Journalism Under Fire

[Guest guest]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/journalism_under_fire.php

 

 

Journalism Under Fire

September 17, 2004

 

 

 

Part biography, part reprimand, part love letter to the promise of his

profession—this speech, given by Bill Moyers at a Society of

Professional Journalists conference on Sept. 11, 2004, will be

referred to for years to come by those who are worried about the state

of journalism. It's a true classic: " I believe democracy requires `a

sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in

us to tell them what we can about how the world really works. "

 

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist currently hosting the PBS

program Now With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president of the

Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial support

to TomPaine.com.

 

Thank you for inviting me to share this occasion with you. Three

months from now I will be retiring from active journalism and I cannot

imagine a better turn into the home stretch than this morning with you.

 

My life in journalism began 54 years ago, on my 16th birthday, in the

summer before my junior year in high school, when I went to work as a

cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger in the East Texas town of

20,000 where I had grown up. Early on, I got one of those lucky breaks

that define a life's course. Some of the old timers were sick or on

vacation and Spencer Jones, the managing editor, assigned me to help

cover the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in town refused to pay

the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They

argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was

taxation without representation, and that—here's my favorite

part— " requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring

us to collect the garbage. " They hired a lawyer—Martin Dies, the

former Congressman notorious for his work as head of the House

Committee on Un-American Activities—but to no avail. The women wound

up holding their noses and paying the tax. In the meantime the

Associated Press had picked up our coverage and turned the rebellion

into a national story. One day after it was all over, the managing

editor called me over and pointed to the ticker beside his desk.

Moving across the wire was a " Notice to the Editor " citing one Bill

Moyers and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the

rebellion. I was hooked.

 

Looking back on that experience and all that followed, I often think

of what Joseph Lelyveld told aspiring young journalists when he was

executive editor of the New York Times . " You can never know how a

life in journalism will turn out, " he said. " Decide that you want to

be a scholar, a lawyer, or a doctor…and your path to the grave is

pretty well laid out before you. Decide that you want to enter our

rather less reputable line of work and you set off on a route that can

sometimes seem to be nothing but diversions, switchbacks and a life of

surprises…with the constant temptation to keep reinventing yourself. "

 

So I have. My path led me on to graduate school, a detour through

seminary, then to LBJ's side in Washington, and, from there, through

circumstances so convulted I still haven't figured them out, back to

journalism, first at Newsday and then the big leap from print to

television, to PBS and CBS and back again—just one more of those

vagrant journalistic souls who, intoxicated with the moment is always

looking for the next high: the lead not yet written, the picture not

yet taken, the story not yet told.

 

It took me awhile after I left government to get my footing back in

journalism. I had to learn all over again that what's important for

the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are

to reality. I've seen plenty of reality. Journalism took me to

famine and revolution in Africa and to war in Central America; it took

me to the bedside of the dying and delivery rooms of the newborn. It

took me into the lives of inner-city families in Newark and

working-class families in Milwaukee struggling to find their place in

the new global economy. CBS News paid me richly to put in my two

cents worth on just about anything that happened on a given day. As a

documentary journalist I've explored everything from the power of

money in politics to how to make a poem. I've investigated the abuse

of power in the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and the unanswered

questions of 9/11. I've delved into the " Mystery of Chi " in Chinese

traditional medicine as well as the miracle that empowered a one-time

slave trader to write the hymn, " Amazing Grace. " Journalism has been

a continuing course in adult education—my own; other people paid the

tuition and travel, and I've never really had to grow up and get a day

job. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I've enjoyed the

company of colleagues as good as they come, who kept inspiring me to

try harder.

 

They helped me relearn another of journalism's basic lessons. The

job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide

the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it

in the first place. Unless you're willing to fight and refight the

same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work

with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it

right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of " bias, " or,

these days, even a point of view, there's no use even trying. You have

to love it, and I do. I remember what Izzy Stone said about this.

