What the news needs more than anything else is historical context, the very thing news executives have always eschewed in favor of immediacy. Without historical context the news becomes a major cause of ill-considered, slogan-driven policy.

The news industry has given itself a pass for its culpability in taking us to war in Iraq, but while we’re remembering the distortions of intelligence data and the downright lies of the White House we ought to remember how CNN and Fox News melodramatically beat the war drums and how the print media failed at due diligence when there were plenty of Arabists around to challenge the war policy.

Anyone who has ever watched the Discovery, Military, History or Weather channels may have observed that they often give us far more food for thought than the so-called news channels. They are more reflective, less inclined to dramatize. Such was the case this week when the Military Channel reopened the case of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898.

With the exploding of the Maine, American foreign policy departed from its republican ideals to take a distinctly imperialistic turn. The impetus, of course, was money, business. We had considerable monies invested in Spanish-held Cuba, and we had embarked on the expansion into the Pacific Basin that ultimately brought us into conflict with Imperial Japan.

The press, led by the ultraconservative and hawkish Hearst newspapers, jumped to every conspiracy theory conceivable. The Navy commission established to investigate the sinking, pressured by Congress, concluded that it was an act of terrorism either by Spanish sympathizers or by Spain itself. The slogan, Remember the Maine, To Hell With Spain, led us into a war in which we ultimately seized Cuba and The Philippines from Spain and destroyed what remained of its empire.

The parallels with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that legitimized the Vietnam War and with George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s bogus rationale for invading Iraq can hardly be more compelling. But in each case a complacent, irresponsible press played a major role and then stood by acting as if it had had nothing to do with war hysteria but was merely an objective bystander. Ever since the press has been tsk-tsking all the way to the bank.

The Military Channel recounted that in 1974 four-star Admiral Hyman Rickover, a controversial maverick, headed another commission of inquiry that concluded that the Maine had sunk because of an explosion within the steel-plated ship itself. This cast doubt on the Spanish conspiracy theory but failed to put it completely to rest.

But now scientists, using computer modeling and cutting-edge metallurgical research unavailable in 1974, have shown that the explosion originated in a coal bunker by spontaneous combustion, a frequent occurrence wherever coal was used to power ships, and then ignited gunpowder in the Maine’s hold. So much for the Spanish conspiracy.

Here we have three instances in which a democratic republic, which had renounced empire and colonialism from its inception, went to war in behalf of imperialist interests on the basis of misinformation and even chicanery. And the press, which had been envisioned by our founders as a bulwark against government misdeeds, took part in inflaming public opinion.

The media role in the sinking of the Maine (which has been explored closely by scholars) and in the Vietnam and the Iraq wars should give us pause. What we think of as news is more a tsunami of ephemeral reports and events, self-serving interpretations and political posturing. Sometimes the press may argue, as it did regarding the Maine, that there was nowhere to turn for countervailing viewpoints, but it had no such excuse in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

The Internet, to which the news industry is reluctantly transitioning, offers a unique opportunity to redefine news. Indeed, we might usefully revisit the very word. What we need is information and contexts in which to put it. We need new nomenclature for the ideal media role in the 21st Century. Perhaps a word like context. The reason for hope is hypertext, which enables the news industry to put events in perspective. For example, when the White House was making its case for barging into Iraq in the name of democracy, the press could have said, Whoa, Remember the Maine, and then linked breaking stories to all those previous doubts about how the Maine actually blew up that winter’s day in Havana harbor. The press could have revisited the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its historical reexamination.

But even more significantly, the press could have turned each Iraq story into a virtual index of issues related to modern Iraq history. Readers would have clearly seen that the British had failed in the 1920s to create a balance among Iraq’s sectarian parties. They would have seen how many Arabists thought it a bad idea to invade. They would have understood the secular nature of the Ba’ath Party and the unlikelihood of its having made common cause with Al Qaeda. They would have been able to ask themselves who would benefit most from an Iraq incursion. The answer, of course, would have been big oil and Pentagon contractors.

All these matters eventually came into play, but too late, because our concept of news is not broad enough to prevent nitwit sloganeers and conspiracy theorists from hijacking foreign policy.

The 2001 anthrax incident is another case at hand—a string of developments without context. If the FBI can convince us, as it is now trying to do, that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biochemical researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who recently committed suicide, was in fact the man who in 2001 killed five people and threatened many more, will the media remember that it was the anthrax scare and not the September 11th attacks that frightened us into allowing our civil liberties to be eroded in the name of national security? And will the media reopen the case with the same vigor with which they have reported each development? By reopening the case I mean, Will the media point out that a nation of 300 million souls was made docile by fear that foreign terrorists were using anthrax powder against us rather than a domestic terrorist for reasons that are not entirely clear?

