In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind

[Guest guest]

In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet

 

 

 

Posted on December 15, 2005, Printed on December 16, 2005

http://www.alternet.org/story/29656/

 

Note: This is the prepared text of the address delivered on December

9, 2005, by Bill Moyers for the 20th anniversary of the National

Security Archive at George Washington University, in Washington D.C.

Collaborating with him on this speech was Michael Winship, a long-time

colleague and journalistic collaborator.

 

Thank you for inviting me to take part in this anniversary celebration

of The National Security Archive. Your organization has become

indispensable to journalists, scholars, and any other citizen who

believes the USA belongs to the people and not to the government.

 

It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to

know. And no one in this town has done more to fight for open

democracy or done more to see that the Freedom of Information Act

fulfills its promise than the Archive. The fight goes back a long way.

You'll find a fine account of it in Herbert Foerstel's book, " Freedom

of Information and the Right to Know: The Origins and Application of

the Freedom of Information Act " (Greenwood Press, 1999). Foerstel

tells us that although every other 18th century democratic

constitution includes the public's right to information, there were

two exceptions: Sweden and the United States.

 

But in 1955 the American Society of Newspaper Editors decided to

battle government secrecy. The Washington Post's James Russell Wiggins

and Representative John Moss of California teamed up to spearhead that

fight. President Kennedy subsequently resisted their efforts. When he

asked reporters to censor themselves on the grounds that these were

times of " clear and present danger, " journalists were outraged and

agreed that his administration represented a low point in their

battle. But Congressman Moss refused to give up, and in 1966 he

managed to pass the Freedom of Information Act, although in a crippled

and compromised form.

 

I was there, as the White House press secretary, when President Lyndon

Johnson signed the act on July 4, 1966; signed it with language that

was almost lyrical -- " 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. "

 

Well, yes, but I knew that LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming

to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of

Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in

government closets and opening government files; hated them

challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his heels and even

threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House.

And he might have followed through if Moss and Wiggins and other

editors hadn't barraged him with pleas and petitions. He relented and

signed " the damned thing, " as he called it. He signed it, and then

went out to claim credit for it.

 

Because of the Freedom of Information Act and the relentless fight by

the Archive to defend and exercise it, some of us have learned more

since leaving the White House about what happened on our watch than we

knew when we were there. Funny, isn't it, how the farther one gets

from power, the closer one often gets to the truth?

 

Consider the recent disclosures about what happened in the Gulf of

Tonkin in 1964. These documents, now four decades old, seem to confirm

that there was no second attack on U.S. ships on the 4th of August and

that President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes against North

Vietnam on the basis of intelligence that either had been " mishandled "

or " misinterpreted " or had been deliberately skewed by subordinates to

provide him the excuse he was looking for to attack North Vietnam.

 

I was not then a player in foreign policy and had not yet become the

President's press secretary -- my portfolio was politics and domestic

policy. But I was there beside him during those frenetic hours. I

heard the conversations from the President's side, although I could

not hear what was being told to him by the Situation Room or the Pentagon.

 

I accept now that it was never nailed down for certain that there was

a second attack, but I believe that LBJ thought there had been. It is

true that for months he had wanted to send a message to Ho Chi Minh

that he meant business about standing behind America's commitment to

South Vietnam. It is true that he was not about to allow the hawkish

Barry Goldwater to outflank him on national security in the fall

campaign. It is also true that he often wrestled with the real or

imaginary fear that liberal Democrats, whose hearts still belonged to

their late fallen leader, would be watching and sizing him up

according to their speculation of how Kennedy would have decided the

moment.

 

So yes, I think the President's mind was prepared to act if the North

Vietnamese presented him a tit-for-tat opportunity. But he wasn't

looking for a wider war at that time, only a show of resolve, a

flexing of muscles, the chance to swat the fly when it landed.

 

Nonetheless, this state of mind plus cloudy intelligence proved a

combustible and tragic mix. In the belief that a second attack

suggested an intent on the part of an adversary that one attack alone

left open, the President did order strikes against North Vietnam, thus

widening the war. He asked Congress for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

that was passed three days later and opened the way for future

large-scale commitments of American forces. Haste is so often the

enemy of good judgment. Rarely does it produce such costly

consequences as it did this time.

 

But did the President order-up fabricated evidence to suit his wish?