For years he was America's premier independent journalist, bringing

down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for

publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone's Weekly the

government's lies and contradictions culled from the government's own

official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone

said: " I have so much fun I ought to be arrested. "

 

That's how I felt 25 five years ago when my colleague Sherry Jones and

I produced the first documentary ever about the purchase of government

favors by political action committees. When we unfurled across the

Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign

contributions to every member of Congress, there was a loud outcry,

including from several politicians who had been allies just a few

years earlier when I worked at the White House.

 

I loved it, too, when Sherry and I connected the dots behind the

Iran-Contra scandal. That documentary sent the right-wing posse in

Washington running indignantly to congressional supporters of public

television who accused PBS of committing— horrors!— journalism right

on the air.

 

While everyone else was all over the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio,

Sherry and I took after Washington's other scandal of the time— the

unbridled and illegal fundraising by Democrats in the campaign of

1996. This time it was Democrats who wanted me arrested.

 

But taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen

if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington. When my

colleagues and I started looking into the subject of pesticides and

food for a Frontline documentary, my producer Marty Koughan learned

that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the

findings of a National Academy of Sciences study on the effects of

pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary,

the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script—we still

aren't certain how—and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign

to discredit our broadcast before it aired. Television reviewers and

editorial page editors were flooded in advance with pro-industry

propaganda. There was a whispering campaign. A Washington Post

columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it

aired—without even having seen it—and later confessed to me that the

dirt had been supplied by a top lobbyist for the chemical industry.

Some public television managers across the country were so unnerved by

the blitz of dis-information they received from the industry that

before the documentary had even aired, they protested to PBS with

letters prepared by the industry.

 

Here's what most perplexed us: Eight days before the broadcast, the

American Cancer Society—an organization that in no way figured in our

story—sent to its three thousand local chapters a " critique " of the

unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the

dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American

Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary

that it had not seen, that had not aired, and that did not claim what

the society alleged? An enterprising reporter in town named Sheila

Kaplan looked into these questions for Legal Times and discovered that

a public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical

companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society.

The firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that

" charitable " work to persuade the compliant communications staff at

the Society to distribute some harsh talking points about the

documentary— talking points that had been supplied by, but not

attributed to, the public relations firm.

 

Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to

tarnish the journalism before it aired; including right-wing front

groups who railed against what they called " junk science on PBS " and

demanded Congress pull the plug on public television. PBS stood firm.

The documentary aired, the journalism held up, and the National

Academy of Sciences felt liberated to release the study that the

industry had tried to demean.

 

They never give up. Sherry and I spent more than a year working on

another documentary called Trade Secrets , based on revelations—found

in the industry's archives—that big chemical companies had

deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information

about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry

documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or

point of view. And they portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a

major American industry, revealing that we live under a regulatory

system designed by the industry itself. If the public and government

regulators had known over the years what the industry was keeping

secret about the health risks of its products, America's laws and

regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more

protective of human health than they were.

 

Hoping to keep us from airing those secrets, the industry hired a

public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives

and former CIA, FBI, and drug enforcement officers to conduct

investigations for corporations. One of the company's founders was on

record as saying that sometimes corporations need to resort to

unconventional resources, including " using deceit " , to defend

themselves. Given the scurrilous underground campaign that was

conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an

understatement. Not only was there the vicious campaign directed at

me personally, but once again pressure was brought to bear on PBS

through industry allies in Congress. PBS stood firm, the documentary

aired, and a year later the National Academy of Television Arts and

Sciences awarded Trade Secrets an Emmy for outstanding investigative

journalism.

 

I've gone on like this not to regale you with old war tales but to

get to a story that is the one thing I hope you might remember from

our time together this morning. John Henry Faulk told me this story.