If the media continue to refuse to take responsibility for the issue of context, if they persist instead in providing a steady stream of developments and smart-alecky punditry, they will have forfeited the opportunity of a century to redefine American journalism in the name of public enlightenment. The media have traditionally taken the position that it is for historians to make sense of things, to provide overview. But in a world as fast-moving as ours we can’t wait for the historians; we must instead take advantage of what is already archived. The current formula of literally poisoning news with punditry is a sorry excuse for putting news in context. It accelerates the polasrization of an already profoundly polarized society, because it daily invites partisans to pick their poison, leaving independent-mind citizens to fend for themselves.

There will always be a segment of our population that prefers ideology to fact, simple-minded solutions to nuanced examinations, and war to peace. Profiteers depend on this predilection for easy answers. One would think, would hope that the press would be the antidote to knee-jerk hawks and profiteers, but the press is owned by big business and takes its responsibility to make money for investors more seriously than its First Amendment responsibilities. A democracy can never be reminded too often that war is big business.

That is why the idea of citizen journalism is so spectral to press moguls. The idea of being no longer capable of hyping and propagandizing news by ownership of media outlets is truly intimidating. And yet nowhere in today’s presidential campaign is the issue raised of who will control the Internet. That’s no accident. It’s the last issue corporate media wants raised.—DM

We wait more or less patiently as software downloads or some program  completes itself, and every once in a while the progress bar slows down to an iffy crawl and threatens to go backwards. That’s how I see simpleminded slogans and political lies, they threaten to reverse civilization’s progress bar.

A society that can’t face up to real discourse, to the grayness of some subjects, to their complexities, is surely an endangered species. I fear, admittedly without facts to support it, that ideological polarization has addicted us to the pleasures of hate and mindlessness, and it’s a more serious addiction than cocaine.

I fear we are fast reaching the point where truth simply doesn’t matter because it isn’t as comforting as a lie. Lies are fast food. We get fat and lazy on them, and ultimately they kill us.

It was the Mafia that prompted this contemplation. We don’t know where the word came from, but we have some intriguing clues. It might have come from the Mu’afir tribe of Arabs who once occupied Palermo in Sicily. It may have first appeared in an 18th Century Sicilian poem, referring to a beautiful woman. It may describe beauty, excellence, bravery, loyalty. Palermo street vendors once hawked brooms as scupi da mafia, meaning they can’t be beat. The word may come from the Arabic word mahias, meaning a bold man. It may refer to mafie, the tuff caves in the Marsala region where Saracens once hid from Christian persecutors.

We don’t know. The questions belongs to the universe of things we don’t know. But we know that such Mafia concepts as omerta and vendetta bear a striking resemblance to Arab tribal thinking. And we know the Arabs, the Saraceni, people of the dawn, are never far from Sicilian consciousness, because the long Arab rule of Sicily was in fact a relatively halcyon time.

Much more could be said of this Sicilian-Saracen connection, but my point is simpler. There is a great deal we don’t know about each other and the world. There is a great deal at which we can only guess. There are ties between cultures that go unnoticed.  And while  we may long for certitudes, they are few and far between. A civilization that can’t accept this can’t progress. You simply must acknowledge how much you don’t know in order to learn anything. Without new knowledge, without the willingness to change your mind, you are in fact an impediment to the society in which you live.

Our politicians are pretending to know too much. Their behavior is an impediment to our well being, our progress. We ourselves, the electorate, are pretending to know too much. That’s why the ether is viral with rumor and hate mail and snarky lies. We are uncomfortable with our ignorance, but instead of remedying it we are pretending that slogans, simplicitudes will save the day.

Nobody familiar with Iraq’s history, for example, would have barged into that Byzantine arena as we did. But we had many people who were familiar with Iraq’s history. We chose not to listen to them. The press chose not to give them a hearing. We chose, instead, a handful of lies and half-truths.  At any given time there are hundreds of opportunities around the world to get our children killed; the challenge is to avoid it.

Only by facing up to what we don’t know, which is far more than we can ever know, can we give our thinkers, our scientists, our historians, our leaders license to explore issues deeply and make wise decisions. The current presidential campaign does not bode well for this possibility. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton will not not suffice for political wisdom on the right, platitudes will not suffice on the left, and a sound bite, smart-ass press will not enlighten us. We must ask more of ourselves or we will become less.—DM

And since we’re in Baghdad, let’s look at what history taught the Arabs who built that fabled city. When the Abbasid caliphate became corpulent and corrupt it began using Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks to fight its wars. The great Arab tribal armies that had carried the banner of Islam to far-flung places withered and were supplanted by professional armies of mercenaries.

Soon the mercenaries were asking themselves why they should not rule. And once the question was asked the Arab goose was cooked and the Arabs gave way to the Turks as Islam’s defenders. They had forfeited their right to lead because they could no longer rally their own children.

