Carpe Datum

Lessons of History

They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Well, the Republicans have done a good job on their history. They've learned so well from past mistakes that they've made sure it won't happen again. By "it", I mean a scandal like Watergate, in which anonymous sources are used to help uncover a deeply corrupt, criminal administration.

The Sideshow has some good links to writers trying to put the whole Deep Throat/Watergate retrospective thing into its proper frame. Bottom line? It shows you just how for the media has gone down the toilet. First, from Greg Palast:

I've been gagging all morning on the Washington Post's self-congratulatory preening about its glory days of the Watergate investigation.

Think about it. It's been 33 years since cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein pulled down the pants of the Nixon operation and exposed its tie-in to the Watergate burglary. That marks a third of a century since the Washington Post has broken a major investigative story. [...]

Today, Bob Woodward, rules as the Post's Managing Editor. And how is he "managing" the news? After the September 11 attack, when we needed an independent press to keep us from hysteria-driven fascism, Woodward was given "access" to the president, writing 'Bush at War', a fawning, puke-making fairy tale of a take-charge president brilliantly leading the war against Terror.

Woodward's news-oid story is a symptom of a disease epidemic in US journalism. The illness is called, "access." In return for a supposedly "inside" connection to the powers that be, the journalists in fact become conduits for disinformation sewerage. 

And woe to any journalist who annoys the politicians and loses "access." Career-wise, they're DOA.
 
Here's a good place to tote up part of the investigative reporter body count.  There's Bob Parry forced out of the Associated Press for the crime of uncovering Ollie North's arms-for-hostages game. And there's Gary Webb, hounded to suicide for documenting the long-known history of the CIA's love-affair with drug runners. The list goes on. Even the prize-laden Seymour Hersh was, he told me, exiled from the New York Times and now has to write from the refuge of a fashion magazine.

And notice someone missing in the Deep Throat extravaganza? Carl Bernstein, the brains and soul of the All-the-President's-Men duo, is notably absent from the staff of the Post or any other US newspaper.

Why don't we read more "Watergate" investigative stories in the US press?   Given that the Woodwards of today dance on their hind legs begging officialdom for "access", news without official blessing doesn't stand a chance.

The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle. And by that rule, there is no chance that the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, would today run Deep Throat's story of the Watergate break-in.

And that sucks.

This is another big problem with the corporate media that I don't talk about very much. The most obvious thing that makes me mad is when they do a "he said, she said" thing in stories. You know, like, there's this memo from the British along with this other stuff that shows the Bush administration intended to go to war with Iraq no matter what as of 6-12 months before the war began, but administration officials say such charges are "absurd" and "old news" and so blah blah blah we don't know what to conclude and hey, look, Britney's pregnant!

But a deeper problem occurs when these "he said, she said" things occur off the front page, and so without a 100% slam-dunk and un-denied case, you can't run anything controversial. I mean, even Newsweek got burned and they supposedly did it the way the nutballs want by which I mean they ran their story past the government censors ... uh, officials ... to make sure it was ok to publish, and they said "sure, no problem, just change this one thing but everything else looks fine." So they change what they were told to change and nothing else, and they are *STILL* the anti-Christ of the news media.

From now until the end of time, anything Newsweek reports that is critical of any conservative will be dismissed out of hand by "Yeah, remember that Quran in the toilet thing?" Billmon has the scary truth about why this is true: apparently, because that's what the Moron American wants, and they're voting Republican:

But reading all the liberal pundits and bloggers moaning and groaning about the death of investigative reporting, and the pusillanimity of the corporate media, and the pure Nixonian evil of the Bush administration, and the crying need for more hero-patriots like Mark Felt, made me feel like screaming Buster Keaton's anti-nostalgia line from Limelight : "If one more person tells me this is just like ol' times, I swear I'll jump out the window."

The truth is that we do have heroic whistleblowers such as Mark Felt today. Their names are Richard Clarke and Sibel Edmonds and Ray McGovern and Scott Ritter -- and even Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury Secretary.

You want well-placed anonymous sources? How about the military officers who fed CBS and Sy Hersh their Abu Ghraib scoops, or the lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's office who spilled the beans on the torture memos, or whoever leaked the Downing Street memo.

You want ordinary Joes and Janes willing to risk the wrath of the powers to do what's right? How about the enlisted man who walked into the Army IG's office in Baghdad and told them the Marquis de Sade was making house calls at Abu Ghraib prison, or the Pentagon auditors who refused to sign off on the Haliburton payola, or the former detainees and the families in Afghanistan who risked their lives -- not just their careers -- by talking to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

You say we need indefatigable investigators, willing to follow the truth no matter where it leads? How about General Taguba or the International Red Cross or the ACLU lawyers who've been using the Freedom of Information Act to pry out far more information than I thought we would ever know about the inner workings of the Guantanamo gulag. you could even thow in David Kay -- the WMD true believer who tried mightly to prove Bush's case, but finally accepted and admitted that the primary rationale for the Iraq invasion was completely false.

Even the corporate media, for all its fawning cowardice, hasn't been as derelict as blog rhetoric would paint it. The Watergates of our time have been covered -- yes, timidly and halfheartedly, not to mention incompetently, but not nearly as timid and halfhearted and incompetent as the Nixon-era media establishment, which left the Post hanging out there, almost entirely alone, for almost a year before reluctantly accepting that the original Watergate was a real story that had to be covered.

And they didn't have Fox News, a Republican puppet Congress and a mob of crypto-fascist bloggers breathing down their necks. [...]

What the health of the Republic requires, in other words, may not be a new crop of leakers and whistleblowers, or a fresh young generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins -- or even a more independent, aggressive media. What it may need is a new population (or half of a population, anyway), one that hasn't been stupified or brainwashed into blind submission, that won't look upon sadistic corruption and call it patriotism, and that will refuse to trade the Bill of Rights for a plastic Jesus and a wholly false sense of security.

That's a much taller order than asking the Gods to send us another Deep Throat -- or even a Luke Skywalker. It's also not an easy thing for liberals, with their old-fashioned faith in democracy, to face: That the Evil Emperor might have a majority (a narrow one, but still a majority) on his side. But a truth isn't any less true for being politically unpalatable.

Which is why right now it's easy for me to imagine Richard Nixon, looking up from the inner circle of hell and lamenting his immense bad luck in being elected to the presidency 30 years too soon.

I'll believe the part about the Morons being in the majority when I feel like I can trust the voting process. Right now, I'm sorry to say, I can't.

Posted by Observer at June 3, 2005 07:26 PM