You Can't Have a Functioning Democracy With a Malfunctioning Press
By Randolph T. Holhut
www.OpEdNews.com
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - It took a whiff of gay sex and the fear of
bloggers gone wild to get the corporate press somewhat interested in
the story of James "Jeff Gannon" Guckert, the phony reporter who
somehow spent nearly two years infiltrating the White House press
corps at the behest of the Republican Party.
Combined with the revelations over the past couple of months of
three B-list conservative columnists - Armstrong Williams, Maggie
Gallagher and Michael McMannus - getting caught taking payoffs from
the government to spread Bush administration propaganda and there
suddenly is an awareness that perhaps the White House hasn't been
playing fair.
Then you remember the phony TV news reports last year touting
benefits of Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan that had Karen
Ryan and Alberto Garcia - employees of the Department of Health and
Human Services posing as journalists - and find out that they got
their money from the same place Armstrong Williams did, the
Washington PR firm Ketchum Communications, which received $97
million of the Bush administration's $250 million it set aside for
selling its political ideas. We don't know where the rest of the
money ended up.
Then you remember that the Pentagon tried to set up a department of
misinformation, the Office of Strategic Influence, to create its own
fake news for global distribution. That never got off the ground,
but if you subscribe to Dish Network, you can watch The Pentagon
Channel and see military propaganda round the clock.
But you look at the press coverage that the Bush administration has
gotten over the past four years and you wonder, what's the point?
Why pay off columnists, plant fake journalists in the White House
press room or fabricate fake news reports when the vast majority of
the unbribed, non-fake reporters on the White House beat are doing a
fine job on their own telling people exactly what the Bush
administration wants them to hear.
President Bush has set a new standard for dealing with the press, or
as he calls them, "the filter." He and his White House staff hold
the press in utter contempt. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew
Card told The New Yorker last year: "They don't represent the public
any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who
represent the public stood for election. I don't believe you have a
check-and-balance function."
As a result, access to the Bush team is tightly controlled. If a
reporter does get to talk with someone, they will likely hear the
approved talking points of the day recited by rote. Every public
event is completely scripted and held in front of hand-picked
loyalists. Reporters that don't play along get frozen out.
Stonewalling reporters and attempting to de-legitimize journalism is
one thing. The Bush administration's fetish for secrecy is another.
They have worked tirelessly to hide from public view many of the
federal government's operations and reverse a decades-long trend of
more openness in government.
If pressed, they will cite the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as the reason
for making increasing amounts of information unavailable to
citizens. But the drive toward increased secrecy was underway from
the first day President Bush took office, and only accelerated after
Sept. 11.
The number of documents classified by the Bush administration has
increased by more than 50 percent since 2001.
As a matter of policy, the Bush administration has decided to be an
advocate of greater secrecy. It has narrowed the reach of the
federal Freedom of Information Act. Agencies are now encouraged to
delay and discourage anyone seeking information and charge
exorbitant fees for research and copying. If all else fails,
agencies are told to find whatever technical grounds necessary to
reject the requests outright.
And still, the Bush administration feels the need to fake the news,
pay off reporters and manipulate the press. Perhaps Robert Parry of
Consortium News is correct when he recently described what the Bush
administration is doing as "the 'Putin-izing' of American politics,
where one side's dominance of media, financial resources and the
ability to intimidate opponents is overwhelming - as now exists in
Russia under President Vladimir Putin."
For all the usual whining by conservatives about the evils of the
liberal media, the conservatives have assembled a powerful media
apparatus of its own and it's forcing the major news outlets to
swing rightward. They have succeed in changing the game to the point
where facts no longer have inherent value and are seen as biased if
they conflict with the policy goals of conservatives.
It's no secret that journalists get their careers and reputations
damaged or destroyed if they report on information that conflicts
with the conservative spin. The fear is pervasive and real at the
highest levels of the corporate media food chain. The result is that
most of what we see, hear and read reflects what the Bush
administration wants us to see, hear and read. You can find
dissenting viewpoints, but it takes more effort to find them than
the average person is willing to spend.
However, the question remains that if you already have that much
power to control the news, why do you need to fake it?
From the lies to convince the nation of the need to invade Iraq to
the lies about the need to privatize Social Security, it takes more
than the tightest news management ever seen to get away with it all.
You have to lie, lie and lie some more. Lie constantly and with the
straightest of faces. Be so brazen with your lies that you
practically dare the press to call you on it, all the while knowing
that they won't because too many reporters are too scared to do so.
Nothing less than complete control of the message will do for the
Bush White House.
It seems almost old fashioned to think of the press as a critical
piece of a functioning democracy. But it is. And when it can't do
its job, we all lose and the Bush administration becomes a step
closer to achieving its dream of total dominance of national
politics - a one-party state where elections are just for show,
where Democrats have little chance of winning and all the
traditional checks and balances on power have withered away.
The people's right to know no longer seems to matter and even more
disturbing, too many people don't care. The Bush administration is
happy to encourage this apathy. They'll do anything, including
bribery and trickery, to ensure that the American people won't
notice and won't care about the destruction of their democracy.<
Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more
than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade
Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.
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