Most of you are too young to remember John Henry—a wonderful

raconteur, entertainer, and a popular host on CBS Radio back when

radio was in its prime. But those were days of paranoia and

red-baiting—the McCarthy era—and the right-wing sleaze merchants went

to work on John Henry with outlandish accusations that he was a

communist. A fearful CBS refused to rehire him and John Henry went

home to Texas to live out his days. He won a famous libel suit against

his accusers and wrote a classic book about those events and the

meaning of the First Amendment. In an interview I did with him

shortly before his death a dozen years ago, John Henry told the story

of how he and friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken house

when they were about 12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the

top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John

Henry told it to me, " All the frontier courage drained out our

heels—actually it trickled down our overall legs—and Boots and I made

a new door through the henhouse wall. " His momma came out and,

learning what the fuss was about, said to Boots and John Henry: " Don't

you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't hurt you. " And

Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, " Yes,

Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it'll cause

you to hurt yourself. " John Henry Faulk told me that's a lesson he

never forgot. It's a good one for any journalist to tuck away and call

on when journalism is under fire.

 

Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize,

analyze and present information people need to know in order to make

sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional

task—John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there

are " no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no

universally accepted set of standards. " Maybe so. But I think that

what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of

which the public is aware only when we violate it—think Jayson Blair,

Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and

now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism

" is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps

them determine what they should do about it. " So good newsrooms " are

marinated in ethical conversations…What should this lead say? What I

should I tell that source? " We practice this craft inside " concentric

rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues,

our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community " —and we

function under a system of values " in which we try to understand and

reconcile strong competing claims. " Our obligation is to sift

patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of

affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation

of the truth—and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice.

 

It's never been easy, and it's getting harder. For more reasons then

you can shake a stick at.

 

One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and

analyze. My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my

pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about

the environment; his bestseller The End of Nature carried on where

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring left off. Recently in Mother Jones,

Bill described how the problems we cover—conventional, manageable

problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime—may be about to

convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations. He puts it this way: If

you don't have a job, " that's a problem, and unemployment is a

problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the

Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But

millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a

situation; it's not clear what, if anything, the system can do to turn

it around. " Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill

McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment.

While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of

vandalism against our air, water, forests and deserts, were we to

change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What

won't go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum—the

greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about

it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be

releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the

Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield

abrupt—and overwhelming—changes, the kind of climate change that

threatens civilization. How do we journalists get a handle on

something of that enormity?

 

Or on ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the

delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the

mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to

smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number

One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash

hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the

possibility that a close election in November could turn on several

million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index?

That's what I said—the Rapture Index; Google it and you will

understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12

volumes of the " Left Behind " series that have earned multi-millions of

dollars for their co-authors, who, earlier this year, completed a

triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George

W. Bush's armor of the Lord. These true believers to a

fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of

immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and

wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally

true.

 

According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when

certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a

state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its " biblical lands; "

when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the

Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the

Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the

valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted

will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs

once the big battle begins. True believers " will be lifted out of

their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the

right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious

opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the

several years of tribulation which follow. "

 

I'm not making this up. We're reported on these people for our weekly

broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank.

They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you that they feel

called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical

prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and

the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and

volunteers. It's why they have staged confrontations at the old

temple site in Jerusalem. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a

warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations

where four angels " which are bound in the great river Euphrates will

be released " to slay the third part of men.' As the British writer

George Monbiot has pointed out, for these people, the Middle East is

not a foreign policy issue, it's a biblical scenario, a matter of

personal belief. A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something

to be feared but welcomed; if there's a conflagration there, they come

out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates,

in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of

harps plucked by angels.

 

One estimate puts these people at about 15 percent of the electorate.

Most are likely to vote Republican; they are part of the core of

George W. Bush's base support. He knows who they are and what they

want. When the president asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of

Jenin in 2002, more than one hundred thousand angry Christian

fundamentalists barraged the White House with e-mails, and Mr. Bush

never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the

administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon's

expansions of settlements on the West Banks. In George Monbiot's

analysis, the president stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging

Israeli expansion into the West Bank than he stands to lose by

restraining it. " He would be mad to listen to these people, but he

would also be mad not to. " No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West

Wing whistling " Onward Christian Soldiers. " He knows how many votes

he is likely to get from these pious folk who believe that the Rapture

Index now stands at 144—just one point below the critical threshold at

which point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the sky

is filled with floating naked bodies, and the true believers wind up

at the right hand of God. With no regret for those left behind. (See

George Monbiot. The Guardian, April 20th, 2004 .)

