June 10, 2005 – A monumental story is required to earn a coveted place in the history of journalism. No wonder then, last week’s journalistic celebration. The great glee and self-congratulatory bravado occasioned by a former FBI agent claiming to be Woodward and Bernstein’s mythical “Deep Throat” brings the media back to its salad days, a time when they got a footnote into the historical record by pushing an elected president from office.

For journalists, successes like these justify what they do. It allows many of them to bend the truth, hide behind unnamed sources, and determine what they think is best for the rest of us to know and what we’d be better off not knowing. The best in the media work in the open with verifiable sources, but the top of the profession is filled by those who’ll use any means to pursue a story when they feel it is important enough, or the cause righteous enough.
Just look at the way the media greeted Mark Felt’s admission last week. Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Washington Post during the heady days of Watergate, made it to every network, and he along with Woodward and Bernstein were quick to discuss the “story,” but said little of Felt’s disloyalty or the ultimate outcome of this whole affair. They disregarded Felt’s breaking of the law and his violation of his sworn oath. The President, after all, had to go. The media, using illegally gained privileged information, overturned a presidential election.
Left unmentioned in all of this was how it weakened the President, leaving him unable to alter what we now know was a death sentence for several millions in Southeast Asia. Fortunately though, the wound wasn’t deep enough to prevent Nixon from doing the right thing for Israel, but it was a close run thing.
In the last weeks of his fragile and besieged presidency, while he was being advised by his State Department to “let the Jews bleed a little,” he put the C-5A cargo planes in motion to resupply Israel’s beleaguered Army during its time of trial in 1973. Political gain wasn’t part of the calculus here, for he was beyond that by that time in his presidency.
For all of the blather about the press being the guarantor of our democratic way of life, it actually, by a process of selecting what we should and shouldn’t know and how we should know it, subverts it. Holding different presidents to varying standards of behavior serves our democracy poorly and only feeds the un-elected presenters own priorities and prejudices.
And now it is the turn of the Bush presidency.
Again, the media and a government insider are pursuing their own agenda. Ten months ago, weeks before we were to go to the polls to vote for President, the media breathlessly informed us about imminent indictments against people too closely tied to Israel and President Bush. Pat Buchanan was quick to point to “Pollardites” in the White House and insinuate dual loyalty on the part of the neo-cons. Read Jews. A variation of the race card, the Jewish card, was facilitated by the Washington Post with its week of front-page coverage and CBS’s prime time exposure. It was a big story, but for one thing: there were no imminent indictments. We are told now that there are indictments coming, but they aren’t here yet, so again a government leak and the media’s complicity manufactured a narrative that they thought important, but was premature and unverifiable. Deep Throat all over again.
Even now, almost a year later, the question the media won’t touch is who broke ranks in government to air this “news.” The information could only have come from the State Department, the CIA or the FBI and if so, it was a breach of national security to disclose it. Those wanting to embarrass the President before the election ended up accusing Jews of dual loyalty and fanning an ancient hatred for current political gain. Who broke the law and who decided that a higher public good was served by all of this?
It wasn’t Mark Felt, now 91 and out of government. But it was someone like him and the media still cannot see that its complicity in all of this is wrong. If there is an issue of grave national interest at stake, it is worthy of more than a “leak” and information passed in the shadows. Our process works best as an open one and is ill served by innuendo, insinuation and deep throats.

Comments are closed.