Much the same thing happened to the Umayyad caliphate in Cordoba. When it imported Berber mercenaries from North Africa they turned against their employers, sacked Cordoba and brought to a close one of the most glorious chapters in human progress.

The next time you read about Blackwater Inc. in Iraq, remember that the use of mercenaries has never bode well for any great power. There is no doubt the military historians at West Point and Annapolis remember this, so why is Washington ignoring it? When you pay others to fight your wars you’re phoning it in.

We didn’t bother to learn much about the Arabs before we invaded Iraq; I wonder if we can learn anything from them now that we’re there.—DM

And even if we were to become a military state like ancient Sparta the morale, the genius of the state would be best served by everyone serving equally. How else can children of wealth discharge their duties to a state from which they have benefited? Everyone should be willing to defend a state in which they believe, whether by active military service or by engaging in such projects as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

The argument should be not only about the quality of the army but the quality of the state and the ideals it holds. The argument is too one-sided, too limited to military science; the broader interests of the state should be considered too. The military does not exist for itself; rather it exists to uphold and defend our ideals, and it should not be allowed to take part in dismantling them in the name of expedience. Not even Sparta for all its militarism would have countenanced that.
We should consider, too, that historically the use of mercenaries is a measure of a civilization’s decline. We have used soldiers for hire in Iraq. When Iraq’s medieval empire under the Abbasids decided to use mercenaries it foreshadowed a breathtaking decline. The same may be said of Rome and the Ottoman Empire and many another world power.

By eschewing the draft we are making the case for an elitist society, saying not that Yankee Doodle will defend us when necessary but that poor Yankee Doodle will do the job. If the lords of the land, our fatted upper class, is unwilling to send its children to war it tells us they’re Americans for what they can get out of the rest of us, not because they believe in our ideals.

If we are to remain as egalitarian as we say we are, as egalitarian as those who wrap themselves in the flag and try to make traitors out of dissenters say we are, then let the rich put their money where their collective mouth is. If their children object to war, let them serve in other capacities. This is not just a military issue, it is a social issue. We do not exist to serve our military. We do not exist to adjust to it; it exists to protect our commonly held birthright. If we become a military state, or merely a state that panders to its military-industrial sector, we forfeit that birthright.

But by all means let us rid ourselves of a circumstance in which old, overweight white men wearing flag pins and waving for the camera send children of color, poverty and despair to war—and then desert them when they come back broken. —DM

There’s an eerie quality of historical deja vu about this. For much of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries young Westerners were engaged in militaristic colonial exploitation of the Southern Hemisphere. Young Americans, for example, slaughtered Native Americans to seize their land and resources. Young American seamen, brokers and planters involved themselves in the wicked slave trade.

No one in his right mind would defend the murderous Taliban and Al Qaeda and their simpleminded fiendishness, but at the same time can we defend  Europe’s exploitation of the Third World or its exploitation of pre-Columbian Americans? The West was not so much simpleminded as it was greedy and racist.

The young Arabs, Central Asians and others who are gathering in Waziristan to fight the infidels will a thousand years from now bear a striking historical resemblance to the young Christians who bore arms against East Indians, South Americans and Asians in the name of Western religion and civilization. Historians of that future time will marvel at both eurocentric and Islamocentric hypocrisy, two sides of the same coin.

Yes, there will be plenty of room and time, too, to marvel at the hypocrisy of the Muslims, for their forebears also colonized and exploited at lance-point in the name of their allegedly superior religion and civilization.

And so it has always been throughout history: cycle after cycle of murderous exploitation and hypocritical justification. There are no good guys, just us flawed humans, Christian and Muslim alike. Waziristan today, London yesterday. We must get off it, all of us, this towering self-righteousness and ravening greed.

The idea of killing for God is the nth obscenity.—DM

Last Sunday on the George Stephanopoulos show we were told by Ted Koppel to forget about withdrawing from Iraq because we’re there to stabilize oil prices. Who did we hear say that, except of course the Sunday agenda-setters? It may or may not be true. Our presence may stabilize or it may destabilize the Middle East. But here we have the press driving the issues.

We were also told in the same show that the election campaign is not about John McCain, or even us, it’s about Barack Obama. Really? Could have fooled us. We thought it was about the presidency, silly us. We were told it was about Obama’s flip-flopping (not John McCain’s or the pundits’), but we were not told that the whole issue of flip-flopping is a press invention because the talking press finds it difficult to squeeze meaning and nuance between advertisements. Inherently dodgy issues like flip-flopping don’t gain traction
without the press’s complicity.

