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):

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”.

From the New York Times, March 17, 1968:

The operation is another American offensive to clear enemy pockets still threatening the cities. While two companies of United States soldiers moved in on the enemy force from two sides, heavy artillery barrages and armed helicopters were called in to pound the North Vietnamese soldiers.

Quoting one participant, a Colonel Frank Barker,

The combat assault went like clockwork. We had two entire companies on the ground in less than an hour.

That was My Lai, by the way, that they were journalizing about.

Lest we think things have changed, during the invasion of Iraq, seventeen marines died in friendly fire in one incident – a PR disaster. The Pentagon searched around for a cover story, a diversion for the leashed media, a doggy bone to toss to them to keep them away from a real story.

The result: The Ballad of Jessica Lynch.

Here’s American journalism at its unfortunate best … an AP story:

VIENNA – Iran accused the U.S. on Friday of using “forged documents” and relying on subterfuge to make its case that Tehran is trying to build a nuclear weapon, according to a confidential letter obtained by The Associated Press.

The eight-page letter — written by Iran’s chief envoy to the U.N. nuclear agency in Vienna — denounces Washington’s allegations against the Islamic Republic as “fabricated, baseless and false.” The letter does not specify what documents Iran is alleging were forged.

It also lashes out at Britain and France for “ill will and political motivation” in their dealings on Iran. …

Read the whole story here. What you will learn is that the U.S. claims to have smuggled a laptop computer out of Iran containing documents indicating that Iran is actively involved in developing nuclear weapons. Iran claims that the U.S is supplying forged documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The story’s author, William J.Kole, went to U.S. and French authorities, who were “not available for comment.” He then went to Britain’s foreign office, who said the accusations were not true.

Fair enough, we have the beginnings of a story here, with the AP actually reporting an allegation made by an Iranian official, which usually doesn’t happen. But it’s only the beginning, and unfortunately, also the end. There will be no attempts to uncover the documents or to follow up with Iranian officials who might have copies. Kole has done his job – he got the Iranian accusation, the denial. That’s the end, and not the beginning, of American journalism.

And the sad thing is that if you ask any journalist about this, he will tell you that Kole did his job – his only job, to get the he-said-and-then-he-said, and then to move on to the next story.

Sitting next to me on a bookshelf, standing out because of its sheer size, is Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie. I get a little teary-eyed when I think of the great journalists of our time. But then I remember that Sheehan and David Halberstam and Peter Arnett were exceptional for their time too – that the reason we remember their names today, and have forgotten all of the others, was that courageous journalism was as rare in the 1960’s as it is now.

Click here to watch Rachel Maddow’s interview of former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Or don’t. I don’t care. The point is that this so rare it ought to be on the front page of the newspaper, along with the California fires (which tend to happen on a more predictable fashion). An American journalist actually confronted an American government official, admittedly one who is out of power, but nonetheless there was a confrontation. Tim Russert spun in his grave.

(Someone please advise – how do you embed an NBC video?)

Maddow says during the interview that it was very obvious that Iraq was a “foregone conclusion”, and that dumping it now on the “spies”for giving them bad information disingenuous.

Ridge, of course, was grateful for her forthrightness, and will never go near the show again. In addition, Maddow’s continuing problem of getting government officials and conservatives on the show will only get worse. They don’t want confrontation, they don’t want hard questions. And the press obliges with distressing servitude.

MSNBC’s lineup of Olbermann, Maddow, and the blowhard Ed Schultz is an interesting contradiction in my scenario where media only presents us with right wingers and centrists (who often are presented as “liberals”), and no one from the left. Olbermann has found a niche and a voice, but I doubt his credentials. Shultz has come around lately, becoming more a progressive than an Obama-ite (on health care,anyway), and that is refreshing. Maddow is a genuine progressive, and has an hour of airtime to herself five days a week.

I’ve got to think about that. Our right wing media has let one slip through, much in the way that the Wall Street Journal allows Tom Frank 700 words each week. I’ll get back to you after I re-frame.

In the meantime, contrast the Maddow/Ridge interview with one of Dick Cheney by Chris Wallace. The only surprise there was that Wallace’s head appears on screen now and then, and that he wasn’t yelling out questions from below camera line as he went about his real business.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Bloggers are citizen journalists, and most of us are not very good at journalism. “Citizen” journalists distinguishes us from professional journalists, most of whom are not very good at journalism.

