(Note: Many of today’s biggest stories go unreported or under-reported. This is partly because news organizations have been decimated by predatory media bosses. But it’s also because the toughest stories call for uncommon skills. I address this issue in this recent podcast for young journalists).

If you think of the people who read what you write or listen to what you have to say as an audience, you shouldn’t be a journalist. Journalism is not about you. If you want to play god, be a surgeon or a banker. If you want to get rich, play the market. If you want attention, study theater.

Journalism is about getting as close to the truth as you can and then finding a way to get it across to others. A byline is as much a blameline as it is anything else. You get the blame if you distort the story, if you misinterpret the facts, if you fail to get them in the first place. A byline puts responsibility for the story on your shoulders.

If you’re not a big reader, forget about investigative journalism. If you can’t wait to get a word in during a conversation, forget about journalism, period. It’s not about what you have to say, it’s not about you being clever.

I can teach you how to be an investigative reporter, but I sure don’t want to try doing it in a classroom. It‘s best learned by doing. But while you’re still in a classroom there are some things you should be doing. You should be reading everything you can find about I.F. Stone, the dogged muckraker who closed his famous weekly in 1971.

The term muckraking comes from Teddy Roosevelt, who coined it from John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It has a long tradition in British and American journalism. You should read everything you can find about Ida Tarbell (inset), Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker.

I think I hear some of you say, Okay, Del, tell us which books to read. But I hope none of you really do say it, for this reason: Investigative reporting is about independent and diligent research. It’s not hard to find out who these people are, what they wrote, and what has been written about them. So if you want me or your professors to hand out reading assignments, maybe you should think twice about being journalists. Journalism is not about handouts. It’s about rigorous independence of mind.

It’s true that investigative reporters, like detectives, have a bag of tricks they use to get the job done. But it’s even more true that depending on the same tired old tricks every day won’t get the job done. You have to think out of the box. You have to follow lead after lead down dead-end alleys. But, above all, you have to read. If you’re not a reader, why would you think you deserve readers?

Okay, so what do you read? The hawkers who sold newspapers on the streets in the old days, including myself, used to shout, Whuddya read, hey, hey, whuddya read? It’s still a good question. It’s still the operative question. Here’s the deal.

We live in a society obsessed with putting everything down on paper, in microfiche or on a disk or in a memory stick. One reason for this is that our society is so complex we need lawyers to help us navigate it. This is why we have so many lawyer-politicians, for better or worse. And lawyers generate documents, mountains of them. And most of them are boring, mind-bendingly boring. And if you want to be a good investigative reporter you better get used to mining those boring mountains, every last sentence of them, because nine times out of ten the truth you’re looking for is hidden in those documents.

That’s the most important thing I.F. Stone’s life teaches us. Read, read, read. Especially the fine print. Especially page 999 in a 3,000-page document. The fact is government, whether it’s a small town, New York City or the federal government, usually points the finger to its own dirty work in legalistic documents that lawyers and their staffs got paid to produce. They can always say it’s all on the record, but they’re hoping like hell neither you nor anybody else will read the record. We are a society of records, and one of the great debates of our time is just how much of our personal lives should be put on the record by the government.

At this point—before I give you any more pointers on how to become an investigative reporter or how to decide you’re not suited for it—let me lay out a tragedy for you. You remember that I said that reporting is about getting as close to the truth as you can and then finding a way to tell it? Well, the tragedy, as you will learn all too soon, is that most readers and most television viewers don’t give a hoot and a holler about the truth. You could shout it from the rooftops, you could ram it down their throats, you could make it a requirement for a passport, and they still wouldn’t love it, because lies taste good, they sound good, they look good, while the truth is The Big Nasty. Lies are the fast food of the mind. Bad for you, but well nigh irresistible. This is the lesson of Nazi Germany and Iraq: the public that prefers simpleminded lies to the complex truth ends up selling itself out to the bad guys.

So you’re confronted, as a journalist, with the task of not only finding the truth but convincing people that it’s important enough to confront. And that’s not always easy. It’s a lot like finding out Pete Rose broke baseball’s betting rules or Barry Bonds used steroids. It’s not something we usually want to hear. And lawyers and politicians know this, and accordingly they often tell the lies they know people want to hear. I did not have sex with that woman. I am not a crook. I did not lie to the FBI. I did not cook the books. Etc. Etc. Very often a good journalist is confronted with having to say the gods have clay feet. And very often the messenger gets shot for saying it, which is why guys like our erstwhile vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, made careers out of blaming the press for everything under the sun, especially the things he was trying to hide from the sun. Every generation of politicians comes with two kinds of liars: those who blame the civil servants for all the ills of the country and those who blame the press, and sometimes they both get blamed.

