Rise of the 'patriotic
journalist' By Robert Parry
Editor's note September 11,
2001 and subsequent events threw into sharp focus
the shortcomings of the media in the United
States. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the
media had been been in a steep decline for decades
prior to the terrorist attacks, as veteran US
journalist Robert Parry documents in the article
below.
The apex for the "skeptical
journalists" came in the mid-1970s when the press
followed up exposure of Richard Nixon's Watergate
scandal and disclosure of the Vietnam War's
Pentagon Papers with revelations of Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) abuses, such as illegal
spying on Americans and helping Chile's army oust
an elected government.
There were reasons
for this new press aggressiveness. After some
57,000 US soldiers had died in Vietnam during a
long war
fought for murky reasons,
many reporters no longer gave the government the
benefit of the doubt.
The press corps' new
rallying cry was the public's right to know, even
when the wrongdoing occurred in the secretive
world of national security.
But this
journalistic skepticism represented an affront to
government officials who had long enjoyed a
relatively free hand in the conduct of foreign
policy. The Wise Men and the Old Boys - the
stewards of the post-World War II era - now faced
a harder time lining up public consensus behind
any action.
This national security elite,
including then-CIA director George H W Bush,
viewed the post-Vietnam journalism as a threat to
America's ability to strike at its perceived
enemies around the world.
Yet, it was from
these ruins of distrust - the rubble of suspicion
left behind by Watergate and Vietnam - that the
conservative-leaning national security elite began
its climb back, eventually coming full circle,
gaining effective control of what a more
"patriotic" press would tell the people, before
stumbling into another disastrous war in Iraq.
Pike report One early turning
point in the switch from "skeptical" journalism to
"patriotic" journalism occurred in 1976 with the
blocking of Otis Pike's congressional report on
CIA misdeeds. CIA director Bush had lobbied behind
the scenes to convince Congress that suppressing
the report was important for national security.
But CBS news correspondent Daniel Schorr
got hold of the full document and decided that he
couldn't join in keeping the facts from the
public. He leaked the report to the Village Voice
– and was fired by CBS amid charges of reckless
journalism.
"The media's shift in
attention from the report's charges to their
premature disclosure was skillfully encouraged by
the executive branch," wrote Kathryn Olmstead in
her book on the media battles of the 1970s,
Challenging the Secret Government.
"[Mitchell] Rogovin, the CIA's counsel,
later admitted that the executive branch's
'concern' over the report's damage to national
security was less than genuine," Olmstead wrote.
But the Schorr case had laid down an important
marker.
The counterattack against the
"skeptical journalists" had begun.
In the
late 1970s, conservative leaders began a concerted
drive to finance a media infrastructure of their
own along with attack groups that would target
mainstream reporters who were viewed as too
liberal or insufficiently patriotic.
Nixon's former treasury secretary, Bill
Simon, took the lead. Simon, who headed the
conservative Olin Foundation, rallied like-minded
foundations - associated with Lynde and Harry
Bradley, Smith Richardson, the Scaife family and
the Coors family - to invest their resources in
advancing the conservative cause.
Money
went to fund conservative magazines taking the
fight to the liberals and to finance attack
groups, like Accuracy in Media, that hammered away
at the supposed "liberal bias" of the national
news media.
Reagan-Bush
years This strategy gained momentum in the
early 1980s with the arrival of Ronald Reagan's
presidency.
Spearheaded by intellectual
policymakers now known as the neo-conservatives,
the government developed a sophisticated approach
- described internally as "perception management"
- that included targeting journalists who wouldn't
fall into line.
So, when New York Times
correspondent Raymond Bonner reported from El
Salvador about right-wing death squads, his
accounts were criticized and his patriotism
challenged. Bonner then infuriated the White House
in early 1982 when he disclosed a massacre by the
US-backed Salvadoran army around the town of El
Mozote. The story appeared just as Reagan was
praising the army's human-rights progress.
Like other journalists who were viewed as
overly critical of Reagan's foreign policy, Bonner
faced both public attacks on his reputation and
private lobbying of his editors, seeking his
removal. Bonner soon found his career cut short.
After being pulled out of Central America, he
resigned from the Times.
Bonner's ouster
was another powerful message to the national news
media about the fate that awaited reporters who
challenged Reagan's White House. (Years later,
after a forensic investigation confirmed the El
Mozote massacre, the Times rehired Bonner.)
Though conservative activists routinely
bemoaned what they called the "liberal media" at
the big newspapers and TV networks, the Reagan
administration actually found many willing
collaborators at senior levels of US news
organizations.