 

I know, I know: You think I am bonkers. You think Ann Coulter is

right to aim her bony knee at my groin and that O'Reilly should get a

Peabody for barfing all over me for saying there's more to American

politics than meets the Foxy eye. But this is just the point:

Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and

examine these links are demeaned, disparaged and dismissed. This is

the very kind of story that illustrates the challenge journalists face

in a world driven by ideologies that are stoutly maintained despite

being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.

Ideologues—religious, political, or editorial ideologues—embrace a

world view that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to

the contrary. And Don Quixote on Rocinante tilting at windmills had

an easier time of it than a journalist on a laptop tilting with facts

at the world's fundamentalist belief systems.

 

For one thing, you'll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago

Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of

those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press restraint

on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those

people don't want the facts to disturb their belief system about

American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or six of

every 10 Americans " would embrace government controls of some kind on

free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic. " No wonder

scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from

criticism.

 

If raging ideologies are difficult to penetrate, so is secrecy.

Secrecy is hardly a new or surprising story. But we are witnessing new

barriers imposed to public access to information and a rapid mutation

of America's political culture in favor of the secret rule of

government. I urge you to read the special report, Keeping Secrets,

published recently by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (for a

copy send an e-mail to publications). You will find laid

out there what the editors call a " zeal for secrecy " pulsating

through government at every level, shutting off the flow of

information from sources such as routine hospital reports to what one

United States senator calls the " single greatest rollback of the

Freedom of Information Act in history. "

 

In the interest of full disclosure, I digress here to say that I was

present when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of

Information Act on July 4, 1966. In language that was almost lyrical,

he said he was signing it " with a deep sense of pride that the United

States is an open society in which the people's right to know is

cherished and guarded. " But as his press secretary at the time, I

knew something that few others did: LBJ had to be dragged kicking and

screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of FOIA,

hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets,

hated them challenging the official review of realty. He dug in his

heels and even threatened to pocket-veto the bill after it reached the

White House. Only the tenacity of a congressman named John Moss got

the bill passed at all, and that was after a 12-year battle against

his elders in Congress, who blinked every time the sun shined in the

dark corridors of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had

drafted, and even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a

handful of newspaper editors overcame the president's reluctance. He

signed " the f------ thing, " as he called it, and then set out to

claim credit for it.

 

But never has there been an administration like the one in power

today—so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping

information from the people at large and, in defiance of the

Constitution, from their representatives in Congress. The litany is

long: The president's chief of staff orders a review that leads to at

least 6000 documents being pulled from government websites. The

Defense Department bans photos of military caskets being returned to

the U.S. To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron, and other

energy moguls, the vice president stonewalls his energy task force

records with the help of his duck-hunting pal on the Supreme Court.

The CIA adds a new question to its standard employee polygraph exam,

asking, " Do you have friends in the media? " There have been more than

1200 presumably terrorist-related arrests and 750 people deported, and

no one outside the government knows their names, or how many court

docket entries have been erased or never entered. Secret federal

court hearings have been held with no public record of when or where

or who is being tried.

 

Secrecy is contagious. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced

that " certain security information included in the reactor oversight

process " will no longer be publicly available, and no longer be

updated on the agency's website.

 

New controls are being imposed on space surveillance data once found

on NASA's web site.

 

The FCC has now restricted public access to reports of

telecommunications disruption because the Department of Homeland

Security says communications outages could provide " a roadmap for

terrorists. "

 

One of the authors of the ASNE report, Pete Weitzel, former managing

editor of The Miami Herald and now coordinator for the Coalition of

Journalists for Open Government, describes how Section 214 of the

Homeland Security Act makes it possible for a company to tell Homeland

Security about an eroding chemical tank on the bank of a river, but

DHS could not disclose this information publicly or, for that matter,

even report it to the Environmental Protection Agency. And if there

were a spill and people were injured, the information given DHS could

not be used in court!

 

Secrecy is contagious—and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that

nearly 600 times in recent years, a judicial committee acting in

private has stripped information from reports intended to alert the

public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.