Jimmy Carter, a man with an impeccable reputation as our most revered former president, came to Washington with a clique of provincials blaming the civil service for most of the ills of the country. It was a despicable lie. This was the very civil service he and his cronies needed to get things done, and it happened to be the best civil service in the world. And it still is, in spite of the current administration’s heroic efforts to turn it into a Soviet-style apparatus. In other words, President Carter came to town with a formula for failure on his lips, and sure enough he couldn’t get much done, badmouthing the people he needed most to do it. This lie was his weapons of mass destruction gambit. It enabled him and his associates to distract the public from the real issues that needed to be confronted.

(And by the way, before some of you Democrats get too het up about Al Gore joining the race you might wish to recall that he damned near destroyed the civil service with his demoralizing and nitwitted Reinventing the Government nonsense. If you don’t believe me, just ask the people who endured that folly.)

So you see that being an investigative reporter isn’t going to be a bed of roses, in spite of the deserved fame and fortune heaped upon guys like Bob Woodward, which brings me to the subject of role models. Woodward’s career is a great model to follow. It’s not the I.F. Stone model. In some ways it’s the antithesis of it, but it’s a great model because here is a man who is so adept at listening, so skilled at drawing people out and putting them at ease that year after year he produces insights into the way government works that help us understand our own lives and the events that shape them.

In part this comes of Woodward’s nature. He’s the consummate listener. His demeanor instills trust and integrity. But it’s not just his nature. He was a beat reporter. He taught himself, and others taught him how to interview, how to listen, how to sort facts out, how to interpret what people confide in you in the context of the facts as you gather them. Of course, he’s a reader. Of course he endlessly reads documents. Of course he goes down blind alleys and gets frustrated. He’s one kind of model. The cultivator of sources, the man who apprehends the big picture.

But in the same newsroom at The Washington Post is another very different kind kind of model, Walter Pincus. He’s not as visible or celebrated as his colleague, but among journalists he is just as highly regarded. Pincus is a reader. He is more in the I.F. Stone mold. He reads and reads until he thinks he understands where to look next, and then he reads some more, and then he goes out and pokes around, and ends up in obscure archives reading some more. Then he makes a thousand telephone calls and does dozens of interviews, and the chances are the people he is interviewing are stunned and probably a little scared at how much he already knows. Pincus is a bit like a CSI or a research scientist. He’s reading the ink off the paper trail, and that trail more often than not leads him to scandals, big stories, public donnybrooks. He has his sources too, like Woodward, but the two colleagues at what is arguably the nation’s most famous newspaper represent different styles, different approaches to the same task, getting at the truth.

I once worked at The National Press Building in Washington. I was doing my own kind of digging. I had started a biweekly newsletter with a colleague and we were telling school districts how to deal with the federal government and its propensity to speak bafflegab and bury people in boilerplate. We were looking for obscure aid programs and explaining them in English which we hoped the educators would grasp. It was fun, but it wasn’t big-time journalism. It was merely helpful journalism, as a lot of journalism is. Down the hall was a guy named Seymour Hersh. He was already famous for having broken the My Lai massacre story in Vietnam. I don’t know what Hersh was working on at the time, but I had an opportunity, because he kept his door open and always waved at fellow journalists, to watch him operate. His little office was a catastrophe of papers. They were everywhere. On the floor, on chairs, on top of files, on window sills, in boxes, and Hersh wore the telephone like a part in his hair. I can’t remember him being off the phone, but the funny thing is I can’t remember him ever talking on the phone. He was listening, listening and reading papers at the same time. And his face usually bore a look of wry amusement.

In some ways Hersh is a third kind of model. He does the reading, he does the listening, he does the walking and the poking around, but his sensibility is different, and that’s why he’s a staff writer for The New Yorker and not working on one of the great daily newspapers. Not that he hasn’t worked on a great daily. He was a New York Times reporter. But Hersh has an independent streak a mile wide and more than a mile deep. He tends to see stories, or he tends to want to explore stories, that reflect the Zeitgeist, the spirit of our times. He has an overarching historical sense that prompts him not to run with the story of the day or the week or even the year, but the story of the decade. My Lai was such a story. This kind of sensibility doesn’t bend easily to newsroom pressures or to the ideas of assignment editors who may not be as attuned to the Zeitgeist as Hersh is. On the other hand, The New Yorker loves such stories, and that’s why Hersh is there.

So here’s what you should be doing about Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus and Seymour Hersh: you should be reading their work, you should be reading their books, and you should be reading books about them. You should examine how they string their findings together, how they organize their stories. You should parse their sentences.

You may become a great investigative reporter and not be anything like these men, but you’ll get there a lot sooner if know all about them. You may write better than they do or not as well. Not all good investigative reporters are good writers.

