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Ralph Peters is a regular columnist with the New
York Post.
Register here for access to the Post's Online Edition.
 Journalism’s
Moral Collapse
Media believes it’s beyond good and evil…
[Ralph
Peters] 12/6/05
A specter
is haunting journalism: the specter of Watergate.
Three decades
ago, two young reporters became the story and crippled American
journalism.
Budding yuppies
who avoided inconvenient service to the state needed heroes
they could call their own. And they got them.
Robert Redford
and Dustin Hoffman played Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on-screen.
It was as if Mike Bloomberg was portrayed by Brad Pitt. Overnight,
journalism became an upwardly mobile profession — and
our country is much the worse for it.
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Ralph
Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books,
as well as of hundreds of essays and articles, written both
under his own name and as Owen Parry. He is a frequent columnist
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In place of the old healthy skepticism, we have arrogant cynicism.
The highest echelons of the media and government became preserves
for America's most-privileged. An Ivy League degree was the ticket
to a reporting job on a major daily. And incest produced the
usual ugly results.
"Mainstream" newspapers
lost touch with American workers because the new breed of journalists
didn't know any workers.
After journalists
became matinee idols, every bright young reporter had a new
career goal. Forget honest, get-at-the-facts reporting.
Henceforth the crowning ambition in the field was to bring down
a president — especially one who wasn't "our kind." Failing
that, turning the tide of a foreign conflict against Washington
would do.
"Serious" journalists
became scandal-mongers in drag.
The other product
of the Woodward-Bernstein cult was the rise of the self-adoring
conviction that journalists were above patriotism,
the law and common decency. Today's Joe McCarthys aren't on Capitol
Hill — they're in the newsroom. In lieu of Edward R. Murrow,
we have Hedda Hopper masquerading as Joan of Arc.
Now we learn that Bob Woodward, the muckraker who became a groupie
to the great, felt himself entitled to ignore his basic responsibilities
as a citizen and journalist in the CIA leak case: He had information
and withheld it from investigators.
His counterpart at the New York Times, Judy Miller (the loudest
diva since Maria Callas), invoked the journalist's exception
to the rule of law in the opposite manner, grandstanding about
protecting her source.
Leona Helmsley famously
remarked that taxes are for the little people. Star journalists
assume that the law is for the little
people, too. "Journalistic privilege" is the biggest
crock of merde since phrenology or eugenics: Reporters aren't
priests in the confessional: They're citizens, just like you
and me.
Celeb journalists
love to invoke "freedom of the press," but
dismiss the reality that the exercise of freedom in an open society
demands a corresponding sense of responsibility, as well as self-restraint
and mature judgment.
The coverage of Iraq by once-great publications such as The
New York Times and The New Yorker has been nothing more than
a propaganda effort to convince the American people that our
efforts are destined to fail. Stories lie by omission and manipulation.
Patriotism? Forget it.
After Watergate, patriotism
became an embarrassment among journalists. They're "citizens of the world." CNN
International has grown so casually anti-American that it rivals
the BBC, while
much of big media here at home gives terrorist atrocities a pass,
while celebrating the slightest errors of our troops with front-page
headlines.
The Washington Post — the old home of Woodward and Bernstein — offers
a fascinating study in the tensions at work in journalism today.
Its editorial page has improved remarkably in recent years, while
the quality of its general reporting has far surpassed the Times'
page one editorializing.
Yet the quest for headlines-at-any-cost and the sense that evident
patriotism is distasteful led a superb paper to shameful decisions.
Dana Priest, a journalist with much fine work to her credit,
recently broke the story of secret CIA arrangements to hold captured
terrorists in Eastern Europe. For the sake of a headline, the
paper did severe harm to our counter-terror efforts and our diplomatic
relations.
The editors would
insist that "the public has a right to
know." That tired mantra needs scrutiny: It would have justified
revealing secrets such as Ultra, the Manhattan Project or the
timing of D-Day in the Second World War.
Our country is at
war with implacable enemies. If the media disdain supporting
our efforts at self-defense, they should at
least refrain from undercutting our security. How many deaths
is a story worth? (And imagine if we had published daily casualty
reports from World War II battlefields. Would "journalistic
integrity" have justified aiding Hitler)?
Another Washington Post reporter, Anthony Shadid, published
a long string of soft-on-the-insurgents columns. An Arabic-speaker
with family roots in the Middle East, Shadid was apparently such
a vital asset to the paper that his work never got the scrubbing
it deserved.
This year, Shadid
published a book, "Night Draws Near:
Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War." Turn to the
index. In 424 pages that pretend to describe the suffering of "Iraq's
people" under American occupation, there are only nine entries
under "Kurds" — when Kurds are about a fifth
of the population. Kurdish success and pro-Americanism would
have been inconvenient.
Media bias just might
turn the future of Iraq into a disaster that will reverberate
for decades. Last week, The Washington
Post interviewed Sunni-insurgent sympathizers. They said they "loved" media-creation
Cindy Sheehan and took heart from reports of the anti-war movement
in Washington.
There you have it, from the camel's mouth.
As vile as Richard
Nixon was, I'm no longer certain that Woodward and Bernstein
did our country a service. The post-Watergate journalist's
unexamined conviction that he or she is "beyond good and
evil" has done far more evil than good.
Actions have consequences.
Today's journalists refuse to accept that the rule applies
to them. The wages of irresponsible journalism
are death — for others. Expose a crucial clandestine operation,
shatter a policy or wreck a struggling state, and you get a Pulitzer
Prize. The motto of journalists today is "Nothing's ever
our fault."
The republic suffers. -one-
Ralph Peters'
latest book is New
Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy
This
piece first appeared in the New York Post
copyright 2004 - NY Post
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