 

Secrecy is contagious, scandalous—and toxic. According to the ASNE

report, curtains are falling at the state and local levels, too. The

tiny south Alabama town of Notasulga decided to allow citizens to see

records only one hour a month. It had to rescind the decision, but

now you have to make a request in writing, make an appointment and

state a reason for wanting to see any document. The state legislature

in Florida has adopted 14 new exemptions to its sunshine and public

record laws. Over the objections of law enforcement officials and

Freedom of Information advocates, they passed a new law prohibiting

police from making lists of gun owners even as it sets a fine of $5

million for violation.

 

Secrecy is contagious, scandalous, toxic—and costly. Pete Weitzel

estimates that the price tag for secrecy today is more than $5 billion

annually (I have seen other estimates up to $6.5 billion a year.)

 

This " zeal for secrecy " I am talking about—and I have barely touched

the surface—adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they

plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our

Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear—as

if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were

the Taliban—they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required

for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again

believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it

about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic

us into abandoning those unique freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of

the press—that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and

turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.

 

I thought of this last week during the Republican National Convention

here in New York—thought of the terrorists as enablers of democracy's

self-immolation. My office is on the west side of Manhattan, two

blocks from Madison Square Garden. From where I sit I could see

snipers on the roof. Helicopters overhead. Barricades at every

street corner. Lines of police stretching down the avenues. Unmarked

vans. Flatbed trucks. Looking out his own window, the writer Nick

Turse (TomDispatch.com 9/8/04 ) saw what I saw and more. Special

Forces brandishing automatic rifles. Rolls of orange plastic netting.

Dragnets. Pre-emptive arrests of peaceful protesters. Cages for

detainees. And he caught sight of what he calls " the ultimate blending

of corporatism and the police state—the Fuji blimp—now emblazoned with

a second logo: NYPD. " A spy-in-the sky, outfitted " with the latest in

video-surveillance equipment, loaned free of charge to the police all

week long. " Nick Turse saw these things and sees in them, as do I,

" The Rise of the Homeland Security State. "

 

Will we be cowed by it? Will we investigate and expose its excesses?

Will we ask hard questions of the people who run it? The answers are

not clear. As deplorable as was the betrayal of their craft by

Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Jim Kelly, the greater offense was

the seduction of mainstream media into helping the government dupe

the public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already

disarmed. Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a " war on

terror " that our government—with staggering banality, soaring hubris,

and stunning bravado—employs to elicit public acquiescence while

offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost,

and no measure of democratic accountability. I am reminded of the

answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a

college student to define " real news. " " Real news, " said Richard

Reeves " is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms. " I am

reminded of that line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard's

play Night and Day : " People do terrible things to each other, but its

worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. "

 

I have become a nuisance on this issue—if not a fanatic—because I grew

up in the South, where, for so long, truthtellers were driven from the

pulpit, the classroom and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to

drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another hundred of

years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by

that war finally achieved equal rights under the law. Not only did I

grow up in the South, which had paid such a high price for denial, but

I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the

Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that

did not confirm to the official view of reality, with tragic

consequences for America and Vietnam. Few days pass now that I do not

remind myself that the greatest moments in the history of the press

came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when

they stood fearlessly independent of it.

 

That's why I have also become a nuisance, if not a fanatic, on the

perils of media consolidation. My eyes were opened wide by the

Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to my first documentary on

the subject, called Free Speech for Sale . On our current weekly

broadcast we've gone back to the subject more than 30 times. I was

astonished when the coupling of Time Warner and AOL—the biggest

corporate merger of all time—brought an avalanche of gee-whiz coverage

from a media intoxicated by uncritical enthusiasm. Not many people

heard the quiet voice of the cultural critic Todd Gitlin pointing out

that the merger was not motivated by any impulse to improve news

reporting, magazine journalism or the quality of public discourse. Its

purpose was to boost the customer base, the shareholders' stock and

the personal wealth of top executives. Not only was this brave new

combination, in Gitlin's words, " unlikely to arrest the slickening of

news coverage, its pulverization into ever more streamlined and

simple-minded snippers, its love affair with celebrities and show

business, " the deal is likely to accelerate those trends, since the

bottom line " usually abhors whatever is more demanding and complex,

slower, more prone to ideas, more challenging to complacency. "