To watch these shows is to watch Washington insiders telling us what the issues are, what is important, and telling us on airwaves we own. What they deem unimportant they simply don’t mention. Net neutrality, for instance. When Mr. Koppel issued his world-weary pronunciamento he failed to mention that the Iraqi government and most of the Arab states, if not all, think our continued presence destabilizes the region.

Iraq interested Mr. Stephanopoulos’s guests more than the economy, although the economy now interests the people more than Iraq. So we got Iraq, we got John McCain’s so-called steadfastness about Iraq, Barack Obama’s so-called wobbles about Iraq; we didn’t get any discussion about how McCain’s brittle ideology might be more disastrous than Obama’s altered positions. That’s what I mean about setting the agenda, the press’s agenda, not ours. We, the people, have expressed our concerns, but who is listening?

When the press takes a poll it’s not for the edification of the public, it’s taken for press fodder.

Ted Koppel says portentously that discussion about staying in Iraq is futile because we’re there to stabilize the oil supply, and that’s that. Thanks, Ted, now we know what our fate is. No discussion about whether we can afford to keep, say, eighty thousand troops in Iraq while we bankrupt ourselves and lose Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban. No discussion about what might be the Arabs’ duty to their own part of the world. This is what is called framing the discussion. It’s framed all right.

We’re not listening to discourse here, not in the sense that the Discovery, PBS or History channels shed light on subjects, illuminate our minds. We’re listening to the world as a handful of pundits see it, we’re listening to the agenda they think we ought to pursue, how they think we ought to think.

The entire issue of flip-flopping, which gets more slapstick by the day, serves the press’s phony certitude about matters, its unwillingness to explore the complexity of issues. The press is in large part culpable for the ideological polarization of the country because of its adolescent insistence that we make up our minds and seal them with Gorilla Glue. Neither life nor the affairs of man are like that. They are more like shifting sands and ocean currents, and whoever is unable to respond intelligently to change and to nuance is swamped. Imagine a sailor trying to hold a course against a wind shift. You can’t, because you’d be imagining a fool. And yet we make heroes of ideologues, we celebrate their inability or refusal to revisit issues in the light of developments and disclosures.

The very fact that the press takes flip-flopping seriously is an obscenity, but it also reveals media commitment to driving the agenda. If the press had simply taken the position that any scientist would take, namely that intelligent people keep their minds open to discovery, there would have been no flip-flopping issue at all. But the convergence of the media impulse to drive the agenda and the political desire to simplify issues into slogans has undermined public discourse in America. —DM

Every Arab civilization since the advent of Islam in the 7th Christian century has been forced to deal with armed tribes. It was the tribes under the leadership of the Umayyad caliphs that turned the Mediterranean into an Arab lake and carried the green banners of Islam into Europe.

But it was also the tribes that toppled many an Arab rule. Sometimes the tribes were Shia, more often Sunni, and sometimes Berber. The impossibility of disarming the tribes posed an exquisite dilemma. On the one hand, the armed tribal Arab was a racial prototype, much like the Scots highlander, the Viking, or our own frontiersman.

When Islam burst out of the Arabian peninsula it was on the horses of tribesmen to whom raiding and hunting was a way of life. But as Muslim rulers came to preside over vast areas and were confronted with the task of governing with an unwieldy bureaucracy they often came into conflict with their own tribes.

If we had had thoughtful rather than ideologically driven leaders in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, we might have heeded the experience of T.E. Lawrence. He needed a certain Arab chieftain, Auda Abu Tayi (inset, pastel by Eric Kennington), lord of the Howeitat tribe, to carry out his strategy against the Turks. But first he had to listen to a revealing speech by Auda, a speech we would have done well to heed:

I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say Arabs. Who are these Arabs of which you speak? I know Howeitat, I know Ruwallah, I know Shammar, I don’t know these Arabs you talk about. What is an Arab?

Lawrence understood the wily Auda very well. Lawrence’s talk about a chance to restore lost Arab glory was a careful British ploy to unite the Arabs just enough to serve Western schemes to topple the Ottoman Empire but not enough to resist British exploitation. It was a delicate balancing act, and Auda, just as wily as the British, decided to play along for rifles and plunder.

What Auda told Lawrence his ancestors might well have told their own caliphs and the caliphs of the Turks. When you talked about government to Auda, when you talked about a capital, a bureaucracy, a flag other than his own tribe’s, you were selling him snake oil. The tribal Arab does not trust central authority, and this is where his history converges with our own Second Amendment, because our own founders believed that if a citizenry could be disarmed it could be bullied into submission.

To misunderstand this about the Arabs—the tension between their aspirations as a Muslim people and their tribal history—is similar to misunderstanding the conviction of millions of Americans that a government that can disarm them can take away their liberties, as surely as fear-mongering has already taken away many of ours.

