Headcase - Nixon or Bush?
As the White House sickens, so do the media
“Doonesbury” cartoonist Gary Trudeau recently told an interviewer something that perfectly describes my own feeling when I sit down to write this column every week.
“My belief that this is the most reckless president in our history has overwhelmed me creatively,” he told a Boston Globe reporter. “I wake up thinking about the astonishing amount of harm these people have done to our national interest on every level, and it takes a tremendous act of will not to write about it every day. I’ve never felt that way before — not even during Nixon’s run.”
Ralph Nader expressed the same sentiment but differently in a recent NPR interview. He said he almost feels nostalgic for Nixon. It’s true that George Bush’s lies make Nixon’s now seem trivial. But those of us who witnessed the Nixon drama notice something almost as disturbing as the presidential prevarication itself.
I’m talking about the difference in the media’s reporting. Oh, I know that the media were deeply divided on the gravity of Nixon’s crime. And I well remember my Republican parents grousing about the “liberal media” back then too and complaining about the use of an anonymous source, “Deep Throat,” in the reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. But I do not remember the bald revision of reality — the complicity in lying, either intentional or through laziness — that characterizes the media today. And I don’t remember staunch Republicans refusing to acknowledge reality when the smoking gun of Nixon’s crime was hurled on the table.
The New York Times issued a milk-toast mea culpa in May, admitting that it had failed to adequately question the White House’s claims during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. While the right continues to squawk that the media is dominated by liberals, the Times admitted that it printed as fact claims that were spoon-fed to its reporters by right-wing propagandists. Of course, the Times was not motivated to issue this nonetheless surprising self-rebuke until its main source, Ahmad Chalabi, fell from grace along with his claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Nor did the Times name the guiltiest reporter, Judith Miller. That failure and its decision to take no action against any of the editors who violated the first rule of journalism — to print the truth, not just what they were told — doesn’t say much for the paper’s credibility.
The Times case is one of negligence aggravated by paranoia about being characterized as liberal. Elsewhere, one finds lying openly in service to the right-wing agenda. I would be most happy to entertain evidence of the left actually engaging in this kind of behavior to a significant degree — write me if you have evidence — but I simply don’t see it. (And, no, I don’t regard Michael Moore’s movies, which are like satirical editorial cartoons, as nonfactual.) Indeed, my recent column about the unmerited sanctification of Ronald Reagan produced several e-mails in which the writers characterized my statement of facts as opinions. I don’t know how to respond to a claim that I’m expressing an opinion when I write that Reagan’s popularity polled consistently lower than Bill Clinton’s, despite the media’s repetitive claim that the Gipper was America’s most popular president in recent history.
It is, of course, on talk radio where facts are most often manufactured in service to the right. A new website, mediamatters.org, is infuriating Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly with its daily exposures of their lying. Hannity, for example, continues to repeat the claim that former President Bill Clinton refused an offer from Sudan to turn over Osama bin Laden to the U.S. in 1996, even though the 9/11 Commission found no “reliable evidence to support” the claim that Sudan made such an offer.
The invention of fact also involves ad hominem attacks. O’Reilly, for example, recently called columnist Molly Ivins a socialist, and branded author and historian Eric Alterman a “confidant of Castro” (even though Alterman has signed an anti-Castro petition). O’Reilly, under threat of a lawsuit, had to back down on both claims. I was amused that in one letter I received about my Reagan column, the writer said that he was particularly disgusted with leftist name calling — after calling me a hypocrite in an earlier paragraph.
Like many people of my generation, I was inspired to a career in journalism by the Watergate reporting. I bounced between mainstream and alternative media, actually spending a year writing a column on media in the late ’70s. By the beginning of the ’90s, it had become clear to me that I no longer wanted to make media my full-time work. It doesn’t matter where you work. As media becomes more corporate, every reporter and editor feels the enormous pressure not to rock the boat and that, in turn, has caused the profession to attract less inquisitive, less aggressive types. Were it not for the Internet and its rigorous monitoring of media, I believe most of the press would even more resemble a giant house organ for the White House.