At the New York Times,
executive editor Abe Rosenthal followed a
generally neo-conservative line of intense
anticommunism and strong support for Israel. Under
new owner Martin Peretz, the supposedly leftist
New Republic slid into a similar set of positions,
including enthusiastic backing for the Nicaraguan
Contra rebels.
Where I worked at the
Associated Press, its general manager, Keith
Fuller, the company's top executive, was
considered a staunch supporter of Reagan's foreign
policy and a fierce critic of recent social
change. In 1982, Fuller gave a speech condemning
the 1960s and praising Reagan's election.
"As we look back on the turbulent Sixties,
we shudder with the memory of a time that seemed
to tear at the very sinews of this country,"
Fuller said during a speech in Worcester, adding
that Reagan's election a year earlier had
represented a nation crying "enough" ...
We don't believe that the union of
Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and
Eve in the eyes of Creation. We don't believe
that people should cash welfare checks and spend
them on booze and narcotics. We don't really
believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of
allegiance is against the national interest in
the classroom. We're sick of your social
engineering. We're fed up with your tolerance of
crime, drugs and pornography. But most of all,
we're sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening
bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our
backs.
Fuller's sentiments were
common in the executive suites of major news
organizations, where Reagan's reassertion of an
aggressive US foreign policy mostly was welcomed.
Working journalists who didn't sense the change in
the air were headed for danger.
By the
time of Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, the
conservatives had come up with catchy slogans for
any journalist or politician who still criticized
excesses in US foreign policy. They were known as
the "blame America firsters" or - in the case of
the Nicaragua conflict - "Sandinista
sympathizers".
The practical effect of
these slurs on the patriotism of journalists was
to discourage skeptical reporting on Reagan's
foreign policy and to give the administration a
freer hand for conducting operations in Central
America and the Middle East outside public view.
Gradually, a new generation of journalists
began to fill key reporting jobs, bringing with
them an understanding that too much skepticism on
national security issues could be hazardous to
one's career.
Intuitively, these reporters
knew there was little or no upside to breaking
even important stories that made Reagan's foreign
policy look bad. That would just make you a target
of the expanding conservative attack machine. You
would be "controversialized", another term that
Reagan operatives used to describe their
anti-reporter strategies.
Iran-Contra Often I am asked why
it took so long for the US news media to uncover
the secret operations that later became known as
the Iran-Contra affair, clandestine arms sales to
the Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran with
some of the profits - and other secret funds -
funneled into the Contra war against Nicaragua's
Sandinista government.
Though the AP was
not known as a leading investigative news
organization - and my superiors weren't eager
supporters - we were able to get ahead on the
story in 1984, 1985 and 1986 because the New York
Times, the Washington Post and other top news
outlets mostly looked the other way.
It
took two external events - the shooting down of a
supply plane over Nicaragua in October 1986 and
the disclosure of the Iran initiative by a
Lebanese newspaper in November 1986 - to bring the
scandal into focus.
In late 1986 and early
1987 there was a flurry of Iran-Contra coverage,
but the Reagan administration largely succeeded in
protecting top officials, including Reagan and
George H W Bush.
The growing conservative
news media, led by Reverend Sun Myung Moon's
Washington Times, lashed out at journalists and
government investigators who dared push the edges
of the envelope or closed in on Reagan and Bush.
But resistance to the Iran-Contra scandal
also penetrated mainstream news outlets. At
Newsweek, where I went to work in early 1987,
editor Maynard Parker was hostile to the
possibility that Reagan might be implicated.
During one Newsweek dinner/interview with
retired General Brent Scowcroft and
then-Representative Dick Cheney, Parker expressed
support for the notion that Reagan's role should
be protected, even if that required perjury.
"Sometimes you have to do what's good the
country," Parker said.
When Iran-Contra
conspirator Oliver North went on trial in 1989,
Parker and other news executives ordered that
Newsweek's Washington bureau not even cover the
trial, presumably because Parker just wanted the
scandal to go away.
(When the North trial
became a major story anyway, I was left scrambling
to arrange daily transcripts so we could keep
abreast of the trial's developments. Because of
these and other differences over the Iran-Contra
scandal, I left Newsweek in 1990.)
Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Lawrence
Walsh, a Republican, also encountered press
hostility when his investigation finally broke
through the White House cover-up in 1991. Moon's
Washington Times routinely lambasted Walsh and his
staff over minor issues, such as the elderly Walsh
flying first class on airplanes or ordering
room-service meals.
But the attacks on
Walsh were not coming only from the conservative
news media. Toward the end of 12 years of
Republican rule, mainstream journalists also
realized their careers were far better served by
staying on the good side of the Reagan-Bush crowd.