I once had an argument with David Crisp, and he gave me a what-for, to which I replied that the job of the journalists was simple: Go out and find out what powerful people are doing, and report back.

But many of them don’t see it that way. Instead, they see their role as mere conveyors of facts that are put out for our general interest. Since we are mere consumers of news, our opinions are of no consequence. Powerful person A says this, and powerful person B says this in reply. They get a quote from both sides, rewrite a press release, and keep secrets from us because they are insiders, and because they have so damned much integrity.

The result? The news. Oh yeah, and Michael Jackson died.

I know they lack integrity, because powerful people like their work. Washington insiders cannot say enough praising words about the wonderful Washington press corp. That ought to be a clue that something is very wrong. Also, the fact that they devote so much time to trivia like MJ indicates that they tend to concentrate on stories that least affect power.

I have come to believe that the kind of journalism we see, of the Russert/Brokaw/Gregory variety, exists as a grand cop-out. If a journalist wants to make a lot of money, he has to get friendly with power and redefine journalism to power’s liking. The human mind cannot live with open deceit, and so self-justifies by changing the definition of the job. No longer is the job of the journalist to investigate and search for truth, but rather to simply relay to us some (but not all) goings-on among the powerful. He is of them, and not of us. He’s doing us a favor. It’s top-down, undemocratic journalism.

Atticus Mullikin is an American expatriate living and working in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He wrote a interesting piece for the European Journalism Center’s Magazine center in late 2007. In it he talks about the epiphanic moment in the movie Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise’s character realizes that he is no more than a “shark in a suit”, and rewrites his company’s mission to be less about making lots of money and having many clients, and more about the people he represents. After he gets himself right in his own mind, he says “I am my father’s son again.”

Mullikin does not mention that Jerry Maguire loses his job as a result.

Mullikin’s epiphanic moment is to realize that “good journalism is a duty.” He talks about an early twentieth century debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey, where Lippman argued for top-down journalism: since ordinary people are not capable of making determinations on the complicated issues of the day, they need to follow leaders. The journalist’s job is to “manufacture consent”.

Dewey thought the opposite. He agreed about the capabilities of ordinary people on complex issues, but also thought “that citizens were capable of participating in Democratic government, and that journalism was a primary means to do this.”

So good journalism is about democratic governance, and journalism as it is done in most of the American media is about top-down rule. Says Mullikin:

Knowledge is power. In the United States, there is a struggle between conservatives and liberals, which I touched on in another article. That struggle is, respectively, between old world authoritarians and new world egalitarians, and the primary question is, as with journalism, are citizens capable of governing themselves or do they need to be controlled and guided by elites? It is a choice, really, between the democratic ideal and the Machiavellian “reality.”

So in my own crude way, when I told Crisp that his job was to find out what powerful people are doing and report back to us, I was unknowingly echoing Dewey, and advocating for democratic governance. I am a new world egalitarian, and all of the back-and-forth I enjoy so much with the Budge’s and Natelson’s and Swede’s is an age old clash between my egalitarianism and their authoritarianism – the top-down world.

Mullikin’s is a remarkably insightful article. Maybe a journalist or two will stumble upon it.

The American media is rife with stories and pictures of the hero’s welcome that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi received in Libya after his release from Scottish custody for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

The only thing missing is context. Unfortunately, that is typical of American journalism.

The Libyan people are happy to have Megrahi back because they believe him to be innocent. The Lockerbie bombing was probably the result of a bomb put on the plane by Iranians, and that in response the the American shoot-down of an Iranian jet in 1988. It is the “blowback” context that Americans rejected. To deflect attention away from American activities, a Libyan was put up as a scapegoat. Hence suspicions surround the original trial, including bribing of a key witness. It appears as though Megrahi was railroaded. He has never confessed to the crime, and insists on his innocence to this day. A new witness came forth in 2008 to protest his innocence.

Read more here, here and here. And “The Lockerbie Case” is a fascinating blog that has tracked all of the evidence surrounding the tragic incident. American names keep popping up.

It’s a fascinating story from many standpoints – how Lockerbie is part of terror history, but the Americans shooting down the Iranian airliner that same year is not; how the mere denial of deliberate act by American officials in the Vincennes incident satisfies American journalists, but how world wide pleas and suspicions don’t get the slightest rise out of them.

