Richard H. Meeker, president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklie and publisher of Willamette Week, in Portland, charges that if the average American voter had been reading the alternative press’s coverage of Election ’88, George Bush would not have been elected president.
Here are just some of the stories that might have made a difference in the 1988 election if the establishment press had bothered to investigate and report them with the same intensity which the alternative press did:
* George Bush and his relationship with a network of anti-semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations;
* George Bush and his connection with the 1980 “October Surprise Working Group” which reportedly sabotaged Jimmy Carter’s efforts to have the hostages released;
* George Bush and his role in delaying the Watergate investigation after Richard Nixon put him in charge of the Republican National Committee;
* Gorge Bush and his role as a CIA “asset” in 1963 when he ran the Zapata off-shore oil drilling company;
* George Bush and his role in encouraging the CIA to go back to business as usual, including covert and dirty operations, when he took over the CIA in 1976;
* George Bush and his relationship with Manuel Noriega while he was CIA chief and Noriega was Panama’s chief of military intelligence and a paid CIA informant;
* George Bush and his strong support for the secret 1986 arms shipments to Iran;
* George Bush and his abject failure as Drug Czar for the Reagan administration;
* George Bush and his questionable judgment in buying real estate with restrictive racist covenants after he was sworn in as Vice President;
* George Bush’s anti-environmental efforts (as head of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief 1981-1983) to block the EPA’s phase-out of leaded gasoline, to weaken restrictions on toxic dumping, on OSHA’s standards on industrial noise, and his complicity in helping General Motors kill a “smog decree” designed to limit air pollution.
Referring to items such as those above, Meeker concluded that “When information like (this) finally surfaces, you can be certain that the last major institution to get any of the blame for allowing this to happen will be the one most responsible.”
 SOURCES:
THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN, 11/2/88, “George Bush’s Dirty Secrets,” by Richard Meeker, pp 23-25; EXTRA!, Sept/Oct 1988, “The GOP-Nazi Connection,” p 5.