"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
In News Biz, It's Whatever Floats Your Swift Boat
Posted 9:38 p.m., Aug. 30, 2004
| The right of free public expression does include the right to be in error. Liberty is experimental. Debate itself could not exist unless wrong opinions could be rightfully offered by those who suppose them to be right. But the assumption that the man in error is actually trying for truth is the essence of his claim for freedom. What the moral right does not cover is the right to be deliberately or irresponsibly in error.
-- "A Free and Responsible Press,"
edited by Robert Leigh (1947)So a guy walks into a newsroom, approaches a reporter with what he insists is hot, hot, hot news. You've got to hear me out about this, he intones, this is big, a career-maker for you, guaranteed. The reporter has heard that one before but he bites: Fine, whattaya got?
The mayor, this stranger insists, is lying about his military record. People ought to know, since he's running for reelection on a lie. Claims he was a Navy Seal in 'Nam. Never happened. I know, the stranger says, I commanded the unit he was supposed to be in. Never saw him. He wasn't there.
Really, the reporter says. Got any documentation to prove any of this? No, the stranger admits. Nothing, no dated duty roster, no unit photo? Do you have anything to indicate where the mayor really was, if not with the Seals? Do you have proof that you were even in this unit, or that you were there when the mayor was supposed to be there?
No, the guy says, I got nothing like that, but believe me, this is a huge story! You've got to pursue this, the guy shouts. This raises questions! If you don't, it just proves your liberal bias!
Thanks for coming by, the reporter says. I'm only gonna commit to one thing: I'll shake the trees a bit, see what falls. I'll try to dig up the records you don't have and try to verify this, one way or the other. If I find anything worth pursuing, I will. But I'm not running anything until I verify these claims.
As if you couldn't tell, the preceding scenario is entirely fictitious despite its similarities to recent events. In the present news climate, it's nigh on impossible. Maybe this is the way things used to work, but we're living in a new jungle now.
Morphing Perception
I mention this, obviously, because this is pretty much the same kind of flimsy material that was used to cloak John Kerry with the liar's cape regarding his service in Vietnam 35 years ago.
Innuendo and allegations, some of them contradictory claims by people who once lauded Kerry, went unchallenged during a crucial period, right after these "swift boat" ads came out in just three swing-state markets. Repetition by cable news services and right-wing radio of charges that went unchallenged, though repeated by so-called "straight media," were allowed to percolate to the point where the fallacy became fact, perception reality.
And now, if the latest polls are to be believed, John Kerry is losing the election.
Far worse than that, the nation is distracted from talking about things that matter now, not the least of which is Alan Greenspan's renewed call to axe Medicare and Social Security benefits for Baby Boomers, before they drain the nation's coffers. In Iraq, a Shiite cleric who won't even talk to Americans has brokered a deal to end fighting in Najaf that essentially leaves the U.S. in no different a position than when it arrived, and the fighting against Moqtada al Sadr has simply been moved up the road a bit, to Baghdad, where it is again raging. (And, recent word has it, our soldiers in Iraq are running out of bullets). Now we have to think about Israel's possible spy in the Pentagon.
But the ongoing campaign is about none of that; it isn't allowed to be. Instead, the media agenda has been set by a few angry veterans and a few rich Texans, creating a tempest over long-ago swift-boat raids, triggered by John Kerry's audacity to truthfully talking about well-documented atrocities in Vietnam.
I won't even bother complaining about those guys. They've got an agenda and they will try to exercise it. They can be mad if they want to be, and the law allows them to do what they're doing.
My problem is with my own industry, the news business.
Freedom's Not Absolute
I was listening to the Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant on the "Al Franken Show" on Aug. 26, and he expressed this same worry--that the news business is giving up its responsibility to check facts, not simply serve as a "transmission belt" for malicious accusations and innuendo.
After doing exactly that, the New York Times and Washington Post last week began running stories that cut down the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on most of their points. (Curiously, after discrediting the group, the Post then ran a Sunday story that seemed to give equal credibility to Kerry's version of events--which are backed up by both his crewmates and the paper trail.)
Leonard Downie Jr., the paper's executive editor, defended that decision in the newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher.
We have printed the facts and some of those facts have undermined Kerry's opponents. We are not judging the credibility of Kerry or the [Swift Boat] Veterans, we just print the facts.
-- Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor, Washington Post,
....
The Washington Post should not even be running such a story ... in the first place. Len Downie and the paper's other editors would undoubtedly argue that the story represents the Post's tenacity for getting to the truth, without fear or favor. But what the story actually proves is that a bunch of liars who have in the past contradicted their own current statements can, if their lies are outrageous enough and if they have enough money, control the media agenda and get even the most respected media outlets in the country to focus on picayune 'truths' while missing the larger story.
-- Michael Tomaskey, The American ProspectWhat brings me to the brink of despondency about this is that the far right, with its steady war-drum beat about "liberal media bias" has in effect discredited genuine journalistic veracity, and now with the rise of FOX News and right-wing radio, they've got the organs they need to push a propagandistic agenda onto the mainstream. And the mainstream is letting it happen.
Now, even if a newspaper or broadcast outlet were to resist the temptation to clamor for ever-higher ratings and circulation, it would get whomped with allegations that it is "covering up the facts" when it is in fact acting responsibily. Even when, as in the swift boat case, "the facts" appear not to be facts, but unproven--and quite likely baseless--raw allegations.
This is what Oliphant had to say to Franken that grabbed my attention and made me want to write this column:
Today, we publish or we broadcast the mere fact of the accusation, regardless of whether it's filled with helium. That's what's changed in our business. I don't really care what the New York Times did last week or what the Washington Post did on Sunday. It was late. And we served as transmission belts for this stuff without ever checking on its accuracy. That's the way the news business is run these days.
-- Tom Oliphant,
"The Al Franken Show," Aug. 26, 2004Oliphant, a Boston Globe columnist of many years' standing, points out that the press is shirking its obligations to accuracy, responsibility and fairness at its own peril. Its abuses cost it the credibility that is its only stock in trade. And he even utters what for a journalist is the unutterable, suggesting that the press might need a lesson that only a judge can deliver.
I've begun to think this isn't going to stop until some judge somewhere in some libel action just finally says, 'I've had it. You people don't deserve the First Amendment protection you claim. And I'm finding for the defendant in this case, and the award is $50 million.'It's not as though the constitutional things don't mean anything to me, I remember when they meant everything. But a constitutional protection like the one we have, it's not a natural right, it doesn't come from the Creator. It came from the Constitution. And what the scholars always say is it's a right, freedom of the press, that was given in the expectation of its responsible exercise. And if it ain't responsible, maybe it's time to let libel law get a little tougher.
-- Tom Oliphant,
"The Al Franken Show," Aug. 26, 2004This idea isn't new. It was laid out in stark terms by The Commission on the Freedom of the Press--a group that included Arthur M. Schlesinger, Archibald MacLeish, Reinhold Niebuhr and several other luminaries, which issued the report, "A Free and Responsible Press" in 1947. The group maintained that the press must be free in order to contribute its part to a free society. But the story, the commission insisted, doesn't end there.
This implies that the press must also be accountable. ... Freedom of the press for the coming period can only continue as an accountable freedom. Its moral right will be conditioned on its acceptance of this accountability. Its legal right will stand unaltered as its moral duty is performed.
-- "A Free and Responsible Press," edited by Robert Leigh (1947)
-- Kevin Featherly|
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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