I’ve had a few role models, too. My first model was the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle. I even wrote him a fan letter when I was a kid, and he wrote back. I admired Walter Lippmann for the clarity of his thought and prose. I admire Pete Hammill for his compassion and warmhearted insight. And I admired a rewrite man at The Providence Journal named Wilbur Doctor. I think of Wilbur after all these years as an alchemist. He took the awful junk we called or teletyped in and turned it into crystal-clear prose. From him I learned to admire clarity, precision, terseness. I once covered a train wreck in Warwick, Rhode Island. It was a bad wreck and we were on deadline for the morning paper. I felt I’d done a great job. I’d even gotten the names of victims, which is often hard to do because the authorities want to notify next of kin first. To top off what I thought was a bravura performance on my part, I shouted into the telephone, Oh yeah, and Wilbur, the engineer was eating a sandwich just before the wreck. Wilbur tapped out a few words and then asked laconically, What was in the sandwich? I won’t tell you what I said, but I sure was deflated, and I’m sure Wilbur was smiling at the other end of the phone. I owe some of my skill as a poet to this wonderful rewrite man.

Wilbur’s boss was an equally laconic city editor named Al Johnson. The best thing that ever happened to me as a newspaperman happened when I was leaving The Providence Journal for another job. Al called me up and said, You’re a good reporter. It was better than the Congressional Medal of Honor, coming from him. My first week on the paper he had called
to the Cranston bureau where I was working and said, If you can’t spell cemetery, I don’t think you’re gonna last here very long. I had written an obituary and misspelled cemetery. It was like a death sentence. I was still in the Navy and I was trying out for a summer job. My competitors for the job were all journalism school graduates, most of them Columbia graduates, because The Providence Journal liked Columbia. I went home with a heavy heart and told my wife I had blown it. I got the job and stayed with the Journal six or seven years. They were the best in my career, because of the idealistic and talented people I met. But I never once thought I had passed muster with Wilbur Doctor or Al Johnson, until I was leaving, and then knowing that I’d somehow earned their approval made me weep going out the door.

Let’s get back to those mountains of paper. Human beings generated them. Lawyers, clerks, assistants of every stripe, interns, researchers, statisticians, you name it. Doing this work meant something to them. They became attached to the data they were generating, to the findings they reached, to the goals they were trying to achieve, and even to the lies they hid in all the small type. So you have to cultivate these people. You have to become their confidante. You have to encourage them to tell you their stories, no matter how boring they may seem, because they know where the truth has been buried. They have their own ideas about the story, the big story, and there is always a small part of them, even when they’re part of a conspiracy to conceal the truth, that wants people to know what they’ve concealed. You will find these people in every small town in the country, every county seat, every state capital. They make the government run. They know what was done right and what was done wrong. They’re attached to the good and the bad. It’s part of their lives, part of what they do. If you care about these people, they will eventually confide in you and lead you to the goods.

Here’s an example. Once in a mid-sized town in Rhode Island I decided I needed to know what an ad valorem tax is, how land, buildings and boats are taxed, and why. So I started talking to tax assessors and tax review committees and appeal boards and disgruntled taxpayers and tax lawyers. I talked, but mostly I listened. And because it’s a dry subject, albeit a political hot button, I found that the people who deal in taxation were grateful to have someone trying to understand what they do and why they do it. I found out that when you buy a house in a town for a high price, it does two things right off: it worries the other taxpayers because it prompts a review and sometimes a revaluation of other people’s properties, and it usually raises the taxes of the property you just bought. This fascinated me, so I decided to follow the appeals process. It worked this way. A guy bought a property for more than it had previously been sold for. His taxes were raised the next year, and he then appealed to a committee. By the time all this had winded its way through the prescribed process I had become pretty familiar with several different tax assessors in several towns. They trusted me to understand their job, at least its broad outlines and slowly and cautiously they began to confide certain facts, one of them being that there is a tendency in most growing communities to overtax the newcomers in order to spare the old-timers whom the tax assessors know. It’s not fair, it’s not even legal, but it’s damned hard to prove, because you have to actually show evidence of it. How do you prove it? I wondered. Well, you go out and you study comparables—properties that resemble your own but are not being taxed as much, and then you find out who owns them. Then you take pictures and make profiles of these properties. It’s time-consuming. The town is hoping you won’t do it. And very often when you do do it, you win the day and get a slight reduction in your taxes, but next year they come back and slam you again, because they’re mad at you. That’s small-town America. And I could spent a lifetime reporting in those towns and not known this if I hadn’t befriended a few tax assessors who really wanted to talk about their jobs.

Here’s another instance. I know an assistant town clerk who was one of those idealistic women of a certain age who had had to go out into the workplace unexpectedly when her marriage failed. She knew I was investigating a local cemetery fund managed by someone appointed by the town. She liked me because we both shared a kind of compulsion to do the right thing even when it was risky. One day, after she had listened to me being frustrated by a bunch of stonewalling town officers, I was about to leave town hall when I passed her desk. She smiled and directed her eyes to an open file drawer, one she had left open. Well, Rhode Island had some sunshine laws on the books, which meant I had a right to look at those records. But that building was crammed with records and I could have spent a lifetime looking for the right documents and never finding them. But there in that drawer was exactly what I was looking for, proof that the cemetery fund was not only being mismanaged but also proof that the town knew about it, because its own auditors had complained about it. The audit was right there in that drawer. And nobody could ever say how I found it, because nobody had told me. She just smiled and stared at the drawer.