So, when George H W Bush sabotaged Walsh's
probe by issuing six Iran-Contra pardons on
Christmas Eve 1992, prominent journalists praised
Bush's actions. They brushed aside Walsh's
complaint that the move was the final act in a
long-running cover-up that protected a secret
history of criminal behavior and Bush's personal
role.
"Liberal" Washington Post columnist
Richard Cohen spoke for many of his colleagues
when he defended Bush's fatal blow against the
Iran-Contra investigation. Cohen especially liked
Bush's pardon of former defense secretary Caspar
Weinberger, who had been indicted for obstruction
of justice but was popular around Washington.
In a December 30, 1992, column, Cohen said
his view was colored by how impressed he was when
he would see Weinberger in the Georgetown Safeway
store, pushing his own shopping cart. "Based on my
Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger
as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense -
which is the way much of official Washington saw
him," Cohen wrote. "Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks,
and that's all right with me."
For
fighting too hard for the truth, Walsh drew
derision as a kind of Captain Ahab obsessively
pursuing the White Whale. Writer Marjorie Williams
delivered this damning judgment against Walsh in a
Washington Post magazine article, which read:
In the utilitarian political
universe of Washington, consistency like Walsh's
is distinctly suspect. It began to seem ...
rigid of him to care so much. So un-Washington.
Hence the gathering critique of his efforts as
vindictive, extreme. Ideological. ... But the
truth is that when Walsh finally goes home, he
will leave a perceived loser.
By the
time the Reagan-Bush era ended in January 1993,
the era of the "skeptical journalist" was dead, at
least on issues of national security.
The Webb case Even years later,
when historical facts surfaced suggesting that
serious abuses had been missed around the
Iran-Contra affair, mainstream news outlets took
the lead in rallying to the Reagan-Bush defense.
When a controversy over Contra-drug
trafficking reemerged in 1996, the Washington
Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times
went on the attack - against Gary Webb, the
reporter who revived interest in the scandal. Even
admissions of guilt by the CIA's inspector general
in 1998 didn't shake the largely dismissive
treatment of the issue by the major newspapers.
(For Webb's courageous reporting, he was
pushed out of his job at the San Jose Mercury
News, his career was ruined, his marriage
collapsed and - in December 2004 - he killed
himself with his father's revolver.)
When
Republican rule was restored in 2001 with George W
Bush's controversial "victory", major news
executives and many rank-and-file journalists
understood that their careers could best be
protected by wrapping themselves in the old
red-white-and-blue. "Patriotic" journalism was in;
"skeptical" journalism was definitely out.
That tendency deepened even more after the
September 11, 2001 terror attacks as many
journalists took to wearing American flag lapels
and avoided critical reporting about Bush's
sometimes shaky handling of the crisis.
For instance, Bush's seven-minute freeze
in a second-grade classroom - after being told
"the nation is under attack" - was hidden from the
public, even though it was filmed and witnessed by
White House pool reporters. (Millions of Americans
were shocked when they finally saw the footage two
years later in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11.)
In November 2001, to avoid
other questions about Bush's legitimacy, the
results of a media recount of the Florida vote
were misrepresented to obscure the finding that Al
Gore would have carried the state - and thus the
White House - if all legally cast votes were
counted.
Iraq War In 2002, as
Bush shifted focus from Osama bin Laden and
Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the
"patriotic" journalists moved with him.
Some of the few remaining "skeptical"
media personalities were silenced, such as MSNBC's
host Phil Donahue, whose show was canceled because
he invited on too many war opponents.
In
most newspapers, the occasional critical articles
were buried deep inside, while credulous stories
accepting the administration's claims about Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction were bannered
on page one.
New York Times reporter
Judith Miller was in her element as she tapped
into her friendly administration sources to
produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD)stories,
like the one about how Iraq's purchase of aluminum
tubes was proof that it was building a nuclear
bomb. The article gave rise to the White House
warning that Americans couldn't risk the "smoking
gun" on Iraq's WMD being "a mushroom cloud".
In February 2003, when then secretary of
state Colin Powell made his United Nations speech
accusing Iraq of possessing WMD stockpiles, the
national news media swooned at his feet. The
Washington Post's op-ed page was filled with
glowing tributes to his supposedly air-tight case,
which would later be exposed as a mix of
exaggerations and outright lies.
The rout
of "skeptical" journalism was so complete - driven
to the fringes of the Internet and to a few brave
souls in Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau - that
the "patriotic" reporters often saw no problem
casting aside even the pretense of objectivity.
In the rush to war, news organizations
joined in ridiculing the French and other longtime
allies who urged caution. Those countries became
the "axis of weasels" and cable TV devoted hours
of coverage to diners that renamed "French fries"
as "Freedom fries".