This I know: On this incident, the Libyan people are better informed than the Americans. Proably about many other things as well.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them — as though they do what he did — even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: “the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are.”
Glenn Greenwald

“Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, Americans have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television. Never before in history has a nation allowed its citizens to view uncensored scenes of combat, destruction and atrocities in their living rooms, in living color. Since television has become the principal-and most believed-source of news for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war on television was instrumental in shaping public opinion. It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric of television executives, to say that television, showing the terrible truth of the war, caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war. This had also been the dominant view of those governing the nation during the war years. Depending on whether the appraisal has come from hawk or dove, television has thus been either blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the American public with the war.” (85)

Throughout this period, furthermore, “television coverage focused almost exclusively on the American effort.” There were few interviews with GVN military or civilian leaders,, “and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were almost nonexistent on American television newscasts.”
Chomsky/Herman, Manufacturing Consent

Torture wouldn’t exist in our countries if it weren’t effective; formal democracy would continue if it could be guaranteed not to get out of the hands of those that hold power. (Eduardo Galeano)

The events in Iran are encouraging, with caveats:

One, we will not know for years, perhaps decades, how much of a role the U.S. and Britain have played in fomenting the crisis. If it is of Western making, the ends are assuredly not democratic.

Secondly, even if it is a true democratic movement, it will exist only in the shadow of a monster – the U.S. has surrounded Iran will military bases and fire capability. They are perpetually threatened, and such threats usually result in oppressive governments to “protect” the population. (Example: The U.S. has been threatening Cuba for decades, the Cubans rely on oppressive government to protect them from dangers, real and imagined. The U.S. then complains that Cuba is not “democratic” enough for us. A true democratic movement in Iran will taste similar blatant hypocrisy.)

I’ve listened to Obama’s words on the subject. If actual policy were conveyed by a mouthpiece, it would be encouraging. But remember, this mouthpiece serves an apparatus that invaded a neighbor of Iran’s, murdered half a million (at least) of its civilians. This apparatus installed a “democratic” regime, but only in the sense envisioned by Galeano above – that if it falls under the control of our power centers, people are allowed to vote among various choices we offer them. If not under our control, we will attack.

I used to put up a piece here on the anniversary of 9/11 called “September 11, 1973” to commemorate the overthrow of the democratic government of Chile by the United States. We cherish our democracy here, hold it up as an example for the rest of the world, but when others enact true democratic reforms of a type that we ourselves are not allowed to experience, we trample them.

Iran is on a precipice – many of their people remember what it was like before 1979, when a U.S. toady, the Shah, ruled, and didn’t even bother with sham democracy, as they have now.

Iran, not unlike Venezuela, has a chance to break free of both of local Mullahs foreign thugs alike. There is always hope. If it is truly a democratic break, we will isolate and attack. If it is a for-show only government that takes power, if it has cut a deal in advance with us, then the country will be submerged yet again in an abyss of darkness. Let us pray.

—-

The Daily Show has done some remarkable work by sending correspndent Jason Jones to Iran. (See here, here, and here.) Their goal was comedic, but as in so many countries under oppressive rule, the best outlet for political protests is by means of comedians and court jesters.

Jones has been exposed to everyday Iranians, and found them kind and intelligent. To contrast this, he interviewed Americans in Times Square, asking them basic questions about our government. It’s pathetic. It’s a comedy show, of course, and so exaggerates for effect, but Jay Leno made mockery of this same phenomenon by asking ordinary Americans very basic questions about news and government. It was painful.

A very large percentage of us are pathetically ignorant. We on the blogs are better informed, but let’s not kid ourselves that ordinary everyday Americans are in any way affected by anything but the highest and most visible news. They know we have a new president, that there is turmoil in Iran, and are fed images of various demons to keep their minds right. Beneath awareness of only the most painfully obvious events dangled before them is mush. The American people are so easily manipulated that it doesn’t even take skilled propagandists anymore, as it did prior to World War I.

We are not a functioning democracy – we don’t have an educated citizenry, our institutions are controlled by powerful moneyed interests. There is a rumbling of discontent, as most of us understand that our health care system doesn’t work very well and is too expensive, and that international cooperation is a good thing. We all know this on some level, but we have no effective mechanism for translation of those impulses to government policy. We have only the comedians, who these days deliver our real news.

I’ll take one Daily Show over ten Russert’s, and fifty Brokaw’s, or a thousand of the vapid pretty faces that mock us from their perches as CNN and Fox and all the others.