No. Did subordinates rig the evidence to support what they thought he

wanted to do? It's possible, but I swear I cannot imagine who they

might have been -- certainly it was no one in the inner-circle, as far

as I could tell. I don't believe this is what happened. Did the

President act prematurely? Yes. Was the response disproportionate to

the events? Yes. Did he later agonize over so precipitous a decision?

Yes. " For all I know, " he said the next year, " our Navy was shooting

at whales out there. " By then, however, he thought he had other

reasons to escalate the war, and did. All these years later, I find it

painful to wonder what could have been if we had waited until the fog

lifted, or had made public what we did and didn't know, trusting the

debate in the press, Congress, and the country to help us shape

policies more aligned with events and with the opinion of an informed

public.

 

I had hoped we would learn from experience. Two years ago, prior to

the invasion of Iraq, I said on the air that Vietnam didn't make me a

dove; it made me read the Constitution. Government's first obligation

is to defend its citizens. There is nothing in the Constitution that

says it is permissible for our government to launch a preemptive

attack on another nation. Common sense carries one to the same

conclusion: it's hard to get the leash back on once you let the wild

dogs of war out of the kennel. Our present Secretary of Defense Donald

Rumsfeld has a plaque on his desk that reads, " Aggressive fighting for

the right is the noblest sport the world affords. " Perhaps, but while

war is sometimes necessary, to treat it as sport is obscene. At best,

war is a crude alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy and the

forging of a true alliance acting in the name of international law.

Unprovoked, " the noblest sport of war " becomes the slaughter of the

innocent.

 

I left the White House in early 1967 to practice journalism. Because

our beat is the present and not the past -- we are journalists after

all, not historians -- I put those years and events behind me, except

occasionally to reflect on how they might inform my reporting and

analysis of what's happening today. I was chastened by our mistakes

back then, and chagrined now when others fail to learn from them.

 

The country suffers not only when presidents act hastily in secret,

but when the press goes along. I keep an article in my files by Jeff

Cohen and Norman Solomon ( " 30 Year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie

Launched Vietnam War " ) written a decade ago and long before the recent

disclosures. They might have written it over again during the buildup

for the recent invasion of Iraq. On August 5, 1964, the headline in

The Washington Post read: " American Planes Hit North Vietnam After

Second Attack on Our Destroyers: Move Taken to Halt Aggression. " That,

of course, was the official line, spelled out verbatim and succinctly

on the nation's front pages. The New York Times proclaimed in an

editorial that the President " went to the people last night with the

somber facts. " The Los Angeles Times urged Americans " to face the fact

that the communists, by their attack on American vessels in

international waters, have escalated the hostilities. " It was not only

Lyndon Johnson whose mind was predisposed to judge on the spot, with

half a loaf. It was also those reporters and editors who were willing

to accept the official view of reality as the truth of the matter. In

his book, " Censored War, " Daniel Hallin found that journalists at the

time had a great deal of information available which contradicted the

official account of what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, but " it

simply wasn't used. "

 

Tim Wells, who wrote a compelling book on " The War Within: America's

Battle Over Vietnam, " told Cohen and Solomon it was yet another case

of " the media's almost exclusive reliance on the U.S. government

officials as sources of information, " as well as " their reluctance to

question official pronouncements on national security issues. " There

are many branches on the family tree of journalism where Judith Miller

blossomed. I can imagine that one day the National Security Archive

will turn up a document explaining how reporters waited outside the

Garden of Eden to snap up Adam and Eve's account of what had happened

inside, but never bothered to interview the snake.

 

I am taking your time with all this hoping you will understand why I

have become something of a fundamentalist on the First Amendment

protection of an independent press, a press that will resist the

seductions, persuasions, and intimidations of people who hold great

power -- over life and death, war and peace, taxes, the fate of the

environment -- and would exercise it undisturbed, in great secrecy, if

they are allowed.

 

In a telling moment, the Bush Administration opposed the

declassification of 40 year old Gulf of Tonkin documents. Why? Because

they fear uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used

to justify the war in Iraq. And well they might. Just as absurd is

their opposition to the release of two intelligence briefings given to

President Johnson in 1965 and 1968. The CIA claims they should be kept

secret on the grounds that their release could impair its mission by

revealing its sources and methods of forty years ago. That's bull. The

actual methods used by the CIA back then have largely been

declassified, which is why I signed a statement in your support when

the National Security Archive went to court over this matter. I was as

disappointed as you were when the federal judge, who ruled this past

summer, preferred the government's penchant for secrecy to the

people's right to know what goes on in their name and with their money.