We were ourselves a hunting society, as the Arab Bedouins have historically been. If we hadn’t been blinded by ideology and the secret agendas of various Washington elites we would have at very least been able to ask ourselves a simple question:

If the Arabs themselves have been riven over the centuries by an inability to confine the Bedouin within a centralized and sedentary society in which people from others tribes and other places called the shots, what made us think we could barge into Iraq and sell the Arabs on the idea that our democracy was better than a tribal system that had served them well over millennia?

This combination of oil lust, ideological madness and arrogance was bound to prove at least as suspicious to the Arabs as British and French efforts to colonize them had been. The Arabs themselves understand fully what Sheik Auda Abu Tayi was saying. Their history is characterized by profound admiration on the one hand for the Bedouin and an equally profound exasperation on the other hand.

Whole Arab societies have fallen overnight either for encroaching upon the Bedouins or for drafting them into emergencies as mercenaries and then not being able to get rid of them. The Abbasid caliphs, who built the once fabled Baghdad with which we have become woefully familiar, thought it would be a good idea to supplant their unruly and unpredictable Bedouin warriors with Seljuk and then Ottoman mercenaries. It was a bad idea for the Arabs and a great idea for the Turks.

Bedouins destabilize Arab society precisely because their own social units are so stable. When a central Arab or foreign government says you must do this or that for the greater good, the Bedouins are invariably suspicious. Whose greater good? But Bedouins destabilize government only when they perceive a threat to their way of life.

On the other hand, much that is noble in the Arab character, much that characterizes the race is uniquely Bedouin. What could have possessed us—or the British or the French before us—to think that we could overturn all this with better ideas when the most glorious Arab societies, such as Cordoba, Palermo and Baghdad, had been at best able to hold the problem in check for a while?

Key aspects of our own government were adapted from the Iroquois nation, a hunting society. Why should we not have accorded Arab society the same respect when we determined to upset the existing order in Iraq and hand it over to foreign influence, namely Iran’s?

Just as surely as Sunni tribesmen in Iraq have turned against Al Qaeda, so they can turn against any central authority, whether it comes from the clergy or the secular government. My mother, an artist who made many drawings and paintings of Algerian Bedouins, once watched a group of Bedouins who had come to market listening to a cleric harangue them about their irreligious ways. They listened silently, and then an old Bedouin drew up close to the cleric and stuck his dagger under his chin. The other Bedouins chuckled and walked off. Anyone who studies Arab history would understand this incident.

When we tell the Arabs our way of life is superior to theirs, the line we are peddling in Iraq, we should remember the tribes have heard this a thousand times before from their own caliphs, from the Golden Horde, from the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, from the British, the French and the Germans. It was hogwash to them then and it is hogwash to them now. One reason the memory of Alexander the Great is held in esteem among the Arabs is that he wasn’t fool enough to try to change their way of life. Arabs have raised up magnificent societies—they are doing it today in parts of their world—but they understand the trigger points and tensions in their culture better than anybody else. We wouldn’t have tolerated them intervening to redress our racial injustices; how can we expect them to tolerate our meddling?

In the 1970s when Jordan clashed bloodily with Palestinians a Jordanian leader remarked, The trouble with the Palestinians is that they’re willing to fight to the last drop of Jordanian blood. This remark was rooted in Arab history. When ambitious rulers have needed warriors, they have looked to the Bedouins, but inevitably their desire to consolidate and rule comes into conflict with Bedouin independence. Americans should have been one of the peoples best suited to understand this about the Arabs, because the Americans who worry about inroads on their right to bear arms are in many ways quite like the Bedouins in their suspicion of central authority.

In North Africa the tribes didn’t want French culture or religion, but they liked Berthier and Lebel rifles. How far from our own Second Amendment in spirit are such tribesmen? They don’t trust government not to bully them. Our ideas of democracy smack of authoritarianism. They’ve heard it before from other Western societies. They’ve heard it from Muslims. It doesn’t wash. They trust their way of life, as we trust ours. The fact that we do not respect their history as much as we respect our own doomed our enterprise in Iraq from the start. Why should an intelligent people have trusted such reckless and disrespectful interlopers?—DM

Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman, has written a book confirming some of the public’s worst suspicions about the presidency of George W. Bush. McClellan (inset) says, among other things, the White House lied us into the Iraq war and covered up its role in destroying the career of a CIA undercover agent simply because she was married to a critic of President Bush’s war policies.

Self-righteous critics on the left and the right of the political spectrum immediately accused the once adamant Bush loyalist of being a day late and a dollar short. Why didn’t his conscience bother him when he foisted these lies on the public, his critics ask? Well, conscience isn’t always as hair-triggered as John Wayne in the movies. Sometimes it takes a lot of introspection to accept that you have been part of wrongdoing, that you are part of the problem when you have been posing as part of the solution.

