February 12, 1997: Oppression, the next generation By Julie Light and Dennis Bernstein The Shadow (Jan-Feb 1997): | When Oliver North and the CIA were in the process of cutting a deal withcocaine traffickers to illegally fund the Nicaraguan contras in 1986,Dennis Bernstein was on top of the story, tracking the traffickers andattempting to hold the CIA accountable. His award-winningContragate/Undercurrents investigative radio show, co-produced with Robert Knight, featured thousands of hours of original material on the Iran-Contrascandal and related government abuses of power. In a May 23, 1987 front-page editorial in The Nation magazine, the lateNation writer, Andrew Kopkind, wrote in support of Bernstein's riskyinvestigations, "if the press cares as much about a government's betrayalof the public as it does about a man's infidelity to his wife, it shouldprotect [this] pioneer." The Village Voice told it readers: "If you want toknow the facts about this country's NSC/CIA shadow government and it's 'lowintensity' war on Nicaragua you can (1) wait for the New York times to beginto 'discover' them next summer or (2) listen to WBAI's Contragateprogram." In 1984, Bernstein was awarded the Art of Peace Award for hisNational Radio Production of The Road to Hiroshima. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
| In 1987, Bernsteinreceived the Jessie Meriton White Service Award in InternationalJournalism for "responsible, humane, path breaking, investigativeinternational journalism," from Friends World College, and a NationalFederation of Community Broadcasters Award . Between 1987 and 1996Bernstein was recognized over a half-dozen times by the National MediaGroup, Project Censored for his hard-hitting investigative reports on theissues of our time. Bernstein is also a trained educator. He has taught teens in the SouthBronx, Brooklyn and Harlem, how to report and produce for print and radio.The founder of the South Bronx Media Collective and Young Writers Radio Collective in the mid 1980's, Bernstein worked with teen parents anddrop-outs to create cutting edge radio and video documentaries. 12-GaugeEviction, by The South Bronx Media Collective, was a news breaking video thatdocumented the assassination/eviction of a 67 year old arthriticgrandmother, Eleanor Bumpers, because she was behind in her rent. It wasfeatured at the 1987 and 1988 American Film Institute Video Festival. Today, when Dennis Bernstein isn't tracking Newt and the New-Righters andBill Clinton's latest fund-raising scam, he's pursuing CIA dirtytricksters, white-supremacist church-burners and their high-level politicalassociates, and hard-core pentagon liars and the dirtiest cover-up ofthe decade: that hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians werewounded by chemical weapons during the war with Iraq. Bernstein's articles, essays, and poetry have appeared widely innewspapers, journals and magazines in this country and abroad. Hispublications have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, London Observer,Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, DallasTimes Herald, San Francisco Chronicle and S.F. Examiner, Cleveland PlainDealer, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, Japan Times, Village Voice,The Nation Magazine, Utne Reader, Mother Jones, The Progressive, TexasObserver, Spin Magazine, Vibe, New Age Journal, New York Quarterly, PulpSmith, Dark Horse and many others. Bernstein is also the author, with Laura Sidel, of The Savings and LoanScandal Trading Cards, Eclipse Books 1993, and The Friendly Dictators Trading Cards: 36 of America's Most Embarassing Allies, 1990 Eclipse Books.His collaborations with book artist Warren Lehrer included in 1987:A Study of Social Patterns, Narratives, Chants, Stories and Songs and in 1984: FRENCH FRIES: A Fast Food Murder Mystery with Warren Lehrer, VisualStudies Workshop (included in the Special Books Collection of The Louvre andThe New York Musem of Modern Art), and in 1980: Anne at 94, a musical with Biaja Teal,and Particles of Light, poems with woodcuts by Stan Kaplan, TortoisePress, 1980. Bernstein has held lectures and workshops at: Stanford University, University of California Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, CSU Sacramento, Sonoma, San Francisco, University of San Francisco, Mills College, Laney College, New York University Law School, Columbia University Graduate Center, Hunter College, Queens College, SUNY Purchase, RutgersUniversity, Fairleigh Dickinson, Hofstra University, SUNY Stony Brook, Friends World College, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Boston University, Visual Studies Workshop, Clark University, United Nations: United Methodist Seminars, Dia Art Foundation, and others. |
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