 

Sure enough, as merger as followed merger, journalism has been driven

further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that

dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins

journalism has been directed to other priorities than " the news we

need to know to keep our freedoms. " One study reports that the number

of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another

reports that in 55 markets in 35 states, local news was dominated by

crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for

Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York

Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news

programs, and on Time and Newsweek , showed that from 1977 to 1997,

the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to

one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from

one in every 50 stories to one in every 14. What difference does it

make? Well, it's government that can pick our pockets, slap us into

jail, run a highway through our backyard or send us to war. Knowing

what government does is " the news we need to keep our freedoms. "

 

Ed Wasserman, among others, has looked closely at the impact on

journalism of this growing conglomeration of ownership. He recently

wrote: " You would think that having a mightier media would strengthen

their ability to assert their independence, to chart their own course,

to behave in an adversarial way toward the state. " Instead " they fold

in a stiff breeze " —as Viacom, one of the richest media companies in

the history of thought, did when it " couldn't even go ahead and run a

dim-witted movie " on Ronald Reagan because the current president's

political arm objected to anything that would interfere with the

ludicrous drive to canonize Reagan and put him on Mount Rushmore.

Wasserman acknowledges, as I do, that there is some world-class

journalism being done all over the country today, but he went on to

speak of " a palpable sense of decline, of rot, of a loss of spine,

determination, gutlessness " that pervades our craft. Journalism and

the news business, he concludes, aren't playing well together. Media

owners have businesses to run, and " these media-owning corporations

have enormous interests of their own that impinge on an ever-widening

swath of public policy " —hugely important things, ranging from

campaign finance reform (who ends up with those millions of dollars

spent on advertising?) to broadcast deregulation and antitrust

policy, to virtually everything related to the Internet, intellectual

property, globalization and free trade, even to minimum wage,

affirmative action and environmental policy. " This doesn't mean media

shill mindlessly for their owners, any more than their reporters are

stealth operatives for pet causes, " but it does mean that in this era,

when its broader and broader economic entanglements make media more

dependent on state largesse, " the news business finds itself at war

with journalism. "

 

Look at what's happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the

Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today's

newspaper markets are monopolies. I urge you to read a new

book—Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering

(published as part of the Project on the State of the American

Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trust)—by a passel

of people who love journalism: the former managing editor of the New

York Times, Gene Roberts; the dean of the Philip Merrill College of

Journalism, Thomas Kunkel; the veteran reporter and editor, Charles

Layton, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva

Overholser, and Roy Reed. They find that a generation of relentless

corporatization has diminished the amount of real news available to

the consumer. They write of small hometown dailies being bought and

sold like hog futures; of chains, once content to grow one property at

a time, now devouring other chains whole; of chains effectively ceding

whole regions of the country to one another, minimizing competition;

of money pouring into the business from interests with little

knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations

newspapers have to democracy. They point as one example to the paper

in Oshkosh, Wis., with a circulation of 23,500, which prided itself on

being in hometown hands since the Andrew Johnson administration. In

1998, it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months.

Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three

years. In New Jersey, the Gannett Chain bought the Asbury Park Press ,

then sent in a publisher who slashed 55 people from the staff and cut

the space for news, and who was rewarded by being named Gannett's

manager of the year. Roberts and team come to the sobering conclusion

that the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning—that it

won't be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major

print conglomerates.