Once the invasion
began, the coverage on MSNBC, CNN and the major
networks was barely discernable from the patriotic
fervor on Fox. Like Fox News, MSNBC produced
promotional segments, packaging heroic footage of
American soldiers, often surrounded by thankful
Iraqis and underscored with stirring music.
"Embedded" reporters often behaved like
excited advocates for the American side of the
war. But objectivity also was missing back at the
studios where anchors voiced outrage about Geneva
Convention violations when Iraqi TV aired pictures
of captured American soldiers, but the US media
saw nothing wrong with broadcasting images of
captured Iraqis.
As Judith Miller would
later remark unabashedly, she saw her beat as
"what I've always covered - threats to our
country". Referring to her time "embedded" with a
US military unit searching for WMD, she claimed
that she had received a government "security
clearance".
While the 57-year-old Miller
may be an extreme case of mixing patriotism and
journalism, she is far from alone as a member of
her generation who absorbed the lessons of the
1980s, that skeptical journalism on national
security issues was a fast way to put yourself in
the unemployment line.
Only gradually,
over the past two years as Iraq's WMD never
materialized but a stubborn insurgency did, the
bloody consequences of "patriotic" journalism have
begun to dawn on the American people. By not
asking tough questions, journalists contributed to
a mess that has now cost the lives of nearly 2,000
US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Retired Army Lieutenant General William
Odom, a top military intelligence official under
Reagan, has predicted that the Iraq invasion "will
turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in
US history".
Plame case At the
core of this disaster were the cozy relationships
between the "patriotic" journalists and their
sources.
In her October 16 account of her
interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief
of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Miller gave the
public an inadvertent look into that closed world
of shared secrets and mutual trust.
Libby
talked with Miller in two face-to-face meetings
and one phone call in 2003, as the Bush
administration tried to beat back post-invasion
questions about how the president made his case
for war, according to Miller's story.
As
Miller agreed to let Libby hide behind a
misleading identification as a "former Hill
staffer", Libby unleashed a harsh attack on one
whistleblower, former ambassador Joseph Wilson,
who was challenging Bush's claims that Iraq had
sought enriched uranium from the African nation of
Niger.
The Miller/Libby interviews
included Libby's references to Wilson's wife,
Valerie Plame, who was an undercover CIA officer
working on proliferation issues.
On July
14, 2003, right-wing columnist Robert Novak,
claiming to have been briefed by two
administration officials, outed Plame in a column
that denigrated Wilson with the suggestion that
Plame may have arranged the trip to Niger for her
husband.
Eventually, this outing of a
covert CIA agent prompted a criminal investigation
headed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald,
who is examining a possible administration
conspiracy to punish Wilson for his criticism.
When Miller refused to testify about her meetings
with Libby, Fitzgerald had her jailed for 85 days.
Miller finally relented after Libby
encouraged her to do so. "Out West, where you
vacation, the aspens will already be turning,"
Libby wrote in a folksy letter. "They turn in
clusters because their roots are connected."
While the Plame case has become a major
embarrassment for the Bush administration - and
now for the New York Times - it has not stopped
many of Miller's colleagues from continuing their
old roles as "patriotic" journalists opposing the
disclosure of too many secrets to the American
people.
For instance, Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen - who hailed George H W
Bush's pardons that destroyed the Iran-Contra
investigation in 1992 - adopted a similar stance
against Fitzgerald's investigation.
"The
best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his
country is get out of Washington, return to
Chicago and prosecute some real criminals," Cohen
wrote in a column entitled "Let This Leak Go".
"As it is, all he has done so far is send
Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail and
repeatedly haul this or that administration high
official before a grand jury, investigating a
crime that probably wasn't one in the first place
but that now, as is often the case, might have
metastasized into some sort of cover-up - but
again, of nothing much," Cohen wrote. "Go home,
Pat."
If Fitzgerald does as Cohen wishes
and closes down the investigation without
indictments, the result could well be the
continuation of the status quo in Washington. The
Bush administration would get to keep control of
the secrets and reward friendly "patriotic"
journalists with selective leaks - and protected
careers.
It is that cozy status quo that
is now endangered by the Plame case. But the
stakes of the case are even bigger than that,
going to the future of American democracy and to
two questions in particular:
Will
journalists return to the standard of an earlier
time when disclosing important facts to the
electorate was the goal, rather than Cohen's
notion of putting the comfortable relationships
between Washington journalists and government
officials first?
Put differently, will
journalists decide that confronting the powerful
with tough questions is the true patriotic test of
a journalist?
Robert Parry
broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest
book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the
Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be
ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.
It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999
book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press
& 'Project Truth.'
This article
first appeared in Consortiumnews.com. It is
republished
with permission.