That’s often how investigative reporting works. You don’t have to be handsome or beautiful. But you have to listen, listen because you care about these people and their jobs. And that’s why Jimmy Carter’s presidency went badly, because his folks didn’t care about those little people. In fact, they wrongly blamed them for what the politicians had fouled up.

And that brings up another issue. Don’t think all the people who work in these many offices around the country are all in cahoots with the politicians. It may be they got their jobs through the politicians. They certainly have to serve the politicians. But they also serve us, the public, and they don’t always approve of the bad things the people we elect do. After all, they’re citizens too. There is a lot of heroism in these thousands and thousands of public offices. Not just the whistle blowers who get their names in the papers and get fired and then sue everybody for their jobs, but everyday highway workers, clerks, assistants, people who want to see things run well. They can’t always tell you the absolute truth, but they can often point you in the right direction. So don’t ever make the Jimmy Carter mistake. The bureaucrats are American citizens and voters. They’re not all stooges and fall guys. And, by the way, Jimmy Carter just happened to be a rather notorious example of this pin-the-tail-on-donkey game. Almost all the big-shot candidates do it. Don’t believe them. The bureaucrats didn’t create the mess, the politicians did. They’d have you believe that all our precious tax money is going to pay these lazy, devious bureaucrats, whereas in truth everything would grind to a half without these bureaucrats, and the real tax money is usually going to the corrupt supporters of the politicians.

If you want to be a good investigative reporter you have to be savvy about this blame game. In fact, and as a general rule, whenever someone blames someone else, especially if that someone else is a lower-level person, you should take a harder look at the person doing the blaming.

—DM 

We know a lot about Modthryth, the awful queen in Beowulf who has men who look her in the eye put to death gruesomely, but we don’t know how to say her name.

My wife Marilyn and I searched the worldwide web for hours last night. We found enough to fill a mountain of hard drives about Beowulf (Beowulfian Viking ship, inset), and we thought we’d surely stumble on a pronunciation guide or perhaps a concordance that would parenthetically tell us how the dread queen’s name sounded to the Geats. We stumbled in vain. For example, the wonderful Webster’s online sound dictionary doesn’t even list Modthryth.

We’re going to have to deal with this conundrum because Angelina Jolie is going to play Modthryth is a movie, and we’ll have to call her something even if it’s too terrible to contemplate looking her in the eye.

But we were not without resort. We consulted our literary friend Tom Hester of Silver City, New Mexico, a prodigious reader. Tom liked the question but hadn’t a clue. Then we dispatched an e-mail to Bertha Rogers, whose own translation of Beowulf surely equals and in my mind surpasses Seamus Heaney’s for its Vikingesque robustness. Bertha, who runs Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, New York, said to the best of her knowledge Mode-Thryth would do.

Modthryth is sometimes referred to as Thryth. It doesn’t seem quite so daunting to say Thryth, but when you add Mod it becomes a chore. Beowulf is written in Old English vernacular, and while there has been a lot of speculation about how it sounded, no one is quite sure.

Why on earth were we so het up about Modthryth? Well, Marilyn and I have been recording two of my novellas, Saraceno and Skip to Maloo, and everything was going quite smoothly until Marilyn tripped over the queen’s name in Skip to Maloo. These novellas will be published with two others later this year.

By the way, recording a book is grueling. It feels like coming down with the flu. I lost my voice on page 121 of Saraceno. Marilyn did better. But we’ll need time to recover.

—DM

Instead of grinding axes for moneybags, here’s something useful a think tank might do. Rent a loft near Capitol Hill—just to keep in mind how full of it Congress is—and simulate imperial Rome circa 135 AD.

Judea is no more. It’s Palestine now. Its citizens have been dispersed, setting the stage for tragedies reverberating to this day, as great tragedies do.

Hadrian, the emperor (117-138), is entertaining intimations of mortality, and in this morbid state he makes a decision as momentous as Constantine’s decision many years later to Christianize the empire. Indeed Hadrian makes a decision that might have precluded Constantine’s. He calls his legions home. From Britain, the Danube, Parthia, Egypt, Africa, Spain and even Gaul. He returns them to the senate and retires to his villa in Tibur as emperor emeritus.

Now what?

Well, we’ve set up economic computer models, agricultural models, military models, religious and social models. It might be a good time to invite Rep. John Murtha, Sen. Harry Reid, John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama to the loft for some serious blue-skying. No point inviting The Prez et al, because we know they think Hadrian is off his meds.

Maybe someone like George Soros could spare a few dimes for this project. Who knows, it might help society more than financing the ambitions of another bloviator?

It’s also time for a little required reading. So everybody involved in the project, which would cost much less than a bomber, is asked to read Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian as a primer, a way of appreciating the excruciating parallels between us and the Roman imperium.

We don’t have a clue to the consequences of Hadrian’s amazing act. But we didn’t have a clue about Iraq either. Just about the only historic comparable that comes readily to mind is the dissolution of the British Empire after World War II. The historic irony that comes most easily to mind is our postwar policy of condemning the British, French and Dutch
empires while launching our own economic imperium.

