The Author of A Revolution: Medialens.org, Jazzy Bessie and Heston

Medialens.org is a sporadically, if weekly updated blog aimed at correction...as in "We hope to raise public awareness of the underlying systemic failings of the corporate media to report the world around us honestly, fairly and accurately. Fundamentally, we wish to reduce suffering wherever it occurs.." They correct our mistakes or try to. It's very British. As any good journalist knows, it should be made note of. If that note is a post-it or setting the site as a homepage is relative to the journalist.

A summation of their most recent article would be, Tibet + 20Th Century Invasion + China = Illegitimate Occupation. Iraq + Afghanistan + US Armed Forces + Torture of Small Peoples = X
In traditional media substitute X for the phase Insurgency Seen Too Optimistic. In medialens.org substitute X for phrase Illegitimate Occupation. Evil Media is sugarcoating total tragedies and failures in Iraq. USA out of Iraq.

That's about what you missed.

In other news, some important people died, as they are prone to do from time to time.

What we do not know is that we have lost a great man. What we do know is that we have lost Charlton Heston. Whom we knew from Planet of The Apes, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and the comically tragic figure with cold dead hands on a gun, the same one that walked in the Civil Rights era marches in the spirit of the thinking man's macho man, Mr. Heston. I remember a not so Mexican detective from a touch of evil. Mr. Confidence all 6 foot, 3 inches of him is gone. We aren't any wiser for it.

But I put to you that someone more important than that has fled our conscious. If he was ever there at all. His name was Simon Bessie. You've never heard of him. Far away from prying eyes and rugged good looks, he died in Lyme. He was not 93. He was 20 years forgotten.

Simon Michael Bessie is the reason that you enjoy such great literary pop cultural references. He wrote Jazz Journalism. He tried to get great injustices told. Like the freeing of Vladimir Bukovsky, another man you haven't heard about.

In 1971, in The New York Review of Books, He cosigned and petitioned this letter to the editors.
"We are writers and publishers who are deeply concerned that the Moscow poet and human rights advocate Vladimir Bukovsky is being confined under prison camp conditions which, in view of his state of health, gravely endanger his life."

Bukovsky risked his life in 1971 to get several hundred pages documents to the United States to show the horrors political prisioners were experiencing as they were forced into concentration camps and mental institutions. For this, Bukovsky was subjected to the same horrors and treatment he described in the leaked reports because he "refused to recant his views."

His life for about twelve years was as follows. "He is confined in a punishment barracks, on greatly reduced rations, deprived of the right to have visits, mail, legal counsel, and medical treatment essential to his survival."

Bessie helped him emigrate gaining him the freedom, releasing one of the greatest voices for soviet human rights in his day and galvanizing forces dissent within Russia. He has become an influential figure helping to aid the rebuilding of the Post-Communist world, advocating for artistic freedom. Bessie helped him get there.

He called the Godfather garbage after publishing the authors first work. Mario Puzo is a great (LOVE HIM SO MUCH) writer. But one must wonder what might have been had gangsters not achieved a renewed status of 70s exploitation glory which eventually translated into 1990s-millennial retro cool. For one thing, Bulgaria's Murder Mystery writer, Georgi Stoev, an author patterning himself on Puzo's work, would still be alive. He died yesterday FYI.

The best thing he did was for journalist though was Jazz Journalism. He is the author of Jazz Journalism. The end all compendium of the daily news and tabloids. He saved and bound pages that might have been destroyed or lost on microfiche in obscure city libraries and other literary enclaves. He gave us a look at the flashy layouts and picture saturated headlines. The sensation and sultry. The new standard of news speak set by the lightly yellowed, roaring twenties epistles whose work has now been translated to sepia toned masterpieces of pre-war Hollywood sex, sin and death that try for Oscar season each year.

He printed the first version of online journalism. The Reporters and Stringers that gave in and formed public demand for interconnectedness and entertainment. And For this achievement, this culmination and keeping of the memory of Journalism's modern roots. I salute him.