McClellan says the press didn’t do its job. He says that no matter how he sliced it the press readily swallowed his daily servings of baloney. That’s hardly news, but it’s refreshing to hear McClellan say so. And no sooner had he said it than a number of famous reporters protested that they had been asking hard questions all along, but were stonewalled or threatened with being denied access to the White House. Oh dear me, those poor reporters. Stonewalled, can you imagine that? Now, as for me, small-time newspaperman that I was, I never covered a town council that didn’t stonewall me and threaten me with a freeze-out. I never covered any local government that didn’t at times try to bamboozle me. Where in heaven’s name have these people been? Did the big bad White House scare them into being sheep in wolves’ clothing? Gee, I thought they got paid the big bucks for slaying those dragons.

Here’s what they’re not telling us. They’re not hanging out their own dirty laundry. They’re not telling us that their corporate bosses caved in to White House pressure and let it be known that questions about the wisdom of going to war and many another scandal should be soft-pedaled. They’re not telling us that we all caved in to phony patriotism, accepting the scurrilous notion that if you opposed this catastrophic war, this unjustifiable war, you were not a patriot and had no right to call yourselves Americans.

Those reporters, like you and me, were bullied and stampeded by the White House, and the White House had plenty of help from corporate America, from the corporate press. And here’s what else the reporters are not telling us. Corporate America had much to gain from the war, and has been stuffing its profits in its pockets since Day One, and that is why we were all herded like sheep. Now, if that is not a story worth covering, what is?

So all these phonies decrying Scott McClellan’s tardiness in coming clean should answer to us about just how clean they have come. For example, what happened to the story about the $9 billion that was reported to have gone missing in Iraq in 2005? Nine billion, not nine million. Imagine what that money could have done for New Orleans, for education or health care, homeland security or our returning soldiers. You better imagine it, because the press has buried that story like a dead skunk.

And here is another story the namby-pamby corporate press, so hard on Scott McClellan, is working hard to bury. The Defense Department can’t account for the money it has spent in Iraq. Here is how the press buries such stories. It tells you about the initial report, usually from some government accounting agency, and then it scrapes up some reaction from the usual big mouths on The Hill or from among the pundits, and that’s it, see ya later. And we’re talking about trillions of tax dollars here, and yet this commercially cowed press has the gall to jump all over a Bush loyalist whose conscience has been bothering him. The Washington insiders are closing their ranks, cooking up their excuses, and trying to make us believe that they were all innocents doing their jobs when they knew damned well the job they were doing was on us.

But let’s not go too fast here. I’m making a pretty serious complaint. Will it hold water? Let’s test it and see what you think. Not long ago The New York Times exposed a squalid program within the Defense Department to turn retired military brass into mouthpieces for the war. The Pentagon gave them so-called insider briefings and then they appeared on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC and elsewhere, posing as analysts but actually selling the war. In other words, they were being paid to sell a lemon. They were disgracing the uniform they had so honorably worn—for money. Remember how night after night Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs and other anchors called these mouthpieces distinguished and expert? Well, where are their apologies? Why haven’t we heard these paid phonies apologize for deceiving us and misusing our tax money? And why haven’t we heard these famous anchors apologizing? Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of them.

On May 30th Wolf Blitzer asked McClellan pointblank if he was sorry for deceiving the American people. McClellan said he regretted it. Someone in a much more public forum than this should ask Wolf Blitzer if he is sorry for taking part in a running con of the American people by night after night telling us we were getting expert military opinion from distinguished retired generals when in fact we were getting paid BS. And someone should ask Mr. Blitzer and many another anchor if he actually believed that nightly blather to be honest, because if he did, and if the others did, well, maybe they’re not qualified for the job of helping the rest of us understand complex issues.

But having asked such admittedly rhetorical questions, we would then be confronted with an even bigger issue, because those anchors and reporters live in a culture determined by their bosses, and we now know that their bosses have been in cahoots with the White House to sell us slanted stories and analyses.

The corporations they work for were in on the scam. It would be worth their careers, tarnished as they are, to open their mouths and say, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done this, or at least I should have explained the deal.

But there’s even more hypocrisy and cover-up. Any logical listener or reader would have said to himself: If the military experts at Annapolis and West Point are teaching our next generation of officers in this same unquestioning, unbalanced and one-sided context, will we have the officer corps we need to win future conflicts? I say the answer is no. And if the answer is no, then what possible cause could these so-called analysts have served other than to dish up propaganda in behalf of a corrupt administration from which they were profiting? The truth is that the academies are teaching our future officers well, but we can’t vaccinate them against the attempts of politicians to politicize the military.
Did the one-sidedness of their analyses never occur to Wolf Blitzer, a veteran print and television reporter? That’s hard to believe. Whether these reporters and military people were in on the scam for money or idealism, it was a scam. Where then are their apologies?

