|
DAVE LINDORFF
Mainstream American Journalism: An Obituary
Watching Bill Moyers’ special marking his return to
PBS, Buying the War, I was struck by the stark contrast it demonstrated
between the yeoman work of then Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters
Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, and everybody else in what used to be
called the journalism profession.
It does no disservice to Landay and Strobel to say that there was nothing
particularly astounding about the work they did in exposing the Bush/Cheney
administration's lies and deceptions in the two-year campaign to put the
country at war against Iraq. As they explain to Moyers, they simply did what
any real reporter was supposed to do, going to sources they'd developed in
the military and intelligence community in Washington, talking on and off
the record with sources willing to tell the truth about what was going on,
digging up and actually critically reading documents like the UN inspectors’
reports on Iraq WMD inspections, and finally confronting the lying
warmongers in Congress and the administration for comment.
The amazing and disheartening thing revealed so clearly in Moyers'
excellent program is that almost nobody else was doing that kind of
nuts-and-bolts reporting in Washington or New York. The vaunted (and grossly
over-rated) Washington Post and New York Times, as Moyers explains, did have
a few reporters who did their jobs right, but they were sidelined by editors
who were afraid to let their stories get any attention, preferring instead
to reserve their front pages for the propaganda pieces churned out by the
likes of Judith Miller and Bob Woodward. Television, which was more of a
focus in the Moyers program, came off even worse. As CBS reporter Bob Simon
told him, senior management was actually afraid to run stories that exposed
the administration's lies for what they were. At MSNBC, we learn that senior
management, which was happy to put government apologists on air with no
balance, required that any administration or war critic be "balanced" with
at least two government shills.
All this was bad enough, but making it worse was the knowledge that nothing
has changed. The media have really not improved at all even after the
catastrophic results of their ethical and professional surrender during
2001-3--a four-year war that has cost over $1 trillion and that has killed
over half a million people, and a government that no longer can be called
constitutional-- have become evident.
There has been almost no honest reporting about the administration
efforts to gin up a new war against Iran. There has been little or no
coverage of the solid evidence of administration-directed efforts to steal
not just one but five national elections. There has been a virtual blackout
in the mainstream media on evidence suggesting administration foreknowledge
of the 9-11 attacks. There is almost no reporting on the actual impeachable
crimes of Bush and Cheney, or on the extraordinary grassroots campaign to
impeach these two constitutional criminals. (How many Americans, for
example, are aware that a federal district judge, in a case that pitted the
ACLU against the US Justice Department, ruled that the president had
committed a felony in ordering the National Security Agency to spy on
Americans' private communications without court warrants in violation of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or that the president has invalidated
and refused to enact all or part of 1200 laws passed by the Congress?)
Just on this last point, consider Rep. Dennis Kucinich's filing, last
Tuesday, of a bill of impeachment against Dick Cheney in the House of
Representatives. Clearly a historic event--the first concrete step towards
impeachment in the House in the new Democratic-led Congress--the bill, which
charges Cheney with lying about Iraq having WMDs, lying about a non-existent
link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and illegally threatening Iran
with an invasion (a crime under international, and US, law), went unreported
in the New York Times, supposedly the nation’s “newspaper of record.” As for
the Washington Post, the next day all it had was a sophomoric, pissy column
by Dana Milbank, which spent most of its verbiage belittling Kucinich’s
short stature and bad hairstyle. The nationwide demonstrations calling for
impeachment held in over 150 different cities across the country on Saturday
went unmentioned in Sunday's New York Times, though there was an article in
the Washington Post about the event at the Washington Monument in the
paper’s own city (it failed to mention that events, bigger and more
successful, actually, were going on elsewhere, too.)
When it comes to the mainstream corporate media, where the overwhelming
number of Americans obtain their information about what it happening in the
country and the world, journalism is dead. Its practitioners--my
professional colleagues and, sorry to say, many of my own Columbia
Journalism School classmates--have in effect become media zombies, going
through the motions of reporting but producing nothing like what journalism
was supposed to be.
American journalism (1735-2001) RIP.
BACK TO NEWSLINKS |
