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DOCUMENTATION

The Establishment Media: Whores for the New World Order


A Bad Day for the Carrion

Former Associated Press reporter Michael A. Hoffman II demonstrates how reporters from the Spokane Spokesman Review newspaper invaded a funeral to smear the living and the dead

On April 1, 1997, the funeral of one of the finest women I ever had the privilege to know, Miss Eva Vail, was held in north Idaho. Eva was born on a Wyoming ranch and was the epitome of the frontier lady.

As one of her friends said, "She was more courageous than most men I have known."

She was an unstinting fighter for this nation, its people and its liberties, on behalf of unpopular truths and the dissidents who articulated them.

She was instrumental in assisting the Randy Weaver family during the Federal government siege of their home. Eva was a person without greed, without a desire for the spotlight or taking credit. A lady of profound altruism, decency and good cheer. She had a love affair with her native West and with north Idaho in particular, calling it "the gathering place."

More than one hundred family members and friends from as far away as Texas, California and the east coast met at the funeral home to pay her our last respects. This moving and solemn occasion was beautifully choreographed by her family, who told stories of her life on the frontier in a home without running water or electricity.

Eva, as the oldest of seven children, had been her siblings' protector. Eva's sister sang "How Great thou Art" and we mourners took up the hymns "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and "Amazing Grace."

In the midst of this dignified and solemn service, punctuated by mirth at the reminiscence of the life of the redoubtable Miss Vail, there sat two media vultures from the Spokesman-Review newspaper.

These carrion had invaded the funeral home posing as mourners and sought to obtain whatever they might conceivably twist into purple prose, suited to the sensational prejudice the Spokesman-Review newspaper publishes about Christian patriots.

Louis Beam, the renowned Vietnam-veteran and patriot activist was the main eulogist, at her specific request. He refuses to speak with the media and is shadowed by them wherever he goes. Even his ailing wife is stalked by reporters who have no respect and no conscience.

Spokesman-Review reporter Bill Morlin invaded Eva's funeral to find any means by which to degrade her or Mr. Beam. However, the eulogy Mr. Beam delivered was sweet and poignant and made reference to his desire for healing and reconciliation between disparate groups.

Had Beam given a fire and brimstone eulogy, with multiple references to Federal government perfidy and jeremiads against coerced integration, it is probably safe to surmise that Morlin would have written a news article casting Beam as a salivating fanatic and tarring Eva by association.

Instead, because the funeral was lovely and dignified, Morlin published nothing.

For this parasite upon the grief of others, there was no story. He had been denied what he had come for: an opportunity to vilify and smear.

Yet, to a journalist worthy of the name, without a political axe to grind, there was a significant story at Eva's funeral. Having trespassed upon the sacred precinct of a family funeral, Mr. Morlin might have made up for his transgression by publishing a story that broke a mold, violated a stereotype and shattered a process of demonization.

Morlin, if he were something other than the agent of Federal police and the Zionist-supremacist ADL, might have written of a quiet country funeral, where leaders of the patriot movement, including the "notorious" Louis Beam, gathered to honor one of their own.

He might have written how, in contrast to media hype, Beam called for reconciliation and respect for diverse opinions.

Of course, such an article would not endear Mr. Morlin to his ADL masters to whom he must toady.

It would not cause his star to rise with the FBI, for whom he is a conduit for police surveillance.

It would not have helped his career at the extremist Spokesman-Review newspaper, which long ago shed any vestige of objectivity in its mission of promulgating partisan prejudice against Christian separatists and by its betrayal of the American public's right to objective information.

No, only the cause of truth would have been served by a Morlin article fairly reporting the healing oratory of Louis Beam.

Only the quest for human rights for all people, including separatists and patriots, would have been enhanced, by offering a factual counterpoint to the crude stereotyping of dissidents, which is the stock-in-trade of the establishment media in general and the Spokesman-Review in particular.

Mr. Morlin could, like the frog in the fairy tale, have transformed himself from a vulture into an independent, thinking human being and journalist, had he risen to the occasion and reported the real story.

But he did not.

Because Bill Morlin, like his employer, is not interested in the truth or genuine human rights.

He is but an ideologue, knowing full well the extent of the fraud he peddles. Sneaking around the dead, failing to preserve any sense of decency or decorum, perched inside the funeral home, pretending to represent the very things Louis Beam and Eva Vail genuinely cherish and which Morlin seeks to extirpate with his hack writing.

It was a bad day for the carrion at Eva Vail's funeral. Flights of angels sang her to her rest and the media buzzards left empty-handed, for now. For there will undoubtedly be other funerals to invade, other mourners to impersonate, other sacred ground to stomp upon, so long as the establishment media continue to regard certain dissidents as less than human.

Addendum: In a front page story by Susan Drumheller of April 7, ("Harsh Image Won't go Away"), Eva's funeral was reported by the Spokesman-Review---if that's the word for it.

Miz Drumheller claimed that the three cheers for Eva and "Hip, hip hooray" which closed her funeral constituted a "Nazi-style salute" by "mourners." When the Vail family denied this, Drumheller called them liars: "Although a family member said it wasn't what it looked like, there was no mistaking the gesture."

The omniscient reporter knows better than the family and other eyewitnesses present.

Drumheller does not say how many mourners allegedly gave this salute, which was clever of her. To give a figure would have given her game away--smearing a sacred funeral rite to which no reporter was invited--by implying that a Nazi congregation bid farewell to Miss Vail with a stiff-armed salute.

Perhaps ten people did such a thing--in a crowd of 100+ mourners. But Drumheller made no distinction between the 10% and the vast majority. Why should she bother? These were patriots and separatists mourning Eva. They were not members of any media-protected race, class or religion; merely descendants of the folks who built this country. Therefore they were fair game for Drumheller's character assassination.

Drumheller's front page "news article" was actually pure opinion. She editorialized: "The funeral for Eva Vail...attracted an assortment of people who have given the region an ugly image:...John Trochmann of the Militia of Montana and Louis Beam..."

That's your opinion Miz Drumheller, but what is it doing sandwiched within a supposedly objective, p. 1 news story? Lots of people in north Idaho would say you are the ugly one--refusing to permit even the dead a respite from your bias.

Is it not "ugly" to use one's position of trust as a journalist to inject one's own prejudice into an article and call it news, in order to ritually degrade dissidents?

The Spokesman-Review newspaper once again cannot distinguish between the Op-Ed page and the front page.

In the opinion of many working people, the presence of men like Louis Beam and Randy Weaver and other thinking individuals who do not follow the conformist herd, is a boon, not a bane to our region. They beautify Idaho.

Susan Drumheller would never evince such disrespect and contempt for a funerary rite had the deceased been a black leader or a Jewish rabbi.

Hence, the funeral of Eva Vail, a oving and giving person who was deeply concerned about government expansion and treachery, becomes a subject for Nazi-baiting and guilt-by-association.

Yet Eva Vail fought big government in all its pomps and was as horrified by the spectre of a fascist police state as she was by the neo-Communist one emerging from Bill Clinton's Washington, D.C.

Let us forgive but not forget how these pseudo-journalists dishonor our dead; how little respect they have for anything of ours that we hold sacred.

Let us remember this when they dare to denounce us for allegedly violating their taboos and icons.

Copyright©1997 by Michael A. Hoffman II. All Rights Reserved.


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