If these retired generals had looked upon combat conditions the way they analyzed the war for us in the media they would have disgraced themselves in the field. They knew how to think in complicated terms. They knew how to examine circumstances. They knew their military history. They are the best and brightest. But they conned us for money. And so did the media that employed them.

So when some media or political hot shot in high dudgeon says, Why didn’t Scott McClellan quit rather than serve such corruptors, I would ask, Why didn’t those anchors quit? Why didn’t those executives quit? Why didn’t those generals say, No, we can’t do this, it’s dishonorable?

Serving officers are supposed to be apolitical. They can have their opinions and they can vote them, but until they retire, they are supposed to refrain from politics. One of the worst aspects of the Bush Administration has been its concerted campaign to politicize the serving military, to make it unpatriotic to oppose a neo-con agenda, to corrupt the military. As The New York Times story showed, to a larger extent than we could have imagined the White House has succeeded in doing just that. And yet here we have a vice president who never deigned to serve in uniform and a President who spent a lot of time dodging his reservist obligations.

This isn’t just the problem of the Tim Russerts and Wolf Blitzers of the industry, it’s everyone’s problem. All of you who aspire to honorable careers in journalism will someday confront similar predicaments. On the one hand office holders and revered public figures will lie to you, and on the other hand your corporate bosses will tell you to tone it down, ignore it, go along to get along. And then what? What will you do?

It isn’t going to be a black and white dilemma. You may happen to like your bosses and enjoy pleasing them. They may like you and promise you a rewarding career. You may even like the liars. They may charm you.
They may feed you choice tidbits that advance your career. Your wife or your girlfriend, husband or boyfriend, may plead with you to go along. Don’t go to the wall for nothing, they may tell you. You have to give a little
to get a little, to keep the bread on the table. You’re going to hear it all.

And what are you going to do? I don’t know. I know what I did, and it didn’t do my career any good, and that’s why I say it’s our problem. Our society’s. A moral issue confronting so important a sector of our society as the Fourth Estate is surely worth debate. So where is the debate? Have you heard it from the pulpit? Have you heard it in the streets? You certainly haven’t heard from the mainstream media. Many books and television serials have glamorized reporting, encouraging the public to trust the integrity of the press. The Scott McClellan story tells us otherwise. It tells us why the press isn’t trusted. It isn’t trusted because it shouldn’t be. It needs to repent and to regain the public trust. McClellan was corrupted by power and charm, and the press he misled was corrupted, even though we’re not hearing any admissions. There would be a lot more hope to go around if we were hearing those admissions.

I once quit a job as a small-town city editor because I knew the newspaper was covering up a secret plan by the city, the county and a big manufacturer to build a huge factory whose presence would have devalued nearby residential property. The mechanisms in place required public hearings. But they were being circumvented “for the public’s own good,” as if the public needed a big daddy. I felt the taxpayers had a right to a public hearing without the scheme being railroaded through in the dark. My decision hurt my career. I was on a fast track. I was a good reporter, a better editor. It could be argued, and there were those who did argue it, that I should have been less naive, that I should have borne with the amorality of the scheme for my own sake, for my family’s. But I didn’t. I took a job as a copy editor somewhere else and moved on. I’ve never felt self-righteous about that decision. I’m still not sure whether I was brave or just immature. But I did what my conscience dictated, and I do ask myself these days how many people who have been involved in the scandals and corruptions of this administration—both within the administration and within the press corps and its corporate front offices—have made similar decisions. And, if they have, do they regard those decisions as moral necessities or immaturity? We can get awfully het up about gay marriages; why can’t we get het up about being conned and swindled?

I do remember asking myself back then when I was in my thirties how I would appear to myself in the mirror as I shaved. I didn’t appear as a hero, I can tell you that. I appeared as a young family man with tears in his eyes. I loved my job. I didn’t want to quit. I was getting ahead, as they say. But I was also sitting on a moral wrong, as are Big Media today.

So don’t be telling me now that McClellan is a day late and a dollar short, because there are just too many of us who happen to be in the same boat, and some of us are famous newsmen and women, and some of us are rich executives and shareholders, and some of us are ambitious and lying politicians. And as for me, I’m just gulled and angry, and I suspect that’s the way a great many others feel.

For a dispassionate look at how the press corps bought the Iraq war I urge listeners to read Gregg Mitchell’s story in the May 30th issue of Editor & Publisher.

If he knew his bosses were lying about Iraq and Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whom they treacherously outed, why didn’t he speak up, save thousands of lives, dollars and damages? That’s what many of his critics of the left and right are yowling.