 

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush

Administration's obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving

coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no

paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached

this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent

journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He

concludes, " The Bush Administration has restricted access to public

documents as no other before it. " And he backs this up with evidence.

For example, a recent report on government secrecy by the watchdog

group, OpenTheGovernment.org, says the Feds classified a record 15.6

million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81% over the

year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. What's more,

64% of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely

closed to the public. No wonder the public knows so little about how

this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable

scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of

its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA

report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act;

research censorship at the departments of health and human services,

interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from

advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health,

and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency

contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving

the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government

scientific reports on global warming

 

It's an old story: the greater the secrecy, the deeper the corruption.

 

This is the administration that has illegally produced phony

television news stories with fake reporters about Medicare and

government anti-drug programs, then distributed them to local TV

stations around the country. In several markets, they aired on the six

o'clock news with nary a mention that they were propaganda bought and

paid for with your tax dollars.

 

This is the administration that paid almost a quarter of a million

dollars for rightwing commentator Armstrong Williams to talk up its

No-Child-Left-Behind education program and bankrolled two other

conservative columnists to shill for programs promoting the

President's marriage initiative.

 

This is the administration that tacitly allowed inside the White House

a phony journalist under the nom de plume of Jeff Gannon to file

Republican press releases as legitimate news stories and to ask

President Bush planted questions to which he could respond with

preconceived answers.

 

And this is the administration that has paid over one hundred million

dollars to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers and disguise the source,

while banning TV cameras at the return of caskets from Iraq as well as

prohibiting the publication of photographs of those caskets -- a

restriction that was lifted only following a request through the

Freedom of Information Act.

 

Ah, FOIA. Obsessed with secrecy, Bush and Cheney have made the Freedom

of Information Act their number one target, more fervently pursued for

elimination than Osama Bin Laden. No sooner had he come to office than

George W. Bush set out to eviscerate both FOIA and the Presidential

Records Act. He has been determined to protect his father's secrets

when the first Bush was Vice President and then President -- as well

as his own. Call it Bush Omerta.

 

This enmity toward FOIA springs from deep roots in their extended

official family. Just read your own National Security Archive briefing

book #142, edited by Dan Lopez, Tom Blanton, Meredith Fuchs, and

Barbara Elias. It is a compelling story of how in 1974 President

Gerald Ford's chief of staff -- one Donald Rumsfeld -- and his deputy

chief of staff -- one Dick Cheney -- talked the President out of

signing amendments that would have put stronger teeth in the Freedom

of Information Act. As members of the House of Representatives,

Congressman Rumsfeld actually co-sponsored the Act and as a

Congressman, Ford voted for it. But then Richard Nixon was sent

scuttling from the White House in disgrace after the secrets of

Watergate came spilling out. Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted no more

embarrassing revelations of their party's abuse of power; and they

were assisted in their arguments by yet another rising Republican

star, Antonin Scalia, then a top lawyer at the Justice Department.

Fast forward to 2001, when in the early months of George W. Bush's

Administration, Vice President Cheney invited the tycoons of oil, gas,

and coal to the White House to divide up the spoils of victory. They

had, after all, contributed millions of dollars to the cause, and as

Cheney would later say of tax cuts for the fraternity of elites who

had financed the campaign, they deserved their payoff. But to keep the

plunder from disgusting the public, the identities of the participants

in the meetings were kept secret. The liberal Sierra Club and the

conservative Judicial Watch filed suit to open this insider trading to

public scrutiny.

 

But after losing in the lower court, the White House asked the Supreme

Court to intervene. Lo and behold, hardly had Justice Scalia returned

from a duck hunting trip with the Vice President -- the blind leading

the blind to the blind -- than the Supreme Court upheld the White

House privilege to keep secret the names of those corporate predators

who came to slice the pie. You have to wonder if sitting there in the

marsh, shotguns in hand, Scalia and Cheney reminisced about their

collaboration many years earlier when as young men in government they

had tried to shoot down the dreaded Freedom of Information Act that

kept them looking over their shoulders (Congress, by the way, overrode

President Ford's veto.)

