NOTE: It seems to me that it's well past time that those of us who value our newspapers, magazines...the jounalists and editors and photographers of the news...get our act together and start standing up for them. As a Democrat, I am not at all pleased by the Bush administration's on-going war on the media....in effect, the war against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They value secrecy more than truth and openness. Anytime any administration tries to muffle the press, there's no question that they're trying to hide what shouldn't be hidden.
From The New Yorker:
by David Remnick
(an excerpt)
Justice Hugo Black wrote, “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Nixon-Agnew-Ford orbit left Washington believing that the imperial Presidency had been disastrously hobbled by a now imperial press. When they reappeared in 2001, under the auspices of George W. Bush, the Nixon-Agnew spirit was resurrected with them—this time without the Joycean wordplay. More than any other White House in history, Bush’s has tried to starve, mock, weaken, bypass, devalue, intimidate, and deceive the press, using tactics far more toxic than any prose devised in the name of Spiro Agnew.
Firm in the belief that the press can be gored for easy political gain, the Bush Administration has set about reducing the status of the media (specifically, what it sees as the left-wing, Eastern-establishment media) to that of a pesky yet manageable interest group, nothing more. As Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff at the time, told this magazine’s Ken Auletta, “They”—the media—“don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. . . . I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”
In the past six years, the Administration and its surrogates have issued a stream of disinformation about intelligence and Iraq; paid friendly “columnists” like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher tens of thousands of dollars to parrot the White House line; accredited to the White House press corps a phony journalist and ex-prostitute (Jeff “Bulldog” Gannon, a.k.a. James Dale Guckert) as a reliable pitcher of softball questions; tightened Freedom of Information Act restrictions; and pioneered a genre of fake news via packaged video “reports.” The President has held fewer solo news conferences than any of his modern predecessors. The Vice-President kept the Times reporter off his plane because he didn’t like the paper’s coverage.
The atmosphere, in general, has been one of crude manipulation and derision. After Seymour M. Hersh published, in this magazine, his third article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in as many weeks, the Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, overlooking the truth of the reports, publicly declared that Hersh merely “threw a lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off what’s real.” (Hersh’s articles, he said, composed a “tapestry of nonsense.”)
In recent months, the critique has grown more ominous. Cheney and other officials have attacked Dana Priest’s article in the Washington Post detailing the rendition of prisoners to secret jails in Europe and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s articles in the Times describing the government’s attempt to fight terrorism with warrantless domestic wiretaps. Aping the spirit, if not the élan, of his predecessor, Cheney called the articles disloyal, damaging to national security, and undeserving of the Pulitzer Prizes they won.
Late last month, the Times published a long report by Lichtblau and Risen on the C.I.A.’s and the Treasury Department’s monitoring of an international banking database in Brussels to track the movement of funds by Al Qaeda. The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times very quickly followed with their own articles on the government’s monitoring of Al Qaeda’s financial transactions, which has been an open secret ever since it was trumpeted by––well, by George W. Bush, in mid-September, 2001. Infuriated that the editors of the Times had not acceded to blandishments to kill the story, Bush and Cheney, in a coördinated offensive, described the Times report as a disgrace and, outrageously, as a boon to further terror attacks.
The ideological noise machine took it from there. A congressman, Peter King, and a senator, Jim Bunning, both Republicans, accused the Times of treason. King, whose contradictory nature once embraced the violent activities of the I.R.A., is now the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Curiously, it was King who, in September of 2004, co-chaired a hearing so that a Treasury official could tell the world how the department’s programs were driving terrorists out of the banking system; now he speaks of employing the 1917 Espionage Act to investigate and try journalists.
Last week, the House approved a resolution condemning the newspapers that published the banking story for placing “the lives of Americans in danger.” The resolution passed 227–183, almost completely along party lines. On the airwaves and in the blogosphere, it got uglier. Melanie Morgan, a shouter on northern California’s biggest talk radio station, told the San Francisco Chronicle that if Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, “were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber.”
The Bush Administration can’t really believe that these newspaper stories have undermined the battle against Al Qaeda; what’s more, it knows that over the decades papers like the Times have kept many stories and countless particulars secret when editors saw that it was in the interest of national security and military safety to do so. The Times banking story disclosed no leads, named no targets. To say that it risked lives is like saying that an article revealing that cops tap phones to monitor the activities of the Mafia is a gift to the Five Families of New York.
The Bush Administration knows very well what it is doing and in what climate. The press––particularly the mainstream outlets the White House finds most irritating––is in a collective state of anxious transition, hurt by scandals (Congressman King was quick to mention Jayson Blair, the Times serial fabulist), by the appearance of a blizzard of new technologies and ideologized alternatives like Fox News, and by a general sense of economic, even existential, worry. The era of hegemonic networks and newspapers, of supremely confident Bradlees and Rosenthals, is a memory.
In the wake of the Administration’s record of dishonesty and incompetence in Iraq and the consequent decline in the President’s domestic polling numbers, it is not hard to discern why the White House might find a convenient enemy in the editors of the Times: this is an election year. The assault on the Times is a no-lose situation for the White House. The banking story itself showed the Administration to be doing what it had declared it was doing from the start: concertedly monitoring the financial transactions of potential terrorists. At the same time, by smearing the Times for the delectation of the Republican “base,” the Administration could direct attention away from its failures, including, last week, the Supreme Court’s decision to block its plans to try Guantánamo detainees before military commissions.
In the era of the Pentagon Papers, a war-weary White House went to the courts to stifle the press. You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.
— David Remnick
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