As a man, perhaps a damned fool, I’ve spent at least half my life trying to figure out why I acquiesced in certain wrongs, why I was wronged, why I wronged others. I think it sometimes takes a long time to square yourself with the events in which you’ve played a role. I think it sometimes takes a while to figure out who your enemies were and are. And, yes, if you can’t make mid-course corrections you haven’t grown up.

Why did the Germans acquiesce to Nazi horrors? Why did the French gang up on Dreyfus, a loyal citizen? Why did we wantonly slaughter the Native Americans and enslave Africans out of greed? Why did Spain enslave the Indians?

It takes time to wake up from some nightmares. It takes time to reset some moral compasses. Sure, I know some people make decisions as fast and surely as John Wayne in his movies. I’ve seen men and women do just that, and I’ve admired them. But it’s not a universal gift. Sometimes I’ve risen to the task, but not always. It seems to me there are an awful lot of self-righteous people out there throwing stones at McClellan.

I’m willing to believe McClellan examined his soul, reviewed his part in wrongdoing, and made a decision to write about it. I don’t hear Dick Cheney or Karl Rove apologizing for ruining the career of Valerie Plame, a loyal American. I don’t hear the Administration saying it was wrong about anything when it can’t even account for $9 billion lost in Iraq, vanished. I don’t hear the networks apologizing for selling us all those retired generals pretending to be analyzing the war and all the while knowing they were paid Pentagon stooges pitching the war.

So what’s all this hullabaloo from the all too righteous on both sides of the political spectrum about a young man who seemingly got sucked into horrific deeds by people who had been his patrons and mentors? What’s so hard to understand about that, considering that we have all been suckered?       —DM

I have been wondering lately whether advertising has played the role of the Bush Administration in subverting culture in favor of appearance over content. It seems clear to me that a precariously broad segment of the electorate favors appearance over discourse and slogan over an intricate interplay of facts and ideas.

I’m already out of my depth, but I can speak knowledgeably about the newspaper business. There was a time when information and opinion was presented in columns, sticks, of type. The overall appearance of the page was severely vertical. Photographs were used largely to relieve fields of gray but were given little authority of their own.

Sometime in the early nineteen-sixties this began to change. Packaging began to triumph over content. Newspaper owners realized that it was cheaper to make a newspaper look good than to maintain the staffs necessary to fully report local, regional, national and international news. A few good editors could put out a pretty product that enclosed an increasingly content-free zone.

This trend has continued unabated. It no doubt arose in the advertising culture where the most meretricious product can be made to look important by slick design.

The trend was bound to change our culture. Subliminally we believed you could look godlike, guzzle beer and win sailboat races, for example. Gorgeous advertisements assured us this was so. We believed it was cool to light up. The business sector was swift-boating us. A Chevrolet could be made to appear rival to a Jaguar.

I don’t mean to contend that a preference for trash was created out of whole cloth. I sold newspapers on the streets of Manhattan in the early nineteen-fifties, so I know how rooted is our interest in women in various states of undress, in gossip, in cheap rumor and scandal. But I think that in the nineteen-sixties journalism began to cross certain lines between appearance and a responsible presentation of fact and opinion. I think it was becoming apparent that a good package could conceal a lack of depth.

As the Bush Administration whipped up war fever prior to its disastrous incursion into Iraq the press swallowed the rationale without digesting it, even down to accepting the bogus idea that we had to go to war against a nation-state enemy that proved to have nothing to do with 9/11. In decades to come, presuming our republic survives the present corruption of its liberties, cable news tapes will be re-examined in our universities and we will marvel at their propagandistic nature. There was CNN literally beating war drums, using graphics that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels could only have dreamed of to instill the idea that there was a real enemy in Iraq, real weapons of mass destruction and a front line in the war on terrorism. The facts were otherwise, but CNN—it was a foregone conclusion Fox News would help the Administration sell the lie—fell to the temptation to present a Wagnerian package rather than pursue the hard task of challenging the Adminstration’s bushwah.

It’s like the difference between examining the technical specifications for an appliance and simply taking the advertiser’s word for it. We have come as a culture to take somebody’s word for it as long as it panders to our expectations. We have carried our aversion to disappointment to extremes and come to regard difficult news as offensive to our sensibilities.

The promise of advertising to make everything easy and beautiful has lured our culture away from the task of sorting out information, fact from appearance, complexity from seductive simplicity. In our preference for simplicity, half-truths and lies, simply because they go down well with our prejudices, we have come to accept the appearance of things for their reality.

There is nothing new about this. Battle cries and the lame-brained certitudes of mullahs and priests have often gulled a people into war and other catastrophes, but our particular American tragedy is that it was thought from the very beginning of the republic that its citizens would have to work hard to understand the complexities before them or they would lose their ideals to the attractive witlessness of authoritarian regime. In this historic task advertising—the triumph of appearance over actuality—has not served us well.                       —DM