Lexington resident Jill Stein is no fan of the mainstream media.
Stein, who served as an elected member of Lexington’s representative Town Meeting from 2005 to 2010, is known for her involvement in the Green-Rainbow Party and its national affiliate, the Green Party. She was the Green-Rainbow Party’s nominee for governor in 2002 and 2010 in Massachusetts. She was also the Green Party’s nominee for president in 2012 and 2016. She drew scrutiny from Democrats in 2016 who allege she helped get Donald Trump elected by splitting left-of-center votes.
In a conversation with the left-wing Massachusetts Peace Action over Zoom last week, Stein reiterated her disdain for the mainstream media — which she refers to as the corporate media. She said she thinks the corporate media treated Julian Assange poorly — as well as anti-war progressives like herself, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), former U.S. representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), and former U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). Stein, Sanders, Gabbard, and Kucinich have all run for president.
Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks which notably published both leaked information from the United States government about the War on Terror; and email messages from officials of the Democratic Party in 2016 showing that the party favored Hillary Clinton in the primary over Sanders. Assange is in prison in the United Kingdom because of his espionage charges in the United States, as The Guardian points out.
Stein thinks that Assange is a good journalist who did his job publishing information that’s important to the American public. She said that’s something that the mainstream media doesn’t do these days.
“If we don’t have a press that’s willing to be a watchdog instead of a lapdog — which is what we have right now — then we don’t have a democracy,” Stein said.
“The First Amendment was established as the First Amendment for very good reason,” she added. “At the time, we were throwing off the chains of a colonial empire, so the First Amendment as well as the right to privacy, the right to protest and so on, you know all of these things that are being massively violated right now, they were established because that’s what you need to have a democracy. And to allow them to be attacked by basically the excesses of the intelligence agency right now is essentially to roll over for empire instead of standing up to be the democracy that we must be.”
Stein said the mainstream media often seem willing to run with whatever government officials tell them despite the government’s tendency to lie.
Stein also encouraged people to look for information in other places so that they can receive an honest perspective of what’s going on in the world.
“I think when people become aware of what’s going on here and break through the media propaganda which is a poster child in of itself of the corruption and the cooptation of corporate media,” Stein said. “When people break through that to actually hear and understand what’s going on, it’s extremely motivating.”
New to NewBostonPost? Conservative media is hard to find in Massachusetts. But you’ve found it. Now dip your toe in the water for two bucks — $2 for two months. And join the real revolution.
