There isn’t much left of journalism in the United States – there are still those who chronicle events, noting that party A said this, while party B countered with this. But there are very few left who carry forward the trade of an aging Seymour Hersh – to find out what powerful people are doing, and report back to us.
Hersh is regularly derided on high for his work. I suspect he is even used by the powerful as a source from which false rumors can be floated and misinformation spread. But his instincts are good, and the craft that he practices, journalism, is an honorable one.
So, as we polarize into various blogging spheres and news sources of choice, it doesn’t hurt to lament about what journalism should be, how it was once practiced, and what it will someday be again.
Journalists these days measure their performance in terms of objectivity. If public official A says that for the sake of science and future scientists, evolution and biology ought to be taught, in our schools, the news story must also cite source B, who says that creationism is a valid scientific pursuit that ought to be taught. That source B is full of it and knee deep in mythology – no objective journalist would say such a thing. That would be unprofessional.
Journalists who weigh in on the worthiness of one position over another can be excoriated for lack of professionalism. Some are allowed to write opinion pieces, clearly labeled as such, as finally having their say, properly placed on the opinion page or clearly labeled as such. But most carp to the he-said-she-said mode, and keep their opinions to themselves.
It’s a tough way to live. I see the result most clearly in television journalism, where we get airheads in suits weighing in with gravitas on the important issues of the day, blithely repeating what powerful people say, sometimes giving both sides if both sides are considered worthy. “Democrat A says such and such, and Republican B says something opposite! We’ll have them both on Sunday, because we are balanced.”
Rarely is a progressive voice heard, never a Chomsky or Finkelstein, regardless of credentials. Oddly, right wing sources, like Coulter and Buchanan, Will and Malkin and Noonan seem to have ample exposure. Ed Abbey wondered about similar circumstances in his time in his essay “The Writer’s Credo”:
Like Huckleberry Finn, the American writer must make the choice, sooner or later, between serving the powerful few or the disorganized many, the institutions of domination or the spontaneous, instinctive, natural drive for human liberation. The choice is not so easy as my loaded phrases make it seem: to serve the powerful leads to financial rewards, public approval and official honors, your picture on the cover of Time or Newsweek (or Pravda or Izvestia) and the eventual invitation to the White House (or Kremlin) dinner; to oppose the powerful creates difficulties, subjects you to abuse and scorn, leads often -as in the interesting case of Noam Chomsky, for example – to what we call the silent treatment in the literary press: your books are not reviewed; your views and reviews no longer appear in the New York Times or New York Review of Books.
The choice professional journalists face is not one I envy. It’s not unlike that faced by the meek accountants of Enron – to go along or to go elsewhere. The choice is to square off with power, or to make a living and perform a craft. Most choose to have a life. They thereby internalize the contradictions, and live in cognitive dissonance. It is so ….. American.
Journalist Chris Hedges talked about this in and interview with Bob McChesney recently (link here, scroll down to August 30, 2009):
The whole notion of objectivity … is one that very rarely works. I suppose a very narrow kind of reporting where there are clearly two discernible sides, which almost never happens, possibly. But it’s a disaster when you’re reporting on those who are being silenced or oppressed, and the oppressor, because you elevate the oppressor to the same moral level as the oppressed.
Objectivity, by the way, was created at the end of nineteenth century by newspaper owners who previously had taken strong positions or advocated for the rights within their communities as a way of attracting advertisers across the political spectrum. And essentially what they did was wash their hands of moral responsibility.
So if you look at the way, for instance, the New York Times covered lynching in the South, and I think roughly between 1870 and 1920, about four thousand African Americans were burned, beaten, mutilated, hung – the Times, to give balance, would say it was mob violence. But these African American men prey on white women, and they rape white women.
Well it turns out we know that this is completely untrue, that these were fabricated charges. And so the paper, in its editorials, would write not about public lynching but the proclivity – and this is an actual quote – the proclivity of Negros to prey on white women is also a crime and a capital crime and so the state should carry out the punishment, i.e., the state should do the lynching.
OK, that’s balance. Look at the coverage of the Palestinians, where in a recent story in the New York Times, the reporters went into a village that had been decimated by the Israelis in the twenty-two day bombing off Gaza, the assault on Gaza, and quoted eyewitnesses who were there and who had suffered. And every other paragraph as an Israeli spokesman who hadn’t been there refuting it and making charges like – well, you know Hamas uses children as human shields and all this kind of stuff.
In essence, it’s just an updated version of the lynching. the Palestinians have just become “the new Negros”.
You see it in the health care debate. The parameters by which objectivity are defined are ones that often exclude, usually almost always exclude – the powerless, those who don’t have the kind of money to advertise like the pharmaceuticals and the for-profit health care industry.
But those doctors and patients who suffer at the hands of these institutions quite literally make their money off of human suffering and deaths. 20,000 Americans in this country died last year because they couldn’t afford proper medical care.
So objectivity is a creed that was created by newspaper publishers and owners to make money, worked quite effectively to make money. It often crippled effective journalism. The great journalists of the south were not the people Alex Jones [referring to Jones’ book “Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy”] holds up at his family newspaper, but the abolitionists and those who were printing these sort of underground sheets which, in the South during slavery, could be punishable by death. Very courageous figures, but of course they couldn’t make money. But they practiced real journalism.
Hedges covered conflicts in the Middle East, unescorted and boots on the ground, and once reported (in Harpers I believe – the piece has long since been taken down) that he had personally witnessed Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children, “for sport”. Unprofessional. He should have gotten an opinion from a highly placed Israeli official saying that the “children” were really just human shields.
And so we have American journalism, obsequious to power, self-adulatory and self-important. They give more awards to one another than at a grade school track meet. The meeker the journalist, the greater the honor bestowed upon them by the powerful. To project gravitas while lying, look credible while groveling … Walter Cronkite, Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw – great journalists in the American tradition.
Abbey:
What is both necessary and sufficient …is to have faith in the evidence of your senses and in your common sense. To be true to your innate sense of justice…”
To be free. To do more than gasp for air and survive in a profession that demands submission. To be more than David Barsamian’s phrase and book title, “Stenographers to Power”.
Piece of Mindful 