Flogging a Press Corpse

By: Alan Bisbort

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

- George Orwell

Back in late October 2000, I attended a Society of Professional Journalists convention in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, with the presidential campaign wheezing to a close, a story had just broken in the Wall Street Journal about Dick Cheney's tenure as CEO of Halliburton. The story detailed how during his five years at the helm of this Dallas-based oil-services company, Cheney had openly courted regimes that flagrantly violated human rights - including Iran, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Libya, Nigeria, and even our latest evil incarnate, Iraq (for those keeping score at home, that's two-thirds, or 66.6%, of George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil").

Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal story offered the grim details of Halliburton's "constructive engagement" with Burma (I refuse to use the name given the country by its illegimate military junta). The WSJ reporter explained how President Clinton had, early in his first term, cut diplomatic ties with Burma for its leaders' myriad human rights violations and that most American corporations had pulled up sticks and left. Not Halliburton. Cheney himself, in fact, personally brokered a deal for a major pipeline in Burma even though, in the opinion of one U.S. federal judge, Halliburton already knew the project would benefit from forced labor and 'numerous acts of violence' by the Burmese military. (You heard that correctly: Mr. Ethics turned a blind eye to slavery.)

On and on the story went, one damning fact after another, backed with names, dates, dollar figures - the whole indictment of this corporate criminal (as we all know and loathe him today) was gift-wrapped and all but hand-delivered to each and every journalist at the convention in Columbus, Ohio, one week before the 2000 election. No, wait. I take that back. It was hand-delivered; one of the venues at the SPJ conference made free photocopies of the Wall Street Journal article available at their booth, presumably to remind the assembled journalists what a free press was capable of doing.

At the very same time, the latest issue of American Journalism Review, a glossy, well-respected professional journal, contained an exhaustive cover story about Dick Cheney's career - long hatred of a free press. Piles of this AJR issue were stacked all over the convention space in Columbus, Ohio, in late October of 2000, too. The APJ article, as I described it later for New Internationalist, had this to say about Cheney:

"When he accepted the Vice-Presidential nomination in August 2000, Cheney said he would offer Americans 'a stiff dose of truth'. Not necessarily what one would expect from his past pattern of bobbing, weaving and dissembling. During the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama and the 1991 Gulf War, as Secretary of Defense Cheney ran the Pentagon with an iron fist, including unprecedented restrictions on the press. Ironically, one of the ink-stained wretches who felt Cheney's wrath was Time photojournalist Warren Bocxe. The ungrateful scribe was blindfolded and detained for 30 hours (by fellow Americans, not Iraqis) for allegedly violating Defense Department press restrictions. Working with sidekick General Colin Powell (now Bush's Secretary of State) Cheney exaggerated the accuracy of U.S. missile strikes, covered up mistakes, and in the words of one ABC TV producer 'duped' the media. David Hackworth, an ex-Army Colonel who covered the war for Newsweek was blunt: 'The American people did not get the truth.'"

Finally - not to flog a dead press corpse, but it is important to recall the context of these remarks - only a few weeks prior to that convention, and common knowledge to all those assembled in Columbus, Ohio on the eve of the 2000 election, was the incident on the campaign trail when George W. Bush called Adam Clymer of the New York Times, "a Major League asshole" in front of a huge crowd of people. The press covered this appalling collapse of presidential timber - this veritable assault to their own freaking profession - as a sort of joke.

Bush, as usual in 2000, was given a free pass from the press corpse while Al Gore's every utterance was deconstructed and debated to the most absurdly minute detail. Some reporters even went to the masochistic length of waving Bush's insult to the Times' well-respected White House correspondent off because the candidate apparently was not aware the microphone was turned on when he was running his potty mouth. (And yet, given the appalling behavior of the Bush team since taking over our government, I wonder if he weren't actually, and not so slyly, issuing an advance warning to ALL journalists that they, to paraphrase Ari Fleischer: "Better watch what they say...")

In light of these bits of information - a perfect wave of prophecy available to every "journalist" at the conference - I felt comfortable discussing the dubious relationship the press was likely to have with a Bush-Cheney administration. So, on awards' night at that SPJ convention in Columbus, I found myself seated at a large round table that contained members of a NPR affiliate team that had won an award, a couple of TV journalists (yes, I know, an oxymoron), a well known "media critic", and director of a journalism think tank in Washington D.C.

I decided to "market-test" my thesis. That is, my opening icebreaker was something like: "I wonder if journalists have really thought about how bad things will be for them if Bush and Cheney are elected." (Little did I suspect that they would be selected, not elected; I was giving them the benefit of the doubt.) I also expressed that I thought the press had been bending over backwards to prop up the mentally-challenged Bush and the ethically-challenged Cheney, and that the Wall Street Journal piece was a welcome breath of fresh air.

Though I have long since ceased expecting a table full of American journalists to be anything but a bunch of bootlicking sycophants for the corporate state, I fully expected at least a spirited discussion at the time. I was completely unprepared for the reaction I got. The NPRers collectively fixed me with doe-like eyes and silently registered their disdain for my line of discussion. The media critic looked distracted, as if peeved that he hadn't been the first to break the ice. And the nationally known press pundit upbraided me, in a loud and pompous inside-the-beltway manner that tacitly reminded me of why I am glad I no longer live in Washington D.C., for even suggesting that journalists might all have a "liberal agenda".

Say what? I never suggested that journalists had to be "liberal" or that they could not harbor favorable opinions toward Bush. I simply cited the two most prominent pieces of journalism being bandied about at a professional journalists convention - articles from two staid, respected and even conservative venues - and wondered aloud whether journalists had really thought through what it was going to be like if Bush was elected President. The word "liberal" had not passed my lips. Where did this pompous windbag get "liberal" out of what I said?

After that incendiary opening, the discussion petered out into a discussion of "trends" and celebrities ("Did everyone see MC Hammer speak in the ballroom today?!" one bubbly TV reporter chirped), and I soon found myself checking my wristwatch every fifteen minutes or so. I felt the night would never end. (Full disclosure: I was there to cheer on my wife, who'd won a fully deserved national award for her newspaper column.) All I could think about was, with the exception of my lovely and talented wife, what a passel of puke-stained pimps were at my table, and I secretly savored the fact that I am not a "journalist", never have been, never will be.

So, flash forward nearly two years and-wouldn't you know it? - I opened the New York Times editorial page the other week and there was a hand-wringing screed from the famous "press expert" who'd upbraided me at that convention. He was whining about how bad a job the press had been doing in covering the Bush administration. He was, in effect, giving the press corpse its last rites, the prose equivalent of hopping up and down in a hissy fit.

By now, sadly, stories by American press experts about the failings of the American press are about as valid as think pieces by CEO's about corporate scandals or lectures on ethics by Newt Gingrich. I take no solace from having warned these pathetic wretches that night in Columbus, Ohio. I wasn't bringing obscure news to them from far away. I wasn't venturing out of the "mainstream" or the "status quo", which is their very life blood. I wasn't even being "liberal".

I was - ah, yes, now I see what was going on! - I was only telling them things that they knew were true but simply did not want to hear.