Dave Lindorff: American Journalism: An Obituary

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Dave Lindorff

Watching Bill Moyers' special on his return to PBS, "Buying the War," I was struck by the stark contrast 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 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 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 such as the UN inspectors' reports on Iraq WMD inspections, and finally confronting the lying officials for comment.

The amazing and disheartening thing is that almost nobody else was doing that kind of nuts-and-bolts reporting in Washington or New York. The vaunted and grossly overrated Washington Post and The New York Times, as Moyers shows, 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, fares even worse. As CBS reporter Bob Simon said, 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 2001-2003 became 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 of 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 U.S. Justice Department, ruled that the president had committed a felony in ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans' communications without court warrants in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or that the president has invalidated all or part of 1,200 laws passed by Congress?)

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 moment - 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 U.S. 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 time 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 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 zombies, going through the motions but producing nothing like what journalism was supposed to be.

American journalism (1735-2001) RIP.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Bookmark/Search this post with:

buzzflash | delicious | digg | technorati