Thomas Sowell has created a brand new award in the field of journalism and he has declared its first winner. And a very special award it is.
Events of this past year have shown the need for a special award in journalism for those who think that the purpose of reporting news is to cause the public to adopt the political views of those who do the reporting. Therefore this column announces the first annual Joseph Goebbels award for that journalist who best exemplifies the spirit and the practice that Dr. Goebbels pioneered.
For people too young to remember or too unschooled in history to know, Dr. Joseph Goebbels was the minister of propaganda in the Nazi regime back in the 1930s and 1940s. Facts never distracted him from his mission nor did a lack of facts inhibit his zeal...
No need to prolong the suspense. This year's Joseph Goebbels award goes by a narrow but decisive margin to CBS News anchorman Dan Rather for his planned broadcast on "60 Minutes" -- just days before the election -- to discredit President Bush's National Guard service 30 years earlier. Leave aside for the moment the fact that discrepancies in the documents he relied on have convinced experts and many others that they were forgeries. Why was what George W. Bush did or didn't do 30 years earlier "news" in 2004?
It was news by Dr. Goebbels' standard -- something that could lead to desired political reactions by the audience. Waiting until it would have been virtually impossible for an effective answer to be made before election day was in the same Goebbels spirit. Had the documents been real, Dan Rather would still have been a strong contender for the award. The fact that virtually everyone, with the notable exception of Mr. Rather, now regards those documents as fake -- instead of simply "not authenticated" -- makes Dan Rather the clear winner of the Joseph Goebbels award for 2004.
Difficult as it may be to imagine, there was serious competition for this award. Ted Koppel made an extraordinary bid to take the prize with his Swift Boat reporting, and in an ordinary year I'm sure he would have won it going away.
Dan Rather's closest competition for the Joseph Goebbels award was Ted Koppel, whose "Nightline" broadcast went to a Communist country to get witnesses to speak on camera -- with a Communist official present -- to discredit what the Swift Boat Veterans had said about an incident involving John Kerry during the Vietnam war.
Not one of the American eyewitnesses, who could have spoken freely in a free country, was interviewed in this "Nightline" broadcast.
That's strong competition for the Joseph Goebbels award but Rather wins narrowly on the basis of potential impact, which is after all the whole purpose of propaganda. However, with Dan Rather retiring in 2005, Ted Koppel might well qualify for next year's award.
Under ordinary circumstances I might have ignored the creation of this new award for fear of invoking Godwin's Law, but 2004 has been an extraordinary year.
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