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Hidden with code "Submitted as Feature" |
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Hollinger Fires Reporter on the Beat of Congressman Weller and His Guatemalan Ex-Dictator's Daughter Bride-to-Be |
Current rating: 0 |
by Michael Green Fonte
Email: michaelfonte (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) |
02 Oct 2004
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Hollinger International, the Enron of newspapers, has allowed its corrpution to seep down to its local Joliet paper with the wrongful termination of a reporter who was potentially attacked in connection with his investigation into Wellergate |
Dear editors,
Last week events in Illinois proved that the corporate corruption of the Enron of newspapers, Hollinger International, has seeped into the local community publications of the Chicago suburbs.
After filing my second investigative report into the engagement of U.S. Congressman Jerry Weller and Guatemalan Diputada Zury Rios Sosa, I was terminated—not by my editors or publisher, but by corporate. During that week they killed all my stories as well as those by others. Now other journalists are leaving The Herald News while others remain in an environment of paranoia and disillusionment. They feel the First Amendment has been shredded and the American experiment is collapsing.
In my second report, I included two sections that are a threat to to Hollinger's Republican board members.
First, I included background info on the U.S. role in Guatemala under the leadership of Henry Kissinger. Second, I reported on how editorials in the Chicago Sun-Times has argued that new intelligence Czar Porter Goss, will be a great fit for instilling democracy in Iraq. They cite his success in working with Kissinger in Central America, specifically Honduras.
The facts about the conditions in Central America are undeniable. They are documented in U.S. Department of State reports and those by the Drug Enforcement Agency, as well as U.N. bodies.
Labor conditions, terrorism, narco-trafficking, etc. is still all controlled—specifically in Guatemala—by mafia elements. These are parallel powers and clandestine groups that operate in conjunction with the Guatemalan Republican Front, the party founded by Efrain Rios Montt, the father of Congressman Weller's fiancée.
Back to my termination. Hollinger has only cited that I am not a good fit for the company and there have been disruptions since I have worked in the newsroom. This is, of course, not adequate for the termination of a guild member that has never received a verbal warning or any other documentation of dereliction of duties.
I want to be clear that this editorial is not about the Weller engagement. Though I was recommended by The Herald News to write a column on it after my first report, I elected not to. I did not wish to take a position and become a biased reporter. Therefore, this editorial is about the collapse of the free press in the heart of America.
While it has been reported from within The Herald News that Hollinger is prepared to create a smear campaign against me, it is also well-known that this will be difficult. Thus, I wish to set the record straight on where I stand politically.
Most journalists wish to say they are objective, but we all know it is impossible for someone to not be influenced by their own interpretations. In order to create an objective article, the writer must become conscious of his own bias. Once this realization occurs, the reporter can then go where he normally wouldn't. He will look for other sides to the story that interpret the events differently than those he first spoke to.
A great example of this is my talking to Byron Vasquez. He is the editor of Guatemala en USA. When I spoke to him in Los Angeles, he informed me of his work for Prensa Libre, a paper in Guatemala City.
Vasquez told me that he tries to be objective and the fact is that it didn't matter who was in charge during the time of Rios Montt. Rios Montt would preside over genocide no matter what, because Washington is the true people in control of Central America, Vasquez said.
Closer to me personally, I must admit that I am a registered Republican. I assisted Andrea Jones in designing specific areas of the youth campaign for Senator John McCain's bid for president.
Those that wish to make me out as a Hollywood liberal, since I was educated at the University of Southern California, will also find it difficult to pin me to democrats. My professors will argue, and my term papers prove it, that I was a thorn in the side of progressive, Marxist media theorists. I worked toward using science to break through the dead end of Postmodernism.
In addition I was born and raised for 13 years in West Virginia. Though it is a democratic state, most of my family are republicans. Some have even held office as Republicans. The democrats, though of independent thinking, including Byrd and Rockefeller, are economically liberal but socially conservative. Therefore, any smear campaign by Hollinger will not work. I am not a leftist and the facts prove it.
Now that the stage has been set, I wish to talk about the dangerous violations to the Constitution that have taken place by Hollinger at The Herald News. They have killed stories, censored stories, and wrongfully terminated me. This is illegal and Un-American.
