Looking for Light in Media of Shadows

The days are getting longer, and perhaps the midday shadows are becoming shorter, but across the mainstream media terrain we're apt to search in vain for clarity behind "the issues."

In the aftermath of the guilty verdict in the Scooter Libby trial, the media coverage has spotlighted its political implications. After being active accessories in exactly the kind of disinformation that Libby was engaged in promoting, the country's major news outlets are now acknowledging that the political road to the invasion of Iraq was paved with deceptions.

But the U.S. news media were integral to the concrete ways that propaganda laid the path to war. This is hardly a revelatory observation; by now it's a truism that anyone who's paying attention should easily grasp. Yet the leading lights of American journalism — the ones acclaimed by their colleagues and widely touted as the finest reportorial spirits in the land — remain hunkered down in the shadowy crevices of their professional pride.

Little can change without candor about what has already happened. And at this point — while the war in Iraq continues unabated — the most powerful media institutions in the United States are often willing to report that the White House was engaged in some nefarious maneuvers to persuade the public that an invasion of Iraq was necessary. But, with few exceptions, the same media outlets have positioned themselves as little more than innocent bystanders, taken in by the overzealous and sometimes unscrupulous officials who led the charge for war.

There's no doubt that the top echelons of the Bush administration's foreign-policy cadres did all they could to manipulate the American media. But that begs the question: Why were the American news media so easy to manipulate?

A simple answer is that numerous high-profile journalists were eager to be manipulated. They got their official-source "scoops" — in the process, often purveying outright falsehoods as supposed facts. But that's only a partial explanation.

The hot-shot journalists weren't manipulated so much as they were avid participants in a fusing of press and state. The journalistic discussions of what "we" (the U.S.

government) might do were more than slips of tongues. Mentally, and professionally, the reporters and editors and pundits routinely could not distinguish between the USA as the dominant global colossus and the American press corps as a real-time historic factor.

After years have gone by and nationalistic ardor has cooled a bit, it's not too difficult for journalists to mention now and again that they may have gotten a bit swept up in the drive to war. Misrepresentations of supposed fact by the administration, now in disrepute, are currently being scorned by many of the same journalists who were trumpeting those misrepresentations as unvarnished truths four years ago.

But it remains very difficult for journalists — the ones who helped drag the United States into the war — to acknowledge that they didn't only get key facts wrong, they also got their basic attitudes wrong.

Mainstream journalists commonly accepted, as sacrosanct, the prerogative of the U.S. government to launch a military attack on any nation that the powerful in Washington chose to target.

They also accepted — in practice if not in theory — the assumption that the benefits of doubts should go to the president of the United States whenever he wrapped himself in Old Glory and proclaimed that American national security was at stake in a looming military confrontation with another country.

And journalists — including many who were bravely willing to risk their lives to cover events on a battlefield — were all too willing to cower into conformity lest they be accused of insufficient patriotism for actually engaging in journalistic skepticism while the U.S. attack got underway.

When we most need truly independent journalism is when its unfettered exercise is most difficult — when the pressures are great to go along to get along with the flag-draped officials who are proclaiming the glorious need to use the Pentagon's might to smite the evildoers.

Unless and until journalists are willing and able to show us that they can shine a harsh light into the shadows of U.S. government policy on a regular basis, they will continue to serve the interests of expediency — rather than the First Amendment and the public interest.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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