Asleep At The Wheel
Thursday, February 3rd, 2005Will Bunch points to an interesting article by Charles Lewis, of The Center For Public Integrity, which examines the role of investigative journalists in our democracy and finds their performance, of late, lacking. I was particularly interested in the notion that the that reality, as perceived by the public, is more often than not dictated by what the powers that be say, and that phenomenon is due, in part, to what Lewis describes as a crisis in journalism. Here are a few key paragraphs:
The line between truth and falsehood-between the facts and a veneer of verisimilitude-has become so blurred as to be indistinguishable. Increasingly, what the powers that be say has become the publicly perceived reality, simply because they say it is so.
Take the war in Iraq. According to national election polling, a majority of voters for George W. Bush believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and months earlier, more than half of the nation thought Saddam Hussein and Iraq had close ties to Al Qaeda or were directly involved in the attacks that brought down the World Trade Towers on September 11th. How could most Americans be so tragically misinformed, when official U.S. and international government investigations, widely reported by the news media, concluded otherwise?
Between 1999 and mid-2004, there were more than 700 specific utterances by George Bush or Dick Cheney mentioning Iraq, often banging the war drums in ominous tones; interestingly, there was not a single sentence explicitly linking Saddam Hussein to September 11. Instead, that was often slyly implied contextually. At the same time, with some notable exceptions such as Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, investigative news coverage before March 2003 of the Bush administration’s ramp-up to the war in Iraq was underwhelming, to say the least. Daily coverage of government policy pronouncements and rationales was largely uncritical, almost stenographic.
At a time in America’s history when discerning the truth is more elusive-and more essential-than ever, the mainstream news media seem increasingly incapable of playing their traditional watchdog role and digging out lies and inaccuracies.
Lewis goes on to discuss the politics of fear as employed by the Bush administration:
Since 9/11, the country has seen a historic, regressive shift in public accountability. Open-records laws nationwide have been rolled back more than 300 times-all in the name of national security. For the first time in U.S. history, the personal papers of past presidents now may only be released with White House approval. A Justice Department “leak” investigation of the White House regarding an Iraq war-related news story has degenerated into a full-fledged witch-hunt against the news media and the First Amendment, with reporters facing imprisonment if they don’t reveal their sources.
Against this backdrop, thousands of people have been interrogated by law enforcement officials and hundreds illegally detained-in many cases held for more than three years without any charges filed against them, their right to counsel and court review denied, the customary arrest information withheld. White House and other senior government officials have defended such policies (some of which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in June), as well as the physical and psychological abuse and torture of foreign prisoners, as essential to the “war on terror,” disregarding the Geneva Conventions and continuing to systematically violate human rights.
None of this is new but it’s not often stated so eloquently and it does bear repeating. Go read the whole thing.
