`Canada Lee'

(chorus)
They called him Canada Lee
And he was Broadway’s Native Son
He spoke out for human rights
So they took away his acting jobs.

(verses)
His father came from the Caribbean
In the early twentieth century
And Lee was born in New York
And grew up in the big city
He studied the violin
And performed in the concert hall
But soon he began to notice
How white were their orchestras.

He ran away to a racetrack
And learned to ride a horse
He quickly became a jockey
And won more than he lost
But the era of Black jockeys
Was in the nineteenth century
Only whites were now allowed
To ride in their Kentucky Derby. (chorus)

So Lee next tried boxing
And fought well in the ring
He won more than he lost
And was renamed “Canada Lee”
Despite his many KOs
They would not give him a title fight
For in the Roaring Twenties
Welterweight champs could be only white.
But boxing can be brutal
And in the head he got hit one night
With a blow that caused bad damage
So in one eye he lost his sight
Retiring from the ring,
He formed himself a band
Yet gigs were hard to find
So he hunted for a new job. (chorus)

He found the Federal Theatre
In an Uptown Harlem church
They discovered that he could act
If the role was realistic
In `Stevedore’ and `The Big White Fog’
In `Native Son’, his big hit
He earned fame and applause
And much praise from the critics.

For eight years in the forties
On stage, radio or screen
He used his celebrity
In the fight for equality
Ed Sullivan smeared him as a “commie”
For acting in `Body and Soul’
And when he refused to condemn Paul Robeson
They cancelled all his radio shows. (chorus)

The Canada Lee biographical protest folk song was written a few years ago to remind people how, historically, the U.S. corporate entertainment industry has not been reluctant to discriminate against certain actors and actresses on the basis of their political beliefs.

(You can listen to some of the other protest folk songs I've written by checking out the "Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society" site at the following link:
http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music


Next: Obama’s Platitudes vs. National Black Independent Political Party’s 1980 Charter

`Times-Mirror-Newsday''s Shoreham/LILCO Nuclear Power Connection

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. In May 2008 the Tribune Company announced the sale of its Newsday subsidiary to the Cablevision media conglomerate. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

Times-Mirror-Newsday also acted as a public relations tool of the U.S. nuclear power industry and the deceased CIA Director Casey’s LILCO utility company in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. When LILCO first revealed its plans to build what many felt to be an unsafe nuclear power plant at Shoreham in 1965, the newspaper endorsed the idea. When then-Suffolk County Executive John Klein expressed opposition to building a Jamesport nuclear power plant on Long Island. Times-Mirror-Newsday attacked him editorially. Times-Mirror-Newsday developed a cozy relationship with LILCO in the 1970s, according to Keeler’s Newsday book:

“By 1979, Newsday had developed a reputation as a good friend of LILCO. Privately (local publisher) Bill Attwood regularly ate meals at the Westbury Manor during the 1970s with the chairman of LILCO John J. Tuohy…When Attwood’s son, Peter, was graduated from college and started to look for work in the computer field, Tuohy arranged an interview for him, and LILCO hired him. Later, when Newsday moved to Melville, LILCO bought the old Newsday Garden City plant, for future expansion of a substation. Publicly, the editorials kept up a steady drumbeat of support for the nuclear plant (at Shoreham).”

Even after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in the late 1970s revealed the unsafe nature of U.S. nuclear power plants, Times-Mirror-Newsday still declared, editorially, according to Keeler’s Newsday book, that “despite all the shortcomings, continuing work on Shoreham still appears to be the best way to meet Long Island’s short-term energy needs.”

Although the Times-Mirror-Newsday conglomerate earned a gross income exceeding $3 billion per year in the early 1990s and posed as a journalistic watchdog of government institutions, it had sought government financial subsidies whenever it could get them. After building a new $44 million printing plant in the town of Hempstead which opened in October 1979, for example, Times-Mirror-Newsday applied for a tax abatement from the New York State government’s “Job Incentive Board” and was granted a tax abatement by the government.

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Canada Lee folk song lyrics

`Times-Mirror-Newsday''s Connection To Former CIA Director Casey Historically

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. In May 2008 the Tribune Company announced the sale of its Newsday subsidiary to the Cablevision media conglomerate. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

Times-Mirror-Newsday has not been reluctant to function as an organizing tool of the Long Island power structure, historically. According to Keeler’s Newsday book, in its May 31, 1978 issue, “Newsday concluded that Long Island needed a formal power structure to make choices for the island’s future” and so Times-Mirror-Newsday’s then-Suffolk County Editor, Robert Greene, “pulled together a group that became known as the Long Island Action Committee.” According to the same book, “It was Greene who called up Long Island leaders, Greene who chose the influential Republican, William Casey, as its initial chairman, Greene who sold Casey to others, and Greene who hovered over the committee’s early meetings.”