I wrote a fair and balanced story published in The Herald News on August 15. One month later I was found in a pool of my own blood around my head outside my apartment in Morris. Though I have been completely transparent by informing local authorities that I had been drinking that night at a local bar, many human rights authorities, the doctor that examined me, and investigators within the Joliet Police Department, all believe I was most likely attacked by the FRG as an act of intimidation. They often act on anniversary of events that damage their cause.
This attack also came as I was preparing to file my next story that reports what analysts think of the Weller engagement. This includes information about the Central American Free Trade Agreement, drug trafficking connected to the FRG and Weller political fundraisers in Morris, terrorism, and comparisons between the U.S. regime change in Guatemala and Iraq.
But what is so frightening is that terrorism has now been invited into Illinois by the very politicians that say they are fighting it.
Despite the action alerts by the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission in Washington, and the filing of my police report, the Morris Police Department have not even contacted me to ask me questions. They also did not inspect my wounds after the incident. Nor did they cordon off the potential crime scene for forensic analysis. They only reportedly gathered blood samples from the carpet.
This seems unbelievable, yet perhaps understandable when you consider the small-town of Morris and the fact that the Morris police chief is a Republican candidate for State Legislature.
The cowboy Republicans at the highest levels down to within our communities have hijacked not only our newspaper but the party of Lincoln. The people of Illinois deserve to have free speech restored.
I will continue to provide the answers the people want to know about Wellergate, but meanwhile I have begun work on the larger threat that has emerged. That threat is the shredding of the First Amendment.
We now face the most challenging hurdle in using the media to educate our citizenship and our children. To solve this problem, others and myself have joined to found the Grundy County Multi-Media Literacy Institute. Based in historic downtown Morris across from the courthouse, the institute will work toward guaranteeing a return of the free press and preserving the past with the technology of the future.
GCMLI was first founded by Zachary J. Pucel and myself. It now has partnerships around the globe, including the Institute for Multi-Media Literacy at the University of Southern California. USC is especially interested in helping out Grundy County because the school's president, Steven B. Sample, is an Illinois-native and graduate of the University of Illinois. Just like Sample, Pucel is also an engineer. With the co-leadership of myself based in the arts and Pucel based in a technical field as well as being a college athlete, the institute hopes to begin a new era in Grundy County. Other partnerships with Hollywood and other academic institutions around the world will soon crystallize.
GCMLI's mission is to act as a hub for Grundy County educators to find supplemental funding for multi-media education. The institute will connect them with not only local donations but with private, government, and non-profit entities. This will help alleviate the threat of cutting programs in the arts and sports due to tax-revenue dilemmas.
In addition, the institute will introduce students and the entire community to the history of Grundy County's media. A multi-media installation is currently in the design stages. This exhibit will trace the evolution of media from as far back as Native Americans up to newspapers, television and to the current rise of the Internet. The institute calls this evolution from local to global media, glocalization. Glocalism is the new era of journalism that is emerging in Grundy County and around the world.
Glocalism educates local people on how international issues affect them directly. In addition to the Weller engagement, the influx of Latinos and even Russians are now challenging Morris schools in complying with the No Child Left Behind initiative. Glocalism is clearly needed for the people of Grundy County.
In regards to the scandal within Hollinger's subsidiaries, there has been a criticism of me by using character assassination that molds me as a conspiracy theorist. The facts prove this untrue. The Bloomington Pantagraph contacted The Herald News to ask about my termination. They specifically asked if a conspiracy was occurring at the paper. Of course, they said no. I, too, say no.
It is not a conspiracy. It is out in the open. Just read the paper. It is obvious that they are killing controversial stories. If you read the managing editor's column called Cloak and Dagger that ran after my termination, it is clear that he is disillusioned with the position of which Hollinger has placed him. He is losing his best writers and is currently forced to kill his best stories. His career is now in danger due to Hollinger.
I urge all readers to cancel their subscriptions to all Hollinger publications, including The Herald News and the Sun-Times. I also ask that local businessmen stand up to this corruption by stopping advertising in these publications. This money will only go into the pockets of corrupt executives and foreign investors. We need to keep our money in our community. We do not need the fantastic local entrepreneurs off-shoring our resources to people across our borders.
Please don't allow the assault on free speech to continue under the direction of both political parties with the assistance of The Patriot Act and the War on Terror. Please save America.
Sincerely,
Michael Green Fonte |
This work is in the public domain |
