Lean Left

Jeanne links together several important stories that paint a picture of the uselessness of American press.

The American press covered the bizarre press silence that surrounded the hostage crisis, but haven’t mentioned even the arrest, without explanation, of a journalist, who had just returned to Moscow from Beslan. Not that there’s anything unusual in that. The press has been under attack in Russia for a long time, without much interest over here. This continues to shock me because I expect our press to get angry about press censorship anywhere, but especially in a country in which our president says democracy is thriving.

(snip)

Notice that it isn’t our press that isn’t being arrested, because for the most part it’s simply going along with the censorship. The Washington Post’s reporter sat around Khartoum for nearly a month, waiting for permission to go to Darfur, and only went when she was able to accompany a delegation of French, American, and UN officials. The story that came out of that trip was a chilling and important one, on rape as means of ethnic cleansing, but it might have come much sooner.

(snip)

No one has ever asked whether soldiers returned from Iraq have died from injuries they recieved there? Once they leave Iraq their deaths may not count, and no American reporter has demanded to know what was going on?

This issue — the compromising and defanging of the American press — worries me more than any other issue, literally. A vibrant democracy requires a vibrant press — but our press is far, far form that. part of the problem is the introduction of essentially propaganda networks like FOX into the equation. Parisian press is not necessarily bad. The British press is very partisan, but it largely avoids the kinds of situations that e have in this country — where people who get their news primarily from FOX are much more likely to believe false statements about Iraq and al-Qaeda. That, in turn, is probably do to the fact that most of the British press is partisan: the Guardian has to deal with the fact that Murdoch’s papers are more than happy to call them on mistakes or bizarrely disconnected spin and vice versa. FOX has no such counterweight in the mainstream press in the US.

A larger part of the problem is the press’s faux objectivity. When person A says that 2 + 2 = 5, the New York Times will report that and then say that Person B “maintained that 2 +2 = 4″ instead of saying “Person A lied about the value of 2 + 2, stating it is 5 when in fact, it is 4.” This both plays into the hands of liars and shaders of the truth and creates the false impression that factual disputes are actually partisan disputes and thus ultimately unanswerable. This is partly do to the concentration on the horse race aspects of politics over the “boring” policy aspects, but it is also the result of decades of conservatives attacking reports for their alleged liberal biases. Reporters are now so afraid, so beaten up, so cringing in their nature as a class that they often refuse to state simple facts in their stories for fear of offending conservatives.

But the unwillingness to buck the system and the pathetic lack of in depth or long range reporting that Jeanne highlights is also a significant factor in the degradation of the American press. I and others on the left have spent quite a bit of time pointing out that the Bush Administration didn’t seem to think terrorism a high priority before 9/11. But neither did the press. I don’t have Lexus/Nexus access (and if someone does and can either correct me or verify my memory), but I have been a news/politics junky for a long time, and I do not remember anyone in the press giving sustained, in depth, prominent coverage to the problem of terrorism. There were spikes in the coverage after the first Towers bombing and Oklahoma City, but nothing sustained. The press operates like a hummingbird with ADD: it flits form one story to another manically, never staying in one place long enough to give readers/viewers anything like a reasoned look at an issue.

The American press is failing democracy. Without long term reporting on important issues and without a willingness to call bullshit bullshit, the press cannot and does not provide the American public with anything like the kind of accurate and complete information that a democracy thrives upon. We are left with, instead, a situation in which elections are determined solely by which propaganda operation is the best. That cannot be healthy for a democracy, but, unfortunately, I do not see the situation changing anytime soon.