A few years later, the initial chairman of Times-Mirror-Newsday’s “Long Island Action Committee,” the now-deceased William Casey, was named by then-President Ronald Reagan to be his CIA director. As Reagan’s CIA director, Casey helped organize the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and supplied CIA satellite-gathered military intelligence to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi military machine during the Iraqi-Iran war of the 1980s.

The day before Casey was to testify before a U.S. Senate Committee in December 1986 on his role in arranging for the sale of arms to Iran to raise funds for the Nicaraguan Contras, in violation of a congressional law, he was hospitalized. In May 1987, the day before a congressional hearing witness testified that Casey was involved in the “Contragate” scandal, the 74-year-old former Fordham University Trustee and Long Island Trust Company, LILCO and Capital Cities Communications director died.

In 1970, the deceased CIA Director Casey, himself, had attempted to purchase Newsday prior to the finalizing of Harry Guggenheim’s sale of the newspaper to the Times-Mirror Company. Casey was both one of the original investors and a director of the Capital Cities Communications media conglomerate and he visited Bill Moyers around this time and told Moyers that Capital Cities Communications could offer Guggenheim $20 million or $30 million more than Times-Mirror for Newsday. Although Guggenheim went ahead with the sale of Newsday to Los Angeles’ Times-Mirror, when Casey was CIA Director in the 1980s his Capital Cities Communications Company was able to gobble up an even more influential mass media institution than Newsday—a television broadcasting conglomerate named ABC [before the Disney media conglomerate subsequently purchased Capital Cities Communications/ABC during the 1990s].

Prior to managing Reagan’s successful 1980 campaign for the presidency, Times-Mirror-Newsday’s friend Casey had worked in former U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers’ law firm of Rogers & Well. Among the law firm clients whom Casey had billed for his services during the five years before he moved into his CIA director’s office were the following: Saudi American Lines, international Crude Oil Refining Company, the Government of Indonesia and the Republic of Korea. As Reagan’s CIA director until he died, Casey continued to share ownership of over $3 million worth of stock in companies like Dome Petroleum, Kerr-McGee, Standard Oil of Indiana, Mobil-Superior Oil, DuPont, and Exxon, according to the book Reagan’s Ruling Class by Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton.

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday’s Shoreham/LILCO Nuclear Power Connection Historically

Discrimination At `Times-Mirror-Newsday' Historically

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

It wasn’t until 1963 that Times-Mirror-Newsday hired its first African-American reporter. One of its early African-American reporters, Les Payne, was only hired in 1969, after he had written speeches for U.S. General William Westmoreland in Vietnam during the Vietnam War era.

In 1978, a Times-Mirror-Newsday African-American reporter named Sam Washington committed suicide and in its obituary of him Times-Mirror-Newsday mentioned that he had beaten his wife during his lifetime. The small caucus of African-American reporters at the newspaper was angered by the tone of the Washington obituary because previously-published obituaries of white Times-Mirror-Newsday employees who had committed suicide had not mentioned the negative actions of the deceased. The caucus of African-American reporters then circulated a memo in which it declared: “This treatment was not surprising, for we know, as Sam reluctantly and quite painfully discovered, that the Suffolk editor particularly treats blacks in a dehumanizing manner.”

Like most U.S. Establishment mass media institutions, Times-Mirror-Newsday has discriminated against women historically. In December 1973, the women employees of Times-Mirror-Newsday filed a formal complaint against the newspaper for sex discrimination with the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And on Jan. 13, 1975, the Times-Mirror-Newsday women filed a class-action lawsuit which charged the newspaper with institutional sexism, the Carter vs. Newsday case. In 1982, Times-Mirror-Newsday finally agreed to an out-of-court settlement with the women reporters who were suing the newspaper. Times-Mirror-Newsday agreed to pay $130,300 in damages to 740 of its current and former women employees.

The New York editor of Times-Mirror-Newsday’s [now-defunct] “New York Newsday” edition, Donald Forst, gained something of an adversarial reputation with employees when he worked in the Long Island office of Times-Mirror-Newsday. According to Robert Keeler’s Newsday book, at that time Times-Mirror-Newsday women reporters had heard Forst “regularly use short, vulgar, offensive synonyms for the word `woman,’” and “knew that he had asked women personal questions about their sexual preferences and had described his own fantasies in graphic detail.”