 

They illustrate the consequences with one story after another. In

Cumberland, Md., the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him

that he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily

reports. But management had a cost-saving solution: Put a fax machine

in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought

the paper should have. ( " Any police brutality today, officer? " " No, if

there is, we'll fax a report of it over to you. " ) On a larger scale,

the book describes a wholesale retreat in coverage of key departments

and agencies in Washington. At the Social Security Administration,

whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York

Times was maintaining a full-time reporter. And incredibly, there

were no full-time reporters at the Interior Department, which controls

millions of acres of public land and oversees everything from the

National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

 

There's more: According to the non-partisan Project for Excellence in

Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The

number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between

1994 and 2000. And the number of television network foreign bureaus is

down by half. Except for " 60 Minutes " on CBS, the network prime time

newsmagazines " in no way could be said to cover major news of the

day. " Furthermore, the report finds that 68 percent of the news on

cable news channels was " repetitious accounts of previously reported

stories without any new information. "

 

Out across the country there's a virtual blackout of local public

affairs. The Alliance for Better Campaigns studied 45 stations in six

cities in one week in October 2003. Out of 7,560 hours of programming

analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs—less than

one-half of one percent of local programming nationwide.

 

A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation

never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could

happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw

eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to their own

interests—and to the ideology of free-market economics.

 

Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan

press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power.

Stretching from Washington think tanks funded by corporations to the

editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's

far-flung empire of tabloid journalism to the nattering know-nothings

of talk radio, a ceaseless conveyor belt—often taking its cues from

daily talking points supplied by the Republican National

Committee—moves mountains of the official party line into the public

discourse. But that's not their only mission. They wage war on

anyone who does not to the propaganda, heaping scorn on what

they call " old-school journalism. " One of them, a blogger, was

recently quoted in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard comparing

journalism with brain surgery. " A bunch of amateurs, no matter how

smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional

neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and

experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly,

does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't?

Nothing. "

 

The debate over who and isn't a journalist is worth having, although

we don't have time for it now. You can read a good account of the

latest round in that debate in the September 26 Boston Globe, where

Tom Rosenthiel reports on the Democratic Convention's efforts to

decide " which scribes, bloggers, on-air correspondents and on-air

correspondents and off-air producers and camera crews " would have

press credentials and access to the action. Bloggers were awarded

credentials for the first time, and, I, for one, was glad to see it.

I've just finished reading Dan Gillmor's new book, We the Media, and

recommend it heartily to you. Gilmore is a national columnist for the

San Jose Mercury News and writes a daily weblog for SiliconValley.com.

He argues persuasively that Big Media is losing its monopoly on the

news, thanks to the Internet – that " citizen journalists " of all

stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming

the news from a lecture to a conversation. He's on to something. In

one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our

earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were

growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and

credit—just a few hundred dollars—to start a paper then. There were

well over a thousand of them by 1840. They were passionate and

pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters,

immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers. But some

called to the better angels of our nature—Tom Paine, for one, the

penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776 –just before joining

Washington's army—published the hard-hitting pamphlet Common Sense ,

with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our

first best-seller because Paine was possessed of an unwavering

determination to reach ordinary people—to " make those that can

scarcely read understand " and " to put into language as plain as the

alphabet " the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights.

 

So the Internet may indeed engage us in a new conversation of

democracy. Even as it does, you and I will in no way be relieved from

wrestling with what it means ethically to be a professional

journalist. I believe Tom Rosenthiel got it right in that Boston

Globe article when he said that the proper question is not whether you

call yourself a journalist but whether your own work constitutes

journalism. And what is that? I like his answer: " A journalist tries

to get the facts right, " tries to get " as close as possible to the

verifiable truth " —not to help one side win or lose but " to inspire

public discussion. " Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core

principle of journalism, " but the commitment to facts, to public

consideration, and to independence from faction, is. "

 

I don't want to claim too much for our craft; because we journalists

are human, our work is shot through with the stain of fallibility that

taints the species. But I don't want to claim too little for our

craft, either. That's why I am troubled by the comments of the former

Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon. Simon rose to national prominence

with his book Homicide, about the year he spent in Baltimore's

homicide unit. That book inspired an NBC series for which Simon wrote

several episodes and then another book and an HBO series called " The

Wire, " also set in Baltimore. In the current edition of the

libertarian magazine Reason, Simon says he has become increasingly

cynical " about the ability of daily journalism to affect any kind of

meaningful change….One of the sad things about contemporary journalism

is that it actually matters very little.'

