers the truth to have been revealed in this trial, noted Pepper, "not from some preconceived conspiracy theory but from a factual picture established under oath in a court of law."
But, or course, government conspiracies to murder national leaders will never become generally accepted until the story appears on the front pages of the Times or Post, an eventuality highly unlikely as long as power corporate executives maintain their tight control over media companies, with their power to dictate how the public is supposed to view the news.