MediaBloodhound: Special Report: Moyers, Wolf, and Journalism in Crisis (Part II)

(Read Part I here.)

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. --Naomi Wolf

Legalizing torture. Establishing secret gulags. Nullifying habeas corpus. Spying on average Americans. Abusing presidential signing statements. Chilling free speech and freedom of the press with accusations of treason.

The establishment media’s complicity in selling the war in Iraq helped to open a Pandora’s box of unimaginable proportions. In addition to the subsequent unraveling of our Constitution and our democracy’s most sacrosanct principles (which added to our plummeting standing in the world), over 3,375 U.S. soldiers and, by some estimates, over half a million Iraqis have lost their lives since the invasion; a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concluded the Iraq War has sharply increased global terrorism; and Afghanistan is once again largely under the control of the Taliban.

All of that would be damning enough, but compounding this journalistic negligence is the establishment media’s sustained and ongoing complicity.

Ask yourself this:

Who facilitated the environment to make torture a debatable issue?

Who permitted Bush administration officials to boast of the Taliban’s defeat in Afghanistan long after clear evidence showed otherwise?

Who allowed the Pentagon and the White House to scapegoat a few low-level grunts for the entire Abu Ghraib scandal even though documents clearly show that torture and its foundations were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, from then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to torture architect Alberto Gonzales to President Bush and Vice President Cheney?

Who focused round-the-clock coverage on the arrest of John Mark Karr and death of Anna Nicole Smith yet barely batted an eye at the Military Commissions Act, one of the most alarming anti-democratic laws in our nation’s history, which made torture permissible, whacked habeas corpus, and granted the president sole power to detain and disappear any American citizen he alone deems an “enemy combatant”?

Who even sat on their hands while this White House threatened their very livelihood, their basic right to report the facts, as in the case of New York Times editor Bill Keller, besieged by threats of treason and execution for breaking the story of the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens (despite the fact The Times had sat on the story for a year)?

Of course our establishment media, that’s who. And through disingenuous frames, negligent omission, underreporting or total disregard, its members continue to grease the wheels of our ever eroding democracy.

In “Fascist America, In Ten Easy Steps,” Naomi Wolf highlights a frightening example of encroaching fascism that occurred just over two months, one that received little or no attention in mainstream news outlets:

Professor Walter F. Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list.”

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Wolf cautions, “We need to look at history and face the ‘what ifs.’ For if we keep going down this road, the ‘end of America’ could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now."

But if our nation’s biggest news outlets aren’t reporting and discussing such stories or signify their insignificance by relegating them to the back pages, it greatly hinders the average American’s ability to see this writing on the wall, to break through the natural incredulity that indeed this is occurring on American soil, to our neighbors, to respected members of our communities.

Packaging is key, too.

Consider the April 29th story on the front page of The New York Times, “U.S. Asks Court to Limit Lawyers at Guantanamo.” First, there’s the use of “U.S.” instead of “White House” or “Bush administration” or even “U.S. government” or “Justice Department.” According to polls, the majority of U.S. citizens (even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for that matter) certainly do not agree with how detainees are being treated at Guantanamo and would think it perplexing at best and unconscionable at worst to reduce the detainees’ access to their lawyers.

While the article, which appeared on the cover of The Times, did include quotes from lawyers who rebuked these proposals, it was frontloaded (and reinforced by that headline) with the administration’s argument. The legal community, in fact, erupted over these latest efforts by the Justice Department. So what happened? The next day The Times reported their response in an article titled “Bar Criticizes Proposed Detainee Rules,” a 270-word article, less than a quarter of the size of the 1,262-word front-page spread from the day before. And the page on which it was printed? The very bottom of A15. Here’s the opening line: “The Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantánamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers, the New York City Bar says.”

Imagine the impact this story might have had if it was given equal visibility and depth of coverage. Instead, this damning news nugget, which actually reflects the overwhelming opinion of Americans, not only escapes wider view but is also almost certain not to find its way onto the nightly news programs and into our national political discourse.

Moreover, nearly daily in alternative media sources and often buried within our national papers of record, like The Times or Washington Post, stories of this administration’s ceaseless attempts to override the Constitution, cite unprecedented executive privilege and further impinge on our citizens’ civil liberties surface and resurface as if in a vacuum separate from the media establishment’s world, where chummy press conferences exhume more laughs than facts, and conflicts of interest, like attendance at lavish state dinners, go on unabated.

Forget about the recent news that the U.S. Army has officially designated American journalists “non-traditional threats,” lumping them into the same category as drug cartels, warlords and al Qaeda. Never mind that more than one-fifth of the detainees at Guatanamo Bay already cleared for release may languish there for months or years to come. Or that the Bush administration is still working hard to illegally spy on average Americans.

What was on our national media’s radar as these stories recently unfolded? The state of John Edwards' hair.

Like soothsayers examining tea leaves, Washington pundits combed through the tale of Edwards’ pricey haircut to report that it cast doubt on everything from his ability to lead to his track record of fighting for the poor and middle class.

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, this kind of stupidity still passes as serious news and substantive discourse among the media elites in Washington. While proponents of media reform and alternative news outlets are growing in popularity and there have been encouraging signs in pushing the occasional unreported or underreported story into the mainstream while beating back some ludicrous received notions, members of the establishment media show no more willingness to question their methods than they do to admit their mistakes leading up to the war.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, in commenting on David Halberstam’s untimely death, wrote:

If there was one thing above all else that David taught us, it was to be skeptical of official accounts, to stay always on guard against the lies, fabrications, half-truths, misrepresentations, exaggerations and all other manifestations of falsehood that are fired at us like machine-gun bullets by government officials and others in high places, often with lethal results.

“You have to keep digging,” he would say, “keep asking questions, because otherwise you’ll be seduced or brainwashed into the idea that it’s somehow a great privilege, an honor, to report the lies they’ve been feeding you.”

Adhering to the basic tenets of sound journalism is not brain surgery, but it shouldn’t be taken lightly either. It involves, or should involve, a public trust. Somewhere along the line too many in our mainstream media forgot that the honor and privilege of being a journalist is in providing oversight to our elected officials and reporting the truth to the American people.