We use computers to make weapons, to advance medicine and science, so why shouldn’t we use them to boost us out of the political Pleistocene with such speculative researches? What would have happened if Hadrian had renounced the imperial dream? Could the Roman military-commercial complex have been redirected? Would chaos have ensued? Can answers be found?

What would happen now if we, the American people, not the betrayers we’re electing to the right and left, renounced dominionist dreams and returned to our republican roots? What would happen if the Congress took back the right to make war and fashion trade agreements?

Hadrian, the real Hadrian, died thinking he had done an astounding thing. He had given the world the philosopher-king Plato had envisioned in his Republic—the Stoic. Marcus Aurelius. And Marcus left us his Meditations, which has enjoyed a faithful readership down through the ages.

Could we not leave our children a decision at least half as brilliant as Hadrian’s?

—DM

In 1972 Edmund Muskie weeps and loses his chance to be president of the United States. In 2004 Howard Dean whoops and loses his chance. In 2007 John McCain croaks Bomb, Bomb Iran and the press chuckles. Not to belabor a point, what is wrong with us?

—DM

When President Clinton said gravely and with seeming candor, I did not have sex with that woman, his disservice to truth was foul enough, but his disservice to decency was worse. What I hold against this man who in many ways I admire are the words that woman. He owed Monica Lewinsky better, and he owed half the human race much better.

Now when I watch Attorney General Alberto Gonzales trying to convince us that he didn’t directly have a hand in the run-up to firing eight federal prosecutors because they weren’t supporting the Administration’s effort to convince us of widespread Democratic Party vote fraud, it reminds me of all those months President Bush told us he was just following the advice of his commanders in Iraq.

There they are, our chief lawyer, and the commander in chief, the decider, telling us they’re just heeding their underlings. Imagine Alexander the Great taking his commanders’ advice at Gaugamela. This is chicken government, if you can call it government at all.

For a president who effects a swaggering style this is certainly the cheesy story the schoolyard bully hands the cops. Just doing what I was told. The President from the get-go set up his generals as fall guys, and he’s still doing it. And now we have his attorney general doing it.

We deserved better from Bill Clinton and we deserve better from The Decider Ltd.

Is there a pattern here?

—DM

The first thing you see when you walk into the very first gallery of
the always fascinating Dahesh Museum in Manhattan is Gustave Doré’s
Black Eagle of Prussia, 1887 (inset). A fallen France, symbolized by a mature woman wearing a Phrygian cap and bearing a sword, is menaced by a huge black eagle, representing Prussia.

Prussia had prevailed in a brief (1870-1871) and ugly war, signaling the rise of German militarism. The large painting grieves for France in blacks and grays, never easy colors for an artist. As I studied it I began to see it as a metaphor for our own situation: our liberties have fallen prey to fear-mongers intent on trading our republican values for dominionist folly.

Prostrate France, wounded and exhausted in a dark trench, could easily be us, wounded and dazed by a propaganda machine that doesn’t trust the people with the truth.

What fascinated me when I tried to reproduce this remarkable painting for this blog is that the hovering eagle, so disturbing when you stand before the painting at the Dahesh, hides in the pixelly darkness the same way the people in Washington who are so busy stealing our liberties hide in their lies.

Others may entertain different contemplations as they consider Doré’s bleak painting, but I can think of no better way to step back a moment from the melée of our times.

—DM

The worse things get in Iraq, the more our dominionist White House sticks to its rancid story, the more I wonder not what the United States is doing there—I’m convinced we don’t belong there—but what the Muslim countries are doing there.

What do they want? Blood? Their own and everyone else’s? Conflict to distract their people from their own corrupt regimes? It’s their part of the world. Isn’t that what they keep telling us? So is Iraq a glimpse of what they envision for themselves? Do they think they have no part in this disgrace? Do they deem themselves helpless at the same time they take to the streets with cries of Death to America? How is it they are so blind to their own hypocrisy while so clear-eyed about ours? What is the Arab League, a support group?

And speaking of hypocrisy and cynicism, the cake surely goes to Israel. The Arabs have now offered Israel exactly what it has said all along it wants: peace. And it’s clear Israel has been lying. It doesn’t want peace. It won’t even go to the table to see if it can sort out the details. Instead it spits at the details as if they were and always will be insurmountable obstacles.

The intransigence of Israel, the White House and Muslim fundamentalists—and the abject hypocrisy of all the governments involved— are equally to blame for this out-of-control conflagration. Everybody is grinding his own axe, and at the end of the day it is the common citizen, whether in Iran or Illinois, who is ground down, here and there.

The White House line never made any sense. But we bought it because we craved a simpleminded response to 9/11. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and there was no connection to Al Qaeda, only a strategy of mass distraction from the grand scheme to transfer wealth from the middle class to the very rich. There was no desire to bring democracy to Iraq, only a desire to fatten the carcasses of Bush-Cheney corporate buddies.