 

They have much to fear from the Freedom of Information Act. Just a few

days ago, FOIA was used to force the Department of Justice to make

available legal documents related to Supreme Court nominee Judge

Alito's record. The department reluctantly complied but under very

restricted circumstances. The records were made available on one day,

for three hours, from 3 to 6pm, for reporters only. No citizen or

advocacy groups were permitted access. There were 470 pages to review.

The blogspot Mpetrelis reckons this meant a reporter had about 34

seconds to quickly read each page and figure out if the information

was newsworthy or worth pursuing further. " Not a lot of time to

carefully examine documents from our next Supreme Court justice. "

 

It's no surprise that the White House doesn't want reporters roaming

the halls of justice. The Washington Post reports that two years ago

six Justice Department attorneys and two analysts wrote a memo stating

unequivocally that the Texas Congressional redistricting plan

concocted by Tom DeLay violated the Voting Rights Act. Those career

professional civil servants were overruled by senior officials, Bush's

political appointees, who went ahead and approved the plan anyway.

 

We're only finding this out now because someone leaked the memo.

According to the Post, the document was kept under tight wraps and

" lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag

rule. " Why? Because it is a devastating account of how DeLay allegedly

helped launder corporate money to elect a Texas Legislature that then

shuffled Congressional districts to add five new Republican members of

the House, nailing down control of Congress for the radical right and

their corporate pals.

 

They couldn't get away with all of this if the press was at the top of

their game. Never has the need for an independent media been greater.

People are frightened, their skepticism of power -- their respect for

checks and balances -- eclipsed by their desire for security. Writing

in The New York Times, Michael Ignatieff has reminded us that

democracy's dark secret is that the fight against terror has to be

waged in secret, by men and women who defend us with a bodyguard of

lies and armory of deadly weapons. Because this is democracy's dark

secret, Ignatieff continues, it can also be democracy's dark nemesis.

We need to know more about what's being done in our name; even if what

we learn is hard, the painful truth is better than lies and illusions.

The news photographer in Tom Stoppard's play " Night and Day, " sums its

up: " People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the

places where everybody is kept in the dark. "

 

Yet the press is hobbled today -- hobbled by the vicissitudes of Wall

Street investors who demand greater and greater profit margins at the

expense of more investment in reporting (look at what's going on with

Knight-Ridder.) Layoffs are hitting papers all across the country.

Just last week, the Long Island daily Newsday, of which I was once

publisher, cut 72 jobs and eliminated 40 vacancies -- that's in

addition to 59 newsroom jobs eliminated the previous month. There are

fewer editors and reporters with less time, resources and freedom to

burn shoe leather and midnight oil, make endless phone calls, and

knock on doors in pursuit of the unreported story.

 

The press is also hobbled by the intimidation from ideological bullies

in the propaganda wing of the Republican Party who hector, demonize,

and lie about journalists who ask hard questions of this regime.

 

Hobbled, too, by what Ken Silverstein, The Los Angeles Times

investigative reporter, calls " spurious balance, " kowtowing to those

with the loudest voice or the most august title who demand that when

it comes to reporting, lies must be treated as the equivalent of

truth; that covering the news, including the official press release,

has greater priority than uncovering the news.

 

Consider a parable from the past, from the early seventh century, when

an Irish warrior named Congal went nearly blind after he was attacked

by a swarm of bees. When he became king he changed Irish law to make

bee attacks criminal. Thereafter he was known as Congal Caech which

means " Congal the Squinting " or " Congal the Half-Blind. " If this

administration has its way, that description will apply to the press.

 

Which brings me to a parable for our day.

 

Once upon a time -- four years ago to be exact -- PBS asked me to

create a new weekly broadcast of news, analysis, and interviews. They

wanted it based outside the beltway and to be like nothing else on the

air: report stories no one else was covering, conduct a conversation

you couldn't hear anywhere else. That we did. We offered our viewers a

choice, not an echo. In our mandate, we reached back to the words of

Lord Byron that once graced the masthead of many small town

newspapers: " Without, or with, offence to friends or foes, " he said,

" I sketch your world exactly as it goes. "

 

We did it with a team of professional journalists recruited from the

best in the business: our own NOW staff; public radio's Daniel

Zwerdling, Rick Karr and Deborah Amos; Network veterans Brian Ross,

Michele Martin, and Sylvia Chase; Washington's Sherry Jones; The

Center for Investigative Reporting's Mark Shapiro; Frontline's Lowell

Bergman; Newsweek's Joe Contreras. We collaborated on major

investigations with U.S. News and World Report, NPR, and The New York

Times.