 

Perhaps.

 

But Francisco Ortiz Franco thought it mattered. The crusading

reporter co-founded a weekly magazine in Tijuana whose motto is " Free

like the Wind. " He was relentless in exposing the incestuous

connections between wealthy elites in Baja, Calif. and its most

corrupt law enforcement agencies and with the most violent of drag

cartels. Several months ago, Francisco Ortiz Franco died sitting at

the wheel of his car outside a local clinic—shot four times while his

two children, aged eight and l0, looked on from the back seat. As his

blood was being hosed off the pavement, more than l00 of his fellow

Mexican reporters and editors marched quietly through the streets,

holding their pens defiantly high in the air. They believe journalism

matters.

 

Manic Saha thought journalism mattered. He was a correspondent with

the daily New Age in Bangladesh, as well as a contributor to the BBC's

Bengali-language service. Saha was known for his bold reporting on

criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and Maoist insurgents and had kept

it up despite a series of death threats. Earlier this year, as Saha

was heading home from the local press club, assailants stopped his

rickshaw and threw a bomb at him. When the bomb exploded he was

decapitated. Manik Saha died because journalism matters.

 

Jose Carlos Araujo thought journalism mattered. The host of a call-in

talk show in northeastern Brazil, Araujo regularly denounced death

squads and well-known local figures involved in murders. On April 24

of this year, outside his home, at 7:30 in the morning, he was

ambushed and shot to death. Because journalism matters.

 

Aiyathurai Nadesan thought journalism mattered. A newspaper reporter

in Sri Lanka, he had been harassed and threatened for criticizing the

government and security forces. During one interrogation, he was told

to stop writing about the army. He didn't. On the morning of May 3l,

near a Hindu temple, he was shot to death—because journalism matters.

 

I could go on: The editor-in-chief of the only independent newspaper

in the industrial Russian city of Togliatti, shot to death after

reporting on local corruption; his successor stabbed to death 18

months later; a dozen journalists in all, killed in Russia over the

last five years and none of their murderers brought to justice.

 

Cuba's fledgling independent press has been decimated by the arrest

and long-term imprisonment of 29 journalists in a crackdown last year;

they are being held in solitary confinement, subjected to

psychological torture, surviving on rotten and foul-smelling food.

Why? Because Fidel Castro knows journalism matters.

 

The totalitarian regime of Turkmenistan believes journalism matters—so

much so that all newspapers, radio and television stations have been

placed under strict state control. About the only independent

information the people get is reporting broadcast from abroad by Radio

Free Europe-Radio Liberty. A stringer for that service, based in the

Turkmenistan capital, was detained and injected multiple times with an

unknown substance. In the Ukraine, Dmitry Shkuropat, a correspondent

for the independent weekly Iskra, who had been working on a story

about government corruption, was beaten in the middle of the day on a

main street in the city of Zaporozhy and taped interviews for his

pending story were taken. The director of Iskra told the Committee to

Protect Journalists (to whom I am indebted for these examples) said

that the newspaper often receives intimidating phone calls from local

business and political authorities after publishing critical articles,

but he refused to identify the callers, saying he feared retaliation.

Obviously, in the Ukraine journalism matters.

 

We have it so easy here in this country. America is a utopia for

journalists. Don Hewitt, the creator of " 60 Minutes, " told me a

couple of years ago that " the 1990s were a terrible time for

journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists; we're

living like Jack Welch, " he said, referring to the then CEO of General

Electric. Perhaps that is why we weren't asking tough questions of

Jack Welch. Because we have it so easy in America, we tend to go easy

on America—so easy that maybe Simon's right; compared to entertainment

and propaganda, maybe journalism doesn't matter.

 

But I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than

ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are

inextricably joined. The late Martha Gellhorn, who spent half a

century reporting on war and politicians—and observing journalists,

too—eventually lost her faith that journalism could, by itself, change

the world. But the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in

itself, she said. " Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential,

not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of

honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader. " I second

that. I believe democracy requires " a sacred contract " between

journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we

can about how the world really works.