There was every reason to foresee what would happen, but instead of listening to Arabists we listened to imperialist hornswogglers and crackpot Rapturists. There was, in fact, good reason to suspect that Israel didn’t want peace if it meant giving up Arab land wrongly seized. On all sides the voices of dimwitted fanaticism prevailed. We should no longer ask why the Germans listened to Adolph Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, et al. We listened to the reasonable if condescending intonations of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and that lot of high-sounding fakers.

Do we think for a moment that if there had been a sustained debate about whether we should listen to the neocons—because in order to bring on the Rapture and the Apocalypse it was necessary to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem that the Romans had destroyed—do we think if we had had that debate we would have been so hot to get our children killed in Iraq, or Iraq’s children? But the press sat on its collective keester, mentioning such loony ideas only in passing but failing miserably to impress upon the public that their cockamamie notions are exactly what motivate so many Zionist Christian bedfellows of the neocon befuddlers.

We are a republic. We must stop comparing ourselves to the Roman Empire and return to our republican roots. It is not our job to cure the ugly cynicism of the Muslim and Israeli leaders. It is rather our job to heal ourselves of our own cynicism. It may be that George W. Bush sees himself as a caesar leading us out of the Stoic days of the republic into the dazzling resplendence of empire, but we can and must do better than the Romans. We must resist these imperial impulses and see what we can do about putting our own house in order.

Do the Muslims and Israel wish to put their houses in order? Who knows? It doesn’t seem so. So why should we follow them to the drain they’ve installed and circle it? But first we have to get our flaccid politicians out of Big Oil’s pockets.

—DM

You can tell a lot about the turns your life took and didn’t take by remembering the childhood games you liked and didn’t like. I didn’t like Hide-and-Seek because I didn’t think anybody would come looking for me. The more I think about this the more I remember there weren’t too many playmates I wanted to come looking for me.

The point at which the game went bad for me, really bad, was when I learned to hide too well. I hid so well I lost myself and went home without me, and the boy who grew up wasn’t me. I was still hiding in the sea oats along Great South Bay.

Then there was Skip to My Lou. It’s a game of stealing partners. A boy stands in a circle of skipping partners. He picks one of the girls and her partner takes the boy’s place in the circle. Every group has its politics. I knew which girl I was supposed to pick, and I didn’t want to pick her. The consequence of picking the wrong girl was ostracism, which was preferable to sucking up to the powers that be. I think the game imbued me with a lifelong aversion to playing anybody’s game for any reason. Since it was a game involving a circle it was necessarily a game of insiders, which may have instilled in me the conviction I was a born outsider. Circles may very well sign eternity, but they also seal out outsiders, and consequently I have never felt comfortable in them. Whenever I meet a rigged game or a stacked deck I think of Skip to My Lou.

There was a 1931 movie called Skip the Maloo, which is how it sounds when most people say My Lou, but the movie didn’t shed any light on the game or its origins. Some people say Lou is Scottish for love. I have a friend who thinks it may be French for place, in which case one might be skipping to fabled Medieval land of Cockaigne.

Ask me who I picked. The girl I wanted to pick, of course. And, boy, was there a price! Story of my life.

(Note: An old friend, Davis Oldham, writes to remark that when the
lyrics of Skip to My Lou are published a stanza that exemplifies modernist poetry and is redolent of William Carlos Williams‘ work is often omitted:
Little red wagon painted blue
Little red wagon painted blue
Little red wagon painted blue
Skip to my lou my darling.)

—DM

Note: Once a week I pod-cast conversational reflections on journalism to students around the world. It occurs to me that readers of this blog might like to read them, so here is the transcript of this week’s podcast:

If you’ve been listening to these podcasts you’ve probably gotten the idea that I think the big stories are often lost in the fog of everyday stories. There are two reasons for this: Spin and the torrent of events produced by a teeming and troubled world.

Leadership has always been theater, among other things, and with theater you have spin. For example, Shakespeare needed to please the Tudor Dynasty, and so in his work the Plantagenets come off looking bad, as do other Tudor enemies. Or take Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The Normans come off as dark oppressors, whereas the Normans were in fact Gallicized Vikings of whom a great many good things might have been said. But Scott didn’t have a Norman monarch to please.

In this era of hypercommunication in which we’re subjected to tsunamis of blather in which helpful information is occasionally imbedded, spin has become a poisoner of information. There is so much spin it literally makes our heads spin.

As students of journalism you’re probably asking yourselves what you can do about this. Isn’t it up to the big-time reporters and their bosses to do something about it? Yes, it is. But there is something you can do about it too. We don’t always know who our foreign policy is designed to serve, for example. Similarly, we don’t know many lesser things about our lives in every village, town, county and state. Just to see what I mean, try surveying the web sites of a dozen towns, cities, counties and states. Check out the use of the word progress. What you’re looking at is spin—pure tax-paid propaganda. Why? Because nobody is asking how progress is defined—and who defines it? Does it mean evicting three hundred low-income renters and knocking down their homes to make way for a new mall or ninety expensive condos? Does it mean cutting three thousand trees that are needed to protect the watershed, prevent flooding and clean the air? Does it mean building a new golf course that will pollute creeks and rivers with pesticides and fertilizers? Or does it mean greater transparency in government, more citizen involvement, tax relief for the elderly? Does it mean preservation of farm land, nature conservancy, scholarships for children of the poor? What does progress mean? Does progress mean a cap on property taxes, or does it mean spending more of the current tax levy on education?

