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CounterPunch
February
18, 2003
War, Protest and the Press
The Failure
of American Journalism
by DAVE LINDORFF
The abject failure of the American journalistic
model--long worsening--has become depressingly apparent in the
run-up to what appears to be almost certain war with Iraq.
Although there are clear and rational
and compelling arguments being made against war both at home
and abroad by professional soldiers, seasoned diplomats and millions
of ordinary people, the American corporate media, both print
and electronic, have become virtual parrots of the Administration
line that war is necessary because Saddam Hussein is evil and
a clear threat to America.
If the administration's warning that
a terror strike was imminent and that Americans should all buy
plastic sheeting and duct tape to enable them to protect their
homes in the event of a gas or germ attack was akin to someone
shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, the resulting
panic stoked by the media's breathless and uncritical repeating
of that self-serving nonsense was like a gang of ushers echoing
the cry while goading theatergoers into a stampede for the exits.
Some critics of the media have blamed
this on a conspiracy--a conscious  desire on the part of the
corporate media to support a pro-corporate government agenda.
While there certainly is a commonality of interest, particularly
as the major media have fallen into the hands of just a few giant
corporate holding companies, there is something else at work
too. Ordinarily jaded and cynical journalists and their editors
seem of late to have entirely lost their grounding in reality.
Constrained for years by a tradition that requires them to remain
scrupulously "objective" and devoid of ideology, they
have allowed themselves to be manipulated into the role of little
more than purveyors of government press releases.
Standard American journalistic practice
calls for reporters to recount faithfully what they are told
by official sources, and then to go to the other side for comment.
But where war is concerned, the other side is perceived as "the
enemy," and is deemed not worthy of comment. Ordinarily,
the other easy source of critical comment on government pronouncements
and opinions would be the opposition party, but in this instance,
with a war in the offing, the Democrats (not much in the way
of opposition in any case), have become largely silent, afraid
of being labeled unpatriotic. That has left the Administration
with a free hand to present its case for war in Iraq in the corporate
media virtually without comment or criticism.
How different things are in the U.K.,
where newspapers are expected to have their own political viewpoints,
and where journalists are permitted, even expected to have opinions.
The Mirror, for example, was actually a sponsor of the giant
Feb. 15 peace march in London. Imagine The New York Times
as a sponsor of a political demonstration in New York!
Of course, the feigned disinterest and
neutrality of the American media is a fraud. Publications like
the Washington Post and the Times view themselves
as part of the ruling Establishment, and rarely if ever challenge
the policies of the government except in the margin. In this
case, whether to go to war is not a question that is even on
the table--only whether or not the U.S. should go it alone if
it cannot gain UN support.
As the Philadelphia Inquirer put
it in a page one news analysis the day after UN inspector Hans
Blix undermined President Bush's and Secretary of State Colin
Powell's plans to demand a Security Council war resolution by
reporting that in fact the inspections were making good progress:
"President Bush now faces an unpleasant choice. He must
decide whether to launch a final round of diplomacy aimed at
repairing the breach with many U.S. allies and thus winning broader
backing for war, or to abandon the United Nations, ignore global
opinion, and launch an invasion with whatever allies will follow."
There simply was no mention by the author
of a third choice: not going to war at all.
In its initial coverage of the demonstrations
the evening of Feb. 15, CNN actually focussed not on the numbers
(the AOL Time Warner network claimed, rather ludicrously and
without any attribution, that there had been only 100,000 protesters
in New York City), but on alleged violence, with a headline saying
"protesters get rowdy." In fact, despite the presence
of an army of police and as many as half a million protesters,
many of them angered that the city and the courts had conspired
to prevent them from reaching the UN, arrests numbered only two
dozen, mostly for the minor charge of "disorderly conduct."
Actually, in reading the coverage of the dramatic worldwide
protest against war the morning after, one could almost sense,
as they wrote of the hundreds of thousands of marchers and demonstrators
in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and the millions in
Europe and elsewhere around the world, some reporters' chafing
at the artificial yoke of "objectivity" under which
they have labored for months. Finally they could safely and honestly
quote some of the obvious arguments against the rush to war--the
inevitable wave of terrorism that would follow, the terrible
and unavoidable slaughter of innocents in Iraq, the unreality
of the Bush Administration's blitzkrieg fantasy, and the lack
of any pressing need to unseat Saddam Hussein, whose military
machine has withered.
All these are arguments against war the
media have known of for months, but as self-constrained as American
journalism has become, they can only get into print if someone
else besides a journalist says them. And under current practice,
even for a reporter to go to some university and seek out an
expert to articulate such anti-establishment points of view would
be seen as evidence of media bias--or worse, liberal bias. Only
when they have been spoken during a legitimate news event, such
as a demonstration, can the reporter safely purvey such contrarian
thoughts without risk of being labeled biased.
The public is ill-served by this tradition
of so-called "objectivity," but it all works beautifully
for those in power. If President Bush or one of his cabinet
secretaries says something, it is considered legitimate news,
and can be quoted without being challenged. Such statements,
though clearly political, are considered to be "facts."
In the same way, a police estimate for the number of people
at a demonstration, such as the Berlin police estimate of 500,000
protesters in Berlin, can go unchallenged in the New York
Times, but in the case of an estimate of 400,000 demonstrators
in New York, made by organizers, the reporter felt obliged add
a caveat. "Crowd estimates are often little more than politically
tinged guesses, and the police did not provide one," he
warned, but then added, "given the sea of faces extending
for more than a mile up First Avenue and the ancillary crowds
that were prevented from joining them, the claim did not appear
to be wildly improbable." (Actually, on page one, the Times
article by Robert McFadden said, without giving a source, that
there were 200,000 demonstrators in Berlin, only 40 percent of
the number reported by Alan Cowell in his story on page 20 of
the same edition.)
Like bloodied Christian penitents, the
media repeatedly flagellate themselves, citing polls that say
the public is losing respect for and confidence in the media.
Inevitably, the response to these polls is for editors to yank
even harder on the leashes constraining their reporters to the
"objective" reporting of stories. Yet this is precisely
why the American public has lost confidence in the mainstream
corporate media.
As the line between entertainment and
news has blurred, Americans, long adept at spotting snake-oil
salesmen and deconstructing advertising, have realized that they
are getting fed a line by the newsmedia. Their response has been
to tune it out, the same way they mute the sound during commercials.
Unfortunately, with so few mass media
sources of information available, that response has left the
public largely ignorant, and vulnerable to manipulation during
times of crisis.
This crisis in American journalism makes
alternative politics, like this week's global protests, and alternative
media, crucial for the development of any serious opposition
the government's plans for war, corporatism, and the assault
on civil liberties and democracy.
At the same time, serious committed journalists
in the U.S. need to begin a grassroots struggle in the media
workplace to challenge the paradigm that has turned them from
a Fourth Estate into little more than propagandists for the Establishment.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
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Colin
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Rep. Dennis
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The Whole World is Watching
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