Within three years after Times-Mirror-Newsday’s New York Newsday edition began to circulate in Manhattan under Forst’s editorship, according to Keeler’s Newsday book, its “newsroom in New York had taken on the air of a men’s locker room—too many crude and offensive epithets flung at women, too many sexual jokes and anti-gay put-downs.” In response, in the fall of 1987, the newspaper’s City Business Section editor, Amanda Harris, its Metropolitan Desk editor, Laura Durkin, and a reporter named Marianne Arneberg met at the Lion’s Head restaurant in the West Village to discuss what they felt was the sexist atmosphere at Times-Mirror-Newsday. They decided to meet every Sunday afternoon at Arneberg’s apartment with more than 20 other newspaper employees to discuss the newspaper management’s sexism in the area of assignments and promotion, as well as the sexist newsroom atmosphere. According to Keeler’s Newsday book, Times-Mirror-Newsday women reporters felt that the newspaper’s men were generally given higher merit raises by Times-Mirror-Newsday managers than women, for sexist reasons.

Around the same time its women staff members were complaining about the newspaper’s sexism, its then-New York Newsday metropolitan editor, John Cotter, was asked to resign by his Times-Mirror-Newsday supervisors in the corporate hierarchy because he used the word “n----r” in a professional conversation.

Asked by Downtown in early 1991 how he would respond to some of the charges published in Robert Keeler’s Newsday book that New York Newsday’s office atmosphere has, historically, been sexist and racist, then Managing Editor Toedtman answered that “Twenty-two percent of the Newsday metropolitan staff is minority or Black and Latino. I think there was a concern” about sexism in the editorial office but it has “long ceased to be a problem, although “we’re not any less vigilant.” In Toedtman’s view, the now-defunct New York Newsday in the early 1990s was “a very challenging place to work” and “our circulation is increasing because we are doing a good job covering New York.”

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday’s Connection To Former CIA Director Casey Historically

`Times-Mirror-Newsday''s Historic Mass Media Monopolization Drive

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

In the late 1970s, Times-Mirror-Newsday began to accelerate its mass media buying drive. Between 1977 and 1979, Times-Mirror-Newsday spent $500 million to acquire more media properties.

In the early 1990s, California’s Times-Mirror-Newsday attempted to cement mass media power by controlling all of the following mass media institutions:

The Los Angeles Times newspaper

Times-Mirror-Newsday/New York Newsday newspaper

The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Evening Sun newspapers

The Hartford Courant newspaper

The Greenwich Times newspaper

The Stamford Advocate newspaper

KDFW-TV-Dallas

KTBC-TV-Austin, Texas

KTVU-TV-St. Louis

WVTUM-TV-Birmingham

Rhode Island Cable Television

Chillecotte Cablevision Inc.

The Los Angeles Times Syndicate

Broadcasting magazine

Popular Science magazine

Golf magazine

Sporting News

Field & Stream magazine

Yachting magazine

Military Forum magazine

Times-Mirror-Newsday also controlled Times-Mirror Land and Timber Company (which owns 272,000 acres of timberland) in the early 1990s, to reduce the business costs for obtaining the paper required by the conglomerate for its many newspapers.

Asked by Downtown in early 1991 whether the ownership by Times-Mirror of so many media properties tended to prevent a diversity of views from being published, then-New York Newsday Managing Editor Toedtman answered: “The Times-Mirror properties that I know of do not stifle diverse views.”

Besides Rockefeller & Company Director Clayton Frye Jr., Chandis Securities Director Otis Chandler and Bruce Chandler, the board of directors of Times-Mirror-Newsday also included the following U.S. Establishment figures in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

1. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Director Robert Erburu. Erburu was chairman of the Times-Mirror-Newsday board in the early 1990s, as well as a director of the company’s Tejon Ranch and the Times-Mirror Foundation.

2. Parsons Corporation Director F. Daniel Frost. Frost also directed Tejon Ranch and Avery International. The Parsons Corporation had special business interests in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s.

3. Southern California Edison/Carter Hawley Hale Stores/Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Director Walter Gerken. Gerken also was a director of the California Economic Development Organization in the early 1990s.

4. J. Paul Getty Trust President Harold Williams. Williams also was a Pan American Airways director and a regent of the University of California in the early 1990s.

The president of Times-Mirror-Newsday in the early 1990s, David Levanthol, was an editor of Yale University’s student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, in the “silent 1950s.”

From its mass media monopolization activity, the California-based Times-Mirror-Newsday corporate board—on behalf of the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Chandler families and other U.S. Establishment families—was able to specially influence political life in New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. as well as in California in the early 1990s. At the same time, it earned a gross income of $3.5 billion each year and a net income annually of $300 million.

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Discrimination At Times-Mirror-Newsday Historically

`Times-Mirror-Newsday''s Historic Corporate Connections

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

By the time Otis Chandler’s father, Norman, died in 1973, the Times-Mirror-Newsday media conglomerate had 31 divisions and a gross income of over $600 million per year. Although about 30 percent of the Times-Mirror-Newsday stock was then still owned by the Chandler family—enough to pretty much control the media conglomerate’s business and editorial direction—a cross-section of non-family representatives from other large corporations also sat on the Times-Mirror-Newsday board. The Times-Mirror-Newsday directors in 1973, for instance, were the following U.S. businessmen:

1. Bank of America/Norton Simon/Ford/Hallmark Cards Director Franklin Murphy.

2. Bank of California and Pacific Insurance Director Albert Casey.

3. Republic National Bank, American Airlines, Lone Star Steel, Neuhoff Brothers and Blue Cross-Blue Shield Director James Aston.