Fast track, low visibility
Take free trade. Fourteen years ago when the Congress gave the White House authority to negotiate free trade agreements around the world without getting prior approval from Congress (meaning the people), the press treated the story as if it were a financial story, of concern mainly to Wall Street and other financial capitals. But as it turns out this so-called fast-track authority has changed the fabric of our society, some would say for good, some would say for ill. The point is that the story slipped by without the debate and intense scrutiny it so richly needed. But if you ask most editors about this, they’ll say, “Oh, we covered fast-track.” And they did. But not enough, not until it was too late. Its far-reaching implications are still not fully appreciated by the public it so dramatically affects.

But once again you say, “What does this have to do with us? We weren’t there.” It has plenty to do with you. The first day you work on a newspaper you will be in an environment where equally important stories are falling between the cracks. For example, some developer wants to saw off the top of a mountain, chop down about three thousand trees, lay out two eighteen-hole golf courses, make a 30-acre lake and build 259 luxury condos, a health spa and an haute cuisine restaurant. The hoopla attending this grand scheme is enormous. There will be jobs, new money, lots of business, more taxes, a virtual renaissance. And, oh yes, your newspaper will be sharing in the goodies too: more advertising, more readers. Everything is hunky-dory. This is America, this is capitalism. Everybody is for apple pie, motherhood and making money. It’s quite a story. There will be zoning hearings, environmental impact statements, architects’ drawings, and lots of promises.

The trouble is that without those trees the trout streams will fill with mud. The sediment will cloud the reservoirs and force the communities the reservoirs serve to build filtration plants. The highway departments, police and fire departments in the region will all be forced to increase services and spend more money. Without those trees there will be floods and poorer air quality. Most of the jobs will probably go to low-wage illegal immigrants. The immigrants will tax local social services. And, of course, once you saw off the top of a mountain and kill that many trees, the environmental consequences are unforeseeable. You have probably destroyed the habitats of certain wildlife species. You have disrupted septic systems and permanently violated the region’s ecology.

But will the negative side of the story be reported with the same kind of diligence as the money-driven positive side of the story? And what about all the local and state legislators, and maybe even some congressmen, who’ve accepted the developers’ campaign contributions to help him get what he wants? Will their finances be examined? Will the fact that two local councilmen have nice new houses and new boats be reported?

Who will protect the public trust when so much money and spin is being thrown around? I wish I could tell you that all you have to do is remember that Del Marbrook told you to follow the money. But the question is not only whether you will be equipped by temperament and education to follow the story: the question is also whether your bosses will let you follow this story, and how far they will let you follow it. Remember that your newspaper executives are probably eating dinner regularly with the developer and his lawyers, and they’re licking their chops at the prospect of all that advertising lineage, all that new money.

When to give it a rest
Understanding this complex situation gets even more demanding. This kind of thing is going to tax your intellect. You’ll be young and inexperienced. What happens when your editor says, “Okay, Jack, I think we’ve got this story under control, let’s move on. We’ve covered the hearings, we’ve covered the environmental impact, we’ve covered the pros and the cons. The public is getting bored with it.”And then you say, “But I’d like to look into the changed lifestyles of some of the local politicians. I’d like to interview the state hydrographer, the geology people at the state university, some of the tax specialists at Wharton School of Business maybe.” “Jack, Jack,” the editor may say, “give it a rest, this isn’t The New York Times.” And, because the editor is the boss, and because his career depends on reading his bosses well, that just might be the end of the story, except for the ribbon-cutting and all that whoopty-do. And then it appears on the official web sites as progress. But is it progress? Progress for whom?

Remember that history is defined by the victors of wars, not the defeated. When did you ever hear a politician say he made a mistake? Or a CEO? Feminists like to call history herstory, meaning it’s conventionally thought of as his story, not hers. They have a point. That’s why our Founding Fathers thought they might be able to form a more perfect society by giving the press, the Fourth Estate, a constitutional role. They gave the press special privileges in return for its special responsibility to keep government honest and transparent. It is this special responsibility that is breaking down as the media are concentrated in the hands of four or five mega-corporations. This is truly a constitutional crisis, but the constitutional crisis the press has chosen to talk about is executive privilege, how much information a president can keep from Congress and the public. This is certainly an important issue, but it is nowhere nearly as important as the failure of the press’s historic responsibility under the First Amendment of the Constitution, a story the press isn’t reporting because its owners don’t want to talk about it.

