Letters to the Editor
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What's Worse--The Journalists Who DID Get Things Right Stay Silent
After the Downing Street Memo story broke, I went back and interviewed a couple of USA Today reporters who collaborated on one of the best articles written during this period--a first anniversary story on Sept 11, 2002. It was all about how the Bush Administration had decided to go to war with Iraq within weeks of 9/11--and how there was no formal decision-making process, that it just happened by osmosis:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-iraq-war_x.htm
Lede paragraph:
President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.
They had some unidentified sources, of course. But they also had Condi Rice handing them a smoking gun:
The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."
"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."
It was an incredible piece of reporting. It wasn't a stand-alone, either. Gannet may not have been quite even with Knight-Ridder, but they were close in terms of critical reporting throughout this period, as one of the reporters I interviewed reminded me.
Now here's point number one. Unlike Knight-Ridder, USA Today gives Gannet a national platform. Once this story was published--on the anniversary of 9/11, no less, it was common knowledge that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made in late 2001. This became public knoweldge a month before Congress voted to give Bush authority to invade. Yet, everyone pretended--and continues to pretend to this day--that (A) Bush really hadn't made up his mind yet about invading Iraq and (B) Congress had no idea Bush was going to go to war no matter what.
These are not minor points. They are central structuring assumptions underlying the whole mainstream discourse about the war. If there's one thing one cannot do and be considered a "serious" person, its to claim that the whole Bush sales job on Iraq was precisely what Andrew Card said it was in August, 2002: a sales job.
This is, in fact, a deeply intersecting point to the one that Glenn is making. The atrocious reporting at the time was both premised on and enabling of accepting the lie that the sales job was not a sales job at all, but the only prudent course of action given what the Bush Administration knew and what it believed about the world.
Now to point number two: I asked the USA Today reporter who spoke to me the longest if they were going to revisit their earlier reporting, in light of the Downing Street Memo, which opened up a whole new line of evidence in support of their earlier reporting. She told me, "no." She said--echoing perfectly the conventional wisdom of everyone else who would even acknowledge the Downing Street Memo at the time--that it was "an old story," and that they had no plans at all to write about it, or investigate further on their own. She differed with her colleagues only in thinking that it was significant, since it bolstered the reporting her team had done. But she didn't think it was a matter of concern for journalists anymore. Instead, it was something to be "left to the historians."
Now I must say that I found this inteview nothing short of amazing. Despite having done work that was directly in opposition to the NYT and the rest of the Beltway-centric media, and despite having been proven 100% right, she then proceeded to repeat the same, seemingly pre-fab soundbites--"an old story" "leave it to the historians"--that one would hear from the worst offenders, if one managed to get them on the ropes.
Needless to say, this experience was powerful piece of evidence that Glenn is 100% correct. If even those who didn't drink the kool aid won't look back critically at the kool aid drinking, then how can we expect the kool aid drinkers to do so?
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Preaching to the choir
The greatest failing of all progressive journalism and activism is preaching to the choir. We do it again and again and again. Gary needs to re-write his story so that it will persuade someone who doesn't already believe him. It's not that he's not right, it's that he starts from certain valid assumptions that mark the difference between those who are already deeply suspicious of the current regime and that which emanates from its flunkies, and those who think things are a mess, but are not at all persuaded that it has been aided by a systematic failing of the press to be anything but supine consumers of administration pronouncements about aluminum tubes, yellow cake, US Attorney firing patterns and practices, voter fraud as an ongoing 'problem', etc., etc., etc. We have to do BETTER, and not just speak the shorthand we speak to each other, but be ready to persuade those who haven't been paying much attention up until now.
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Do Corporate Controllers Have the Sense That We Do?
"The point I was trying to make is that corporations, by their very nature, are going to go where the money is. If there's money to be made pointing out how corrupt the administration is and how the war was started with a pack of lies, then someone will step in to fill the void. Oh wait a minute, did I say that Viacom owns the Comedy Channel?"
Again, I find it remarkable that there is such a remarkable degree of consistency in how the US' primarily corporate news media fall so evenly on the side of power and the hawks whenever hawkish foreign policies are proposed, and seem to only come out with hard skepticism & genuine criticism once those policies have gone bad.
Surely, then, at some time, at some point, there should have been some "money" in going against the hawkish policies.
But perhaps it's the case that some of the people who invest in, run, and otherwise control corporations are just as smart as you and I. They are perhaps just as perceptive as people like Ralph Reed, or Karl Rove, or we liberal bloggers, who are able to simultaneously look at issues strategically for short and long term consequences.
It would be a truly bizarre occurrence in human history if the U.S. alone would have developed a culture with enormous amounts of concentrated economic and governmental power, yet somehow no subtle infrastructure by which the wealthiest and most powerful are able to perceive and when possible influence events to their interests. Either we dismiss such a normal, natural societal occurrence as 'conspiracy theory' or some other ideologically-flavored term, or we somehow carry on the tradition of magical American exceptionalism, in which the kinds of things we know to have shaped history for every other society just hasn't happened here.
It would be a strange and bizarre thing, then, if by chance the most concentrated media and news media system on the planet developed without any way of hedging its bets so that in the long term, the content flowing out of that system failed to promote both the short and long-term interests of that system, which is also to say the recipients of the benefits of that system.
But I don't want to get into that, because there are certainly plenty of people, both those who like and those who don't like the power of corporations, who have studied and analyzed the subtle workings of such power in the USA.
We can't be afraid of seeing systematic answers when they're staring us in the face.
We can go on and on about complexity, but then once again are we just going to stand around and act all shocked and surprised again when as a whole the news media once again collapse, fall, fail to do its job at the next giant initiation of a hawkish foreign policy?
Are we going to wonder in a confused fashion why it is that the overall coverage we see undermines apparently objective facts and analyses regarding any domestic policies which seem both populist and popular?
And "where the money is" is not just where consumers put the money -- it's where investors, partner corporations, and advertisers put the money, which is a lot more influential, due to its tight control than consumer's money. Not to mention the social outlook and calculated self-interest by the most influential executives and individual or corporate investors in a news corporation.
The money which comes from subscribing to a newspaper is, influentially-speaking, a hill of beans to a newspaper, because all it does is serve to prove to advertisers & backers that X number of eyes are possibly looking at the paper or web page. A million of us might begin to just be noticed versus the influence of one Archer Daniels Midlands.
Again, though, even if no one is even slightly interested in these comments on how corporations may or may not work in the USA, we are still left to explain why the giant errors and failures and collapses which concern us in the major news media trend in such a predictable fashion.