 

We reported real stories and talked with real people about real

problems. We told how faraway decision-making affected their lives. We

reported on political influence that led to mountaintop removal mining

and how the government was colluding with industry to cover up the

effect of mercury in fish on pregnant women.

 

We described what life was like for homeless veterans and child

migrants working in the fields. We exposed Wall Street shenanigans and

tracked the Washington revolving door. We reported how Congress had

defeated efforts to enact safeguards that would mitigate a scandal

like Enron, and how those efforts were shot down by some of the same

politicians who were then charged with investigating the scandal. We

investigated the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Steven Griles, a

full 18 months before he resigned over conflicts of interest involving

the oil and mining industries for which he had been a lobbyist on the

other side of that revolving door. We reported on those secret

meetings held by Cheney with his industry pals and attempted to find

out who was in the room and what was discussed. We reported how

ExxonMobil had influenced the White House to replace a scientist who

believes global warming is real.

 

We won an Emmy for the hour-long profile of Chuck Spinney, the

Pentagon whistleblower who worked from within to expose graft and

waste in defense spending. And the blog, Dailykos.com, speculated that

it was our interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson, two weeks before the

invasion of Iraq and months before Robert Novak outed Wilson's wife

Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, that first outraged the

administration. " An honor I dreamed not of… "

 

None of this escaped the attention of the Chairman of the Corporation

for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, a buddy of Karl Rove and

the designated driver for the administration's partisan agenda for

public broadcasting. Tomlinson set out, secretly, to discredit our

broadcast. He accused us of being unfair and unbalanced, but that

wouldn't wash. We did talk with liberal voices like Howard Zinn, Susan

Sontag, Sister Joan Chittester, Isabel Allende, Thomas Frank and

Arundhati Roy. But we also spoke with right-wingers like Grover

Norquist, Ralph Reed, Cal Thomas, Frank Luntz, Richard Viguerie,

Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and then his

successor, Paul Gigot.

 

What got Tomlinson's goat was our reporting. After all, we kept after

his political pals for keeping secrets, and over and again we reported

on how the big media conglomerates were in cahoots with official

Washington, scheming for permission to get bigger and bigger. The

mainstream media wouldn't touch this topic. Murdoch, Time Warner,

Viacom, GE/NBC, Disney/ABC, Clear Channel, Sinclair -- all stood to

gain if their lobbying succeeded. Barry Diller appeared on our

broadcast and described the relationship between the big news media

and Washington as an " oligarchy. " Sure enough, except for NOW with

Bill Moyers, the broadcast media were silent about how they were

lobbying for more and more power over what Americans see, read, and

hear. It was left to one little broadcast, relegated to the black hole

of Friday night, to shine the light on one of the most important

stories of the decade.

 

What finally sent Tomlinson over the edge and off to the ramparts,

however, was a documentary we did about the people of Tamaqua, a small

town in Pennsylvania. The Morgan Knitting Mill there had just laid off

more than a third of its workforce -- the last of 25 textile mills

that sustained the townspeople after the demise of the coal industry.

The jobs were going to Honduras and China. Our report told how free

trade agreements like NAFTA had encouraged companies to lay off

American workers, produce goods more cheaply abroad and then import

the goods back here. We showed how the global economy contributes to

the growing inequality in America, with the gap between the rich and

poor doubling in the last three decades until it is now wider than in

the days of the Great Depression.

 

Those are the facts -- " reality-based " reporting -- that caused

Tomlinson to tell The Washington Post that what he saw was " liberal

advocacy journalism. " Well, if reporting what happens to ordinary

people because of events beyond their control, and the indifference of

government to their fate, is liberalism, I plead guilty.

 

Tomlinson was now on the warpath. In secret (his preferred modus

operandi) he hired an acquaintance out in Indianapolis named Fred Mann

to monitor the content of our show. What qualified Fred Mann for the

job has been hard to learn. His most recent position was as director

of the Job Bank and alumni services at the National Journalism Center

in Herndon, Virginia, an organization that is administered by the

Young America's Foundation, which is, in turn, affiliated with the

rightwing Young Americans for Freedom. The foundation describes itself

as " the principle outreach organization for the conservative movement "

and has received funding from ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris, among

others. But the trail to Mann went cold there. Several journalists

have tried telephoning or emailing him. I tried four times just this

week to reach him. One enterprising young reporter even left notes for

him at an Indianapolis Hallmark Store where Mann frequently faxed data

to Tomlinson. No luck. I guess we'll have to wait for Robert Novak to

out him.

