Saturday, May 26, 2007
Watchdogs or Lapdogs
The news media play an important role as watchdogs of government. When they fail to do their job as safeguards of democracy, we suffer as a people from despotism which frequently leads to bad decisions. The news media revealed criminal activity in the Nixon administration. For a number of years it remained a strong and viable force to keep government in check. However, following 9/11 the press failed to provide alternative viewpoints that might have prevented the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Helen Thomas, the veteran Whitehouse reporter described the actions of the media during this period as one of lapdogs rather than watchdog. Had the media fulfilled their role the U.S. invasion of Iraq might have been averted.
A new generation of reporters are covering the Whitehouse – ones that don't remember the Nixon years. They were also restrained by a prevalent view among Americans that the news media are "too critical of America." In 2005 a survey of about 1500 Americans by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed an increasing political polarization in America and found an overwhelming dissatisfaction with news organizations.
Helen Thomas in Watchdogs of democracy (2006) Thomas who has a repetition as a hard hitting reporter no longer works for a wire service and so doesn't get first shot at questions of the president or his press secretary. In addition, Pres. Bush has kept her off his A-list so she can't ask questions at all.
She quotes Bush as saying: "I'm the commander, see …. I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. [I] don't feel I owe anybody an explanation." Bush told Brit Hume, a Fox news correspondent, that he doesn't get his news from newspapers, radio or television. Instead, according to Bush, the best source for news is objective sources. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what is happening in the world." Unfortunately, Bush is renowned for his unwillingness to tolerate opposition from his staff, so it is likely that he doesn't get critical viewpoints.
An eternal spotlight on public officials is the best way to keep them honest. In the months prior to the invasion of Iraq, reporters were bombarded with misleading "spin" from the government, which was played in the press as gospel. (Thomas, p. 136) The administration stayed on message for two years and the country traumatized by 9/11 was easily convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, had ties to Al Qaeda, and was a threat to the United States. The press bought into this message and even spread it to the pubic.
One of the major supporters of the war effort was Times reporter Judith Miller who got much of her information for stories from defector Ahmad Chalabi, who was on the Pentagon payroll. Embedded with American soldiers in Iraq she was misled to report that soldiers had found the paraphernalia(?). On May 26, 2004, the New York Times published a "self-critical" note to its readers apologizing for the paper's "sometimes erroneous reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" before the invasion and during the early days of occupation. The Washington Post's (p. 140)
Even following this self analysis the news media failed to provide critical coverage of what led up to the Iraq war. In May 2005 the Times of London revealed the so-called Downing Street memo which indicated that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein through military action. Bloggers finally embarrassed the newspaper elite to provide some coverage of the memo, but even then it was buried in the back pages of the papers. The Washington Post discounted the memo as old news; the Los Angeles Times didn't see the value of the memo; the New York Times buried it in the 10th paragraph of a story; and USA Today questioned the timing of the leak which occurred just before the British elections.
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