Press incentives

Thanks to the growth of talk radio and the explosion of weblogs with their vast collective readership, mainstream media have lost their monopoly power to shape public opinion. I confess to some surprise at their reaction to this development, although I suppose denial would make for a simple explanation. In my view the sensible reaction would be to throw in the towel. By that I mean they should resort to balanced reporting of the facts. Think of the boost it would give to their credibility, to say nothing of the embarrassment it would save them over the shoddy jobs they often do.

It hasn’t happened. If anything advocacy journalism has grown. In fact it's blossomed into a full scale war on the Administration.

During the golden age of TV news I would often reply in disgust to the TV screen, "No, Walter. That's really not the way it is!"  Fortunately those days of futility are gone, and now when somebody might wish to offer a different perspective it's not just backtalk to a TV screen.  The interactive nature of the new media that makes it all possible.

For some journalists it's never been enough just to report the news. There's always been the higher purpose of educating the public - not just relating facts, but saying what the facts mean. Interpretation. Unfortunately, pre-determined media interpretations have not always been supported by the facts. That was easy to fix in the old days. When inconvenient facts got in the way of a good conclusion, they could just be ignored, or if they had to be reported, it would be way in the back of the newspaper where hardly anybody would read them.

But giving prominent coverage to some things and scant coverage to others, is no longer enough to push public opinion as far as mainstream media would apparently like it to go. The effect of the new media is to keep stories alive that might otherwise be ignored, and to kill stories that the mainstream press would like to keep alive, by showing them up for what they are. 

To counteract this effect and to try to bring more pressure to bear on public opinion, the press has stepped up their forays, crossing the line between reporting the news and taking a more active part in making it. With the Scooter Libby case, the CIA/Press war against the White House has gotten to the point where Media Personalities will appear in court.  I'll bet they had no idea that was coming when the nifty idea of discrediting the “the sixteen words” was concocted.

Was it a simple smear, gone awry?  In his eight day trip to Niger, much of it spent drinking mint tea, Ambassador Joe was supposed to have destroyed the Bush Administration's State of the Union rationale for the invasion of Iraq.  On a morning shortly after the ambassador's accusatory column hit the news stands, Tim Russert could be heard on Imus in the Morning, allowing in grave tones what a serious thing indeed, if the Administration had ignored contradictory intelligence when they made their case for war.  The entire mainstream press went along, pretending that there was a serious scandal.

As it turns out, there was nothing in the way of contradictory intelligence, or any other kind of intelligence, in Wilson's story. But that didn't stop the media from embracing it as gospel.  It was an election year.

But the story took a different twist. The press was unable to move out of shrapnel range after they dropped their bombshell on the Administration. The story became the "outing of Valerie Plame", and in another twist, it became the Special Prosecutor's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame. It was largely at the insistence of the media. A year of elaborate deception saw the press demanding the Special Prosecutor find out who leaked Plame's identity when they knew it all along.  Well, they got their wish.

But the "outing" charge wouldn't stick for a minute, and the crime to be decided now, is whether or not Scooter Libby lied to the grand jury and obstructed the investigation. His story, you see, doesn't match certain Media Personalities' stories. Since it's Libby's word against theirs, the Media Personalities will likely have to explain in court exactly what theirs are. To their disadvantage, deals to limit questioning, that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald had offered in return for their grand jury testimony, won't carry over to the trial. Defense lawyers get to grill 'em. This could turn out to be more than just some embarrassing moments for Media Darlings as secondary blasts are detonated from Ambassador Joe's original bombshell.

Now, there's an even bigger bombshell in the works. The leak of the NSA terrorist surveillance program represents a new opportunity for the press to gain uncomfortable exposure to the U.S. criminal justice system. While there has been a good deal of hyperventilation over the legality of the surveillance itself, the Senate has pretty well conceded that the President has the authority to collect foreign intelligence from international phone calls, and that the program is a valuable tool in the war on terror. They plan no investigation of it.

Over on the left, hopes that Bush will be found guilty of a crime against civil liberties are going dark. At the same time, there is little doubt that disclosure of the top secret terrorist surveillance program is itself a crime. After letting the story sit for a year on the shelf, the New York Times editors decided to publish it, putting themselves in the Justice Department's cross hairs. A criminal investigation has been initiated that could well lead to a grand jury. In an editorial in the New York Times, CIA Director Porter Goss had this to say:

Government employees have used statutory procedures — including internal channels at their agencies — on countless occasions to correct abuses without risk of retribution and while protecting information critical to our national defense.

On the other hand, those who choose to bypass the law and go straight to the press are not noble, honorable or patriotic. Nor are they whistleblowers. Instead they are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk. It is unconscionable to compromise national security information and then seek protection as a whistleblower to forestall punishment.

Mr. Goss doesn't mention in his editorial that publication by the press could itself be criminal.  Even though charges have not yet materialized, pre-emptive strikes are under way.  News attacks against the Administration appear daily, and they will intensify. Look at the field day they had with Vice President Cheney's hunting accident. 

Members of the mainstream media are up to their necks in both of these cases, and their colleagues are closing ranks with them.  If one takes a hit they all do, especially in the NSA case.  That one smacks of treason, and with the press railing against the Administration in one voice, if one is guilty they will all be tarred.  The war is escalating.  The press will plead and mislead the Plame and the NSA cases in the court of public opinion, making every effort to convince the American people that the Bush Administration is guilty of something - anything.  They say the best defense is a good offense, and there's more than just pride at stake here.

Comments

[anonymous]

Plame was under cover in the US investigating using the NSA, what she found there was so horrible that we had to get the truth out about the investigation of political parties by the US govern
ment. Plame let the truth be known about the NSA being used by the US government to investigate domestic political parties. She is a true American hero and patriot and making America safe for all Americans and......... the world.

[The Gray Monk]

This will be an interesting case, one that will expose a great deal of the hypocrisy of the "media" and of the "civil liberties" arguments. After all, in the 1950's Britain's nuclear and military secrets were handed to the Russians under the guise of "civil liberty" and "humanitarian" interests by that traitor Kim Philby and his fellow "Cambridge spies".

There are times when reporters who compromise national security deserve everything they get. Watergate was one thing, exposing a politician's breaking the law; exposing an instrument of State when it is operating within the law to defend the nation, is another. That is treason.

[Tom Bowler]

Anon, I think you're a bit confused. I'll be very surprised if it turns out that Valerie Plame had anything at all to do with the NSA terrorist monitoring at any time in her career.

Monk, you bring up an excellent point when you make the distinction between the NSA monitoring and Nixon's Watergate dirty tricks.