 

Fred Mann never got around to writing his full report, but when

members of Congress pressed Tomlinson to show them the notes from

Mann, it turns out that he had divided NOW's guests into categories,

with headings like, " Anti-Bush, " " Anti-business, " and " Anti-Tom

DeLay. " He characterized Republicans Senator Chuck Hagel, who departed

from Republican orthodoxy to question the Iraq war, as " liberal, "

which must have come as a quite a shock to the senator.

 

During all this I sought several times to meet with Tomlinson and the

Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I wanted to ask them

first-hand what was going on and to discuss the importance of public

broadcasting's independence. They refused. I invited Tomlinson more

than once to go on the air with me, with a moderator and format of his

choosing, to discuss our views on the role of public broadcasting. He

refused.

 

But all the while he was crudely pressuring the President of PBS, Pat

Mitchell, to counter NOW. And he himself was in direct contact with

Paul Gigot, the rightwing editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial

pages, to bring to PBS a show that Gigot had hosted on the cable

business network CNBC until it was cancelled for lack of an audience.

So the Journal Editorial Report came to PBS, with The Wall Street

Journal, that fierce defender of the free market, accepting over $4

million of taxpayer dollars courtesy of Ken Tomlinson.

 

The emails between Tomlinson and Gigot during this time reveal two

ideological soul mates scheming to make sure " our side, " as they

described themselves, gets " an absolute duplication of what Moyers is

doing. " But as the record will show, Gigot's show was nowhere near

what NOW with Bill Moyers was doing. We were digging, investigating,

and reporting; they were opining. We were offering a wide range of

opinions and views; they were talking to each other. The participants

on Gigot's broadcast were his own staff members at the newspaper whose

editorial pages are the Pravda of American journalism, where the Right

speaks only to the Right. To be blunt about it, we had more diversity

of opinion on a single broadcast than Gigot had all year or than he

has ever tolerated on his own editorial pages. Reporting? You have to

be kidding. In their private exchange of emails Tomlinson informs

Gigot that he doesn't really need to do field reporting. Gigot agrees,

and goes on to say that he finds such reporting not only a waste of

time and money, but " boring " [i'm not making this up: the editor of

the editorial page of a great American newspaper finds field reporting

" boring. " ] So it is that ideologues like Gigot can hold stoutly to a

worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as

reality.

 

I had always thought Gigot an honorable, if ideological fellow. The

emails confirm that he is for certain an ideologue -- and a partisan.

The saddest part of this story, personally, is that on my own

initiative -- with no prompting from anyone -- I had Gigot on my

broadcast three times and had asked him to become a regular presence

through the elections. I even solicited Pat Mitchell, the PBS

President, to urge him to accept my invitation. I had no idea that at

this very same time he was secretly negotiating with Tomlinson for his

own show. He never bothered to tell me. After reading the emails, I

realized this was deceitful on his part. Even as I was asking him in

good faith to join me on the broadcast, Gigot was back-channeling with

Tomlinson on how they could complete their deal and was advising

Tomlinson on " the line " that the CPB chairman should follow.

 

Of the many disclosures in the email exchange between the two, this is

the most intriguing. On August 13, 2004, Tomlinson wrote Gigot:

" Protect me on this. I am breaking my word by forwarding this

Mintz/Moyers stuff -- but it's too rich for you not to see. Please,

please don't show it to anyone. But keep in mind as we have fun with

this. Cheers-KT. "

 

What's he talking about? Mintz is Morton Mintz, the octogenarian (now

retired) and much honored investigative reporter for The Washington

Post. I know nothing about his politics; during his long career he

broke exposes of both Democrats and Republicans. That August he and I

were emailing about the possibility of an appearance by him on my

broadcast, and two months later, just prior to the first Bush-Kerry

debate, I did interview him about the questions he would put to both

candidates if he were an interlocutor who wanted to break through the

polite protocol of the staged event in the hope of getting the

politicians to touch reality. Neither Mintz nor I can recall the exact

subject of our email exchanges that August, long before the debate.

