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Newsweek Debacle: A Treasonous Press?
Posted 2:39 p.m., May 20, 2005
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Be it farther enacted, that if any person shall write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress ... or the President ... with intent to defame the said government ... then such person, being thereof convicted ... shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $2,000, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.
--The Sedition Act:
An Act for the Punishment
of Certain Crimes
Against the United States
(1798)
I had a fairly painful conversation with one of my dearest friends yesterday about a topic that wouldn't normally intrude on our happy discussions: Newsweek magazine.
We were talking about the Newsweek report, now retracted, indicating--based on the testimony of an unidentified source--that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed pages of the Koran down a toilet in an effort to break detainees and extract information. That report, allegedly, resulted in murderous riots that led to a series of killings in Afghanistan.
My buddy--I will identify him only as "F." (for "friend")--is perhaps my best pal, aside from the object of my affections, Tammy. We are the same age, grew up in the same forested neck of northern Wisconsin, and are cut from the same working-class cloth. He lives a workingman's life and did not opt to go to college, though he did complete intensive and demanding training as a skilled tradesman. Like most Americans, he possesses a sturdy intelligence, even if he has not been exposed to the likes of Shakespeare and Spinoza.
Like anyone, certainly like myself, F. has his own unique characteristics and human foibles. So it is highly dubious for me to hold F. up as any kind of bellwether of the "garage logic" that permeates much of the nation. Nonetheless, I do tend to do that.
F., for instance, likes to watch O'Reilly, gets a charge out of the fireworks there. He is proudly patriotic. But he also is a union man, and has expressed some distaste for the way Republican administrations since Reagan have stood by while the power and clout of labor unions have been stripped away like some sergeant being busted down to private. Though F. sometimes expresses his opinions explosively, when measured out his beliefs are pretty moderate, rooted in common sense. I don't think he did, but he could easily have voted for Jesse Ventura.
Bottom line, I love F. and I respect his opinions. (If you reject him out of hand because he watches FOX-TV and O'Reilly, let me just mention this to you--so does the iconic left-wing journalist Nat Hentoff, as Hentoff told me directly last year, not just to get a gauge on the "enemy" but to glean information that isn't made available elsewhere.)
F. and I sometimes disagree. But rarely with the passion that we built up last night discussing Newsweek.
'Why Do They Hate the President?'
F. brought up the subject with a genuine sense of regret and confusion. "I just don't understand," he said softly, "why anyone would hate the president so much that they would print something like this and get so many people killed, just so that they can hurt our leader politically."
Pardon my French, but, for Christ's sake!
Still, F. is hardly alone. The conservative blogger Dennis Prager puts forth the same idea: "Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of innocents and for damaging America." Others howl that this episode is just further proof that the "liberal media" hates all matters military. This is the position that F. takes, believing that Newsweek was intentionally unpatriotic for reporting the alleged incident--a position he says he would hold whether the story was true or not.
"I just can't imagine the justification for running something like this, knowing that it would mean little kids would get slaughtered," he says.
Thankfully, the right's most thoughtful columnist, David Brooks, rides to the rescue, or at least attempts to.
Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.
-- David Brooks,
"Bashing Newsweek,"
New York Times,
May 19, 2005
But in F.'s reality, that's not even the issue. He thinks the press should never publish "unpatriotic" material. How that is sussed out, of course, is the trouble, because F. and his ilk butt heads with folks like me who think it is the press' patriotic duty to report facts, particularly in war--excepting, of course, such essentials as troop movements, battlefield strategy and other pieces of military information that might get our people killed. (In the 1940s, to name one example, the Chicago Tribune stupidly reported that the Allies had cracked Japanese military communications encryption. Luckily, the Japanese apparently weren't subscribers, because they never changed the code. If they had, WWII would have been needlessly prolonged, and the outcome perhaps thrown into doubt.)
But one man's patriotism is another man's cowardice and treason, and vice versa.
F. noted correctly that during Vietnam, soldiers in the wake of the reporting of the My Lai massacre came home to scorn and derision, and got spit upon. It was an awful episode all around.
Therefore, the My Lai story, F. insists, should never have been published. I argued back that it was the press' obligation to report truthfully that policy in Vietnam had gone so hopelessly astray, and that soldiers were caught in such a maelstrom of confusion and violence that catastrophes like My Lai were spawned as a direct result, and that the American people had to know that.
Not if it meant that American soldiers would get spit on in airports, he retorted.
Fading Perspective
My problem with this has little, really, to do with F. It is the end result of my own admittedly suspect extrapolations, which suggest to me that many good Americans may be losing their head when it comes to a free press and the need for reporters to bring home sometimes disquieting facts, so that the people can pass measured judgment on controversial policy--particularly wartime policy--and either lend continued support or withdraw it based on shared, accumulated knowledge.
Recall that an erosion in faith toward the press' mission is already evident among the young. According to research published this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, more than one-third of 100,000 students surveyed felt that the First Amendment goes "too far" in guaranteeing freedom of speech, the press, worship and assembly. Only about 50 percent thought that newspapers should be allowed to publish stories not approved by the government.
Sedition Act II, anyone?
Anyone who knows anything about me and my career knows I am not the press' staunchest defender. I railed at the press' abuses and irresponsibilities during the Clinton/Lewinski era. I have criticized the media for its over-reliance on unaccountable, anonymous sources (a primary problem in Newsweek's current woes--though, full disclosure, I've done the same thing myself on rare occasions). I have complained about the race-horse, prognosticator's mentality that permeates political coverage, favoring gossipy oddsmaking over explanation and analysis. And I fret that the media is losing its public-service posture in favor of producing product and profits.
But I still believe in a free (and responsible) press.
Attitudes like those expressed by F., I maintain, are largely the product of raw fear, generated by the terrorism attacks of Sept. 11, exacerbated by Americans misunderstanding of the tenets of genuine Islam and by what I believe are the typically dehumanizing attitudes that usually are exhibited by peoples toward wartime enemies. (Think of those prejudice-baiting propaganda posters of infant-chomping "Nips" during World War II.)
Some of those attitudes, incidentally, I believe also can partly be pinned to the very real sins of the press, among them the ones I mentioned earlier, that have eroded the republic's faith in its news media. They are not without fault here.
It is these raw and blistered emotions that the political class--particular those currently in power--is exploiting right now. It is those fears, those prejudices, that indignation that the White House press secretary recently fed upon when he twisted Newsweek's arm to the point of snapping, calling for more cries of uncle even after the story had been--probably quite properly--retracted.
Again, thankfully, David Brooks is looking at this reasonably.
I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can't believe what I'm seeing. We're in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers. They're attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations.
-- David Brooks,
"Bashing Newsweek,"
New York Times,
May 19, 2005
-- Kevin Featherly