4. Bank of America, Bank of Hawaii, Hawaiian Western Steel and Deltec International Director Lowell Dillingham.

5. Wells Fargo Bank and U.S. Steel Director Thomas Jones.

6. Western Airlines and Pacific Lighting Director Harry Volk.

7. Rockwell International/Pacific Indemnity and Cyrus Mining Director J.I. Atwood.

As Jack Hart noted in his book, The Information Empire, the corporate makeup of the Times-Mirror-Newsday corporate board “hardly seemed conducive to independent news reporting…Times-Mirror directors, for example, indirectly tied the interests of the Times to companies like Ford, the Bank of America, American Airlines…and dozens of similar corporate giants.” In the 1970s, Times-Mirror-Newsday Director Franklin Murphy also sat on the U.S. government’s Intelligence Advisory Board which worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency [CIA].

Asked by Downtown in early 1991 whether the [now-defunct] New York Newsday would be reluctant to report critically on the outside companies which are also directed by Times-Mirror directors, then-Managing Editor Toedtman again insisted that “There’s no hands-on control of the newspaper by Times-Mirror” that would “compromise the integrity of the paper” in terms of how “editorial content is determined.”

As might be expected, given its unpublicized historic corporate connections, Times-Mirror-Newsday strongly supported U.S. military intervention in Vietnam editorially during the 1960s. According to The Information Empire book, the Los Angeles Times’

“support for American intervention dated back to a Defense Department junket through the region by Otis Chandler…in the spring of 1963…Throughout subsequent years the Times editorial page remained rigidly fastened to the Administration’s coattail…A 1967 editorial condemned Martin Luther King’s opposition to current Vietnam policy.”

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday’s Historic Mass Media Monopolization Drive

`Times-Mirror-Newsday' Chandler Dynasty's Hidden History--Part 3

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

Control of Harry Chandler’s Times-Mirror Company was next passed on to his son, Norman Chandler, who began to expand the company after World War II by purchasing a television station, KTTV-Los Angeles, and new properties in Oregon which included forest land and paper companies. In addition to heading his newspaper media company after World War II, Norman Chandler also sat on the corporate boards of Kaiser Steel, Safeway Stores, Santa Fe Railroad, Pan American Airways and Dresser Industries. George Bush I’s father [and George W. Bush II’s grandfather] Prescott Bush, also sat on the board of directors of Pan American Airways and Dresser Industries around the same time. In 1954, the wife of Times-Mirror publisher Chandler, Dorothy Chandler, was also appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California for a number of years.

In 1960, Norman Chandler’s then-32-year-old son, Otis Chandler, took over as the Los Angeles Times-Mirror publisher. Like his father and grandfather before him, Times-Mirror publisher Otis Chandler also combined the exercise of mass media power with sitting on the corporate boards of non-media corporations. In 1964, he joined the corporate board of Western Airlines. In 1965, Otis Chandler became a director of Union Bank. And by 1970—the same year that Chandler’s Times-Mirror purchased Newsday from Harry Guggenheim—Otis Chandler had holdings in oil, real estate, agribusiness and publishing and was also a director of Pan American Airways, TRW and Geo-Tech Resources. He also received income from three trust funds.

Soon after Newsday was purchased by Chandler’s Times-Mirror, Otis Chandler attempted to influence editorial policy on war-peace issues. According to the book `Newsday': A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid by Robert Keeler, a Times-Mirror-Newsday editorial staff member, “Chandler didn’t hesitate to comment on the tone of the paper’s editorials” and “Chandler strongly criticized” a 1971 editorial that supported “a bill to create a congressional inquiry into American war crimes in Vietnam.” Between 1970 and 1978, the minutes of all Times-Mirror-Newsday staff meetings were also sent to its Los Angeles corporate headquarters by its local publisher, William Attwood.

Downtown asked then-New York Newsday Managing Editor Toedtman in 1991 how much influence the Los Angeles office of Times-Mirror had over New York Newsday editorial policy during the early 1990s.

“Virtually none. None on a daily basis. The editorial content of the newspaper is determined locally to protect the integrity of the paper,” Toedtman answered.

When asked by Downtown whether the minutes of Newsday staff meetings were still sent to Los Angeles in the early 1990s , like in the 1970s, Toedtman replied: “No minutes of any meetings that I attend are either taken or mailed to Los Angeles. You’d have to ask the publisher” whether any minutes of staff meetings are currently sent out to the Los Angeles headquarters.

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday’s Historic Corporate Connections