Tomlinson somehow gained access to our correspondence -- Mintz

speculates that he found someone who hacked into our emails -- and

promised his source that he wouldn't share it with anyone else.

Nonetheless, " breaking my word " and begging Gigot to " protect me on

this, " he forwarded it to his co-conspirator. In a sane world, both

men would be drummed out of town for such behavior.

 

Gigot has now taken his show to FOX News, where such tactics will find

a compatible home among like-minded partisans. " Our side " turns out to

be the great Republican noise machine. A couple of days after that

announcement, The Wall Street Journal published a thoroughly

disingenuous editorial, obviously written by Gigot, defending Kenneth

Tomlinson and their own involvement with him, while taking potshots at

the Inspector General of CPB who had investigated the whole mess at

the request of members of Congress. The editorial compared him to

Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau.

 

But in a final triumph of reporting and evidence over ideology and

spin, the Inspector found that Tomlinson had committed multiple

transgressions: he broke the law, violated the corporation's

guidelines for contracting, meddled in program decisions, injected

politics into hiring procedures, and admonished CPB executive staff

" not to interfere with his deal " with Gigot. The emails show Tomlinson

bragging to Karl Rove, who played an important role in his appointment

as chairman, about his success in " shaking things up " at CPB. They

also confirm that he had consulted the White House about recruiting

loyalist Republicans to serve as his confederates in an organization

that had been created in 1967 to prevent just such partisan meddling

in public broadcasting. (Thanks to Tomlinson and his White House

allies, the new President of CPB is the former co-chair of the

Republican National Committee. She arrives under a cloud that only her

actions can dispel. We shall see.)

 

Curiously, Gigot's Wall Street Journal editorial conveniently failed

to mention that the emails between himself and Tomlinson indicate

Tomlinson perjured himself under oath, before Congress, when he said

he had nothing to do with the agreement that landed Gigot at PBS. Fact

is, they worked hand-in-glove. As I just mentioned, Tomlinson told his

own staff not to interfere with " his deal " with Gigot. There's even an

email in which Tomlinson says to Gigot, after they have been plotting

on how to bring the proposed Gigot show to fruition, " Let's stay in

close touch. " Obviously, lying by an ally doesn't offend Gigot, who is

otherwise known as a scourge of moral transgressions by Democrats,

liberals, and other pagans.

 

As all this was becoming public, Tomlinson was forced to resign from

the CPB board. He is now under investigation by the State Department

for irregularities in his other job as Chair of the Broadcasting Board

of Governors, the agency that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free

Europe, and other international broadcasting sponsored by the United

States. As I say, great secrecy breeds great corruption.

 

I have shared this sordid little story with you because it is a

cautionary tale about the regime in power. If they were so determined

to go with all guns blazing at a single broadcast of public television

that is simply doing the job journalism is supposed to do -- setting

the record straight -- you can imagine the pressure that has been

applied to mainstream media. And you can understand what's at stake

when journalism gets the message and pulls its punches. We saw it once

again when Ahmed Chalabi was in town. This is the man who played a key

and sinister role in fostering both media and intelligence reports

that misled the American people about weapons of mass destruction.

Although still under investigation by the FBI, Chalabi has maneuvered

himself into the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. He came to

Washington recently to schmooze with the President and to meet with

the armchair warriors of the neoconservative crowd who had helped him

spin the case for going to war. The old Houdini was back, rolling the

beltway press who treated him with deference that might have been

accorded George Washington. Watching him knock one soft pitch after

another over the wall, I was reminded that the greatest moments in the

history of the press have come not when journalists made common cause

with power but when they stood fearlessly independent of it. This was

not one of them.

 

In his recent book, " The Gospel According to America, " David Dark

reminds us again of a lesson we seem always to be forgetting, that " as

learners of freedom, we might come to understand that the price of

liberty is eternal vigilance. " He might well have been directly

addressing the press when he wrote, " Keeping one's head safe for

democracy (or avoiding the worship of false gods) will require a

diligent questioning of any and all tribal storytellers. In an age of

information technology, we will have to look especially hard at the

forces that shape discourse and the various high-powered attempts, new

every morning, to invent public reality. "

 

So be it.

 

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host of the PBS

program, " NOW With Bill Moyers. "

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/29656/