Woody Allen, Barbara Walters and the Iraq War

Barbara Walters & Woody Allen

Woody Allen has enough foul-smelling mush on his plate from accusations that he molested  a 7 year old, not to be blamed for the Iraq War as well.   But what I'm really looking at here is information, and how the Internet has diminished the power and authority of the corporate media to reframe and manipulate it.

 The upswell of support for Dylan Farrow despite the mainstream media's defense of Woody Allen is a testament to the Internet's power to magnify public opinion.    Most of the stories out of the major news outlets refused to believe that the  filmmaking genius  might also be capable of child molestation.  Headlines across the country called the public condemnation of Allen, an example of  "mob rule."  Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that they sounded so much like European monarchs of the eighteenth century, who had the same thing to say about America's fledgling democracy.  The connecting thread is "elitism."

And that got me to thinking.  Had the public grasped the power of the Worldwide Web to provide alternative sources of legitimate information in 2002,  would President George Bush have mustered enough public support to invade Iraq?  Two hundred thousand dead bodies later, we have the mainstream media and Barbara Walters' loud mouth to thank for convincing the public that Saddam Hussein had conspired with his mortal enemy Osama bin Laden to blow up the Twin Towers.  Of course there was also the issue of the Iraqi dictator hiding weapons of mass destruction based on a forged letter from someone in Niger, who had misspelled his own name.  (Niger is a tiny sub-Saharan nation  with a population of  17 million, not to be confused with Nigeria -- 168 million people).     

As for Ms. Walters, she should have retired years ago.  Instead, she defended Woody Allen on the View, claiming: "I have rarely seen a father as loving and caring."  Or maybe she was more right than she realized about the "loving" part.  I remember all too well Ms. Walters going on television pumping up the need to invade Iraq, echoing the opinion pages in the New York Times and elsewhere.   Of course, when that enterprise collapsed in on us, she appeared on the View, grilling former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, demanding that he apologize for the war.  This is the same Ms. Walters who spent her July 4th in 2008, dining with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.  She then tried to convince the American public that the man responsible for a war, whose death toll rivals that of Iraq, was both "intelligent" and "charming." 

We can now access, on the Internet, the court records that refute Woody Allen's lies about having been declared "innocent" for molesting Dylan.   Being able to look back at a public figure's record of interviews and other materials, we can  also make more informed decisions about who has earned the right to be taken seriously and who has lost it. 

RELATED POST:  Dylan-of-Arc Has Ignited a Revolution and Woody Allen's Pals are Scared Sh*tless