The Circuit City model
None of us want to hear that we don’t have a free press. We even mock foreign commentators when they say we don’t. But in order to be good journalists, as opposed to merely playing at it, we have to be willing to see our limitations. A man’s got to know his limitations, Dirty Harry says. So does a reporter and an editor. Circuit City recently laid off 3,400 experienced salesclerks. Then it turned around and told them they had to wait for at least 10 weeks before they could reapply for jobs, probably not the same jobs or at the same rate of pay. What kind of a society can we have when our corporations respond to competition and shareholder pressures with mass firings? The Circuit City decision made the news, but of all the major newspapers in the country only The Baltimore Sun delved into such questions as the impact on our society of such business behavior.

How many stories do you think explored executive salaries at Circuit City? This decision plunged thousands into misery. But how many reporters asked if the bosses who made this decision got bonuses and other rewards? And, finally, why was the story only a blip on the media radar when it fact this kind of business policy is everywhere wrecking the middle class? The answer is simply that Circuit City is a major advertiser in the media.

Another and more important story concerns Wal-Mart. The typical Wal-Mart opens in a mall area just outside the old downtown of the typical town. Usually the small downtown merchants are struggling against big chain competitors, like Wal-Mart, and typically the town is trying to rejuvenate its historic downtown. In town after town Wal-Mart has endangered the prospects of downtown areas by offering prices, services, hours and cheap foreign goods, often from China, that its small competitors can’t offer. But town after town has allowed Wal-Mart to do this in response to the siren song of cheap goods and jobs. Wal-Mart wages are low and its labor policies have often been the subject of controversy. Many of the goods it sells have been produced by underpaid and overworked foreigners. And this immense story affecting the lives and economies of hundreds of towns and cities gets poorly covered, while trivial stories such as the bad behavior of spoiled celebrities make the evening news. Is it because the public prefers the trivia, as the media bosses claim, or is it because the media derive fortunes in advertising from Wal-Mart?

How free is a press in which this sort of economic censorship prevails? More free than China’s or Russia’s, to be sure, but is it as free as the Founding Fathers envisioned? Is it as free as a great republic needs it to be for its people to make informed decisions? Does it live up to its Constitutional obligations?

So what does this mean for us working journalists? Do we turn all cynical and just write the stories we think our corporate bosses will like, or do we fight the good fight? And maybe get fired.

What are the answers to these questions? I don’t know. I’m a reporter. I know how to ask good questions. Are you asking them? Are your instructors? Are you getting any answers? Let’s pray for the sake of our nation that you are.

There is an even bigger question that is not being asked. In a capitalist society is the operative rule anything for a buck, or are certain businesses, like medicine, education and journalism, subject to higher standards? And if we insist on higher standards for such businesses, how do we achieve them? Can medical care, education and journalism be outsourced, for example? Should the press continue to enjoy special privileges under law if it continues to operate like Circuit City and Wal-Mart? And if the country wants less government and lower taxes, how can these businesses be held to higher standards? I wish I knew. I do know one thing as a reporter: The leaders of our country who pretend every day to know so much are not providing us with the answers. They don’t like the questions. And the questions aren’t being asked nearly enough or often enough or loudly enough. We’re in a hell of a lot of trouble and it ain’t all Iraq.

There are still some good print newspapers left, and there are many online news organizations, and more are coming online every day. And there is some evidence that while the major metropolitan dailies are in trouble, some suburban and rural weeklies and dailies are prospering. So it’s entirely possible that the Internet, which is siphoning off newspaper advertising, may solve some of these dilemmas. But you can be sure that the bosses of online media will be just as tempted as their newspaper predecessors to suck up to advertisers and cut costs at the expense of coverage. It’s just that they may be a little less pressured to do it.

—DM

One of the more unsavory characters to emerge from our criminal lore is the clean-up mechanic. He knows how to get rid of the evidence. He enjoyed a brief vogue in filmdom before the CSI industry convinced us that crime can be disguised but not erased.

Historians can be something like the clean-up mechanic. In their zeal to explain this and that they sometimes obscure the plain fact that in any clash of fanaticism and common sense fanaticism wins hands down.

Mark Twain (inset) put it this way: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Fanatics don’t always look disreputable. They wear suits and smile at us in church. They entertain us on radio and television, stoking our prejudices. They seduce us with their beauty or their manliness. They make everything seem simple and sensible. So we give them good ratings. We buy their books, usually ghost-written. We vote for them.

And, above all, we fail to remember that fanatics bring down all great works, all civilizations, all human progress. It doesn’t matter what ideology they happen to be wearing that day. They always bring disgrace and ruin.

Today more than one commentator has remarked that we seem to have devolved to the time of the Crusades. In fact, Muslim fanatics are calling Western soldiers in the Middle East Crusaders. Bloody-minded fanatics brought on the Crusades. And bloody-minded fanatics today in Israel, and throughout the Muslim and Christian worlds are beguiling people looking for simple answers with mindless hard lines.

We can resist. But we have to think, and think again, and that’s not as easy as listening to honey-tongued fools and cruel hearts dressed in piety

—DM