Thomas Jefferson Was Right
Thomas Jefferson, who was constantly and viciously hounded by his opponents in the press, once declared that, given the choice, he’d still rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers. Fortunately, television had not yet been invented, so that Sally Hemings story took a couple of hundred years to take off; maybe he’d feel differently today. Nonetheless, now we find ourselves in 2010, muddling along with the latter system Jefferson decidedly didn’t want, whether or not we’d ever been asked to choose, and the “newspapers” themselves created it.
Paradoxically, the death of the Fourth Estate began with Watergate, which though it’s often considered to be a triumph of a free press over an increasingly lawless and secretive government, turned out, in the end, to be the opposite. As a lifelong scholar of that particular scandal, my three shelves of Watergate books (not a few written in jail…) told the story we all know today: time and again, the Nixon administration used every legal tool and many illegal ones to bring a truth-telling press to heel, and they failed. Later, though, I expanded my research into magazines of the era, and they told a different story: throughout Watergate, Nixon and his henchmen coasted to reelection, and nearly survived, by successfully stopping any number of unflattering stories, typically by going over the heads of news divisions to publishers and network executives, and this created a palpable chill in newsrooms that has reached its apotheosis today: no one today’s overpaid and heavily concentrated media even remembers what real journalism actually looked like, and those who do are too busy with the plastic surgeons to care.
The July 8, 1974 cover of Time pictured above, dated exactly one month before Nixon’s historic resignation, graphically demonstrates that even in that heady time for the power of the free press, corporate boots were already starting to stomp on journalistic heads for their failure to sufficiently “support” the government by not being so darned critical all the time. A disturbing number of letter writers, then as now, agreed that the media had gotten out of hand, and that was all the increasingly corporatized media needed to hear; every merger (the first wave of which were spawned by Nixon’s ironically named “Newspaper Preservation Act), made the growing media monopolies less and less comfortable speaking truth to power, a tendency which has culminated in the embarrassing media uproar over Wikileaks. Now the media have, practically unanimously, come out firmly against the very practice of journalism epitomized by Wikileaks, in favor of whatever it is they do these days to draw their unprecedentedly hefty paychecks. Katharine Graham, who was willing to go to jail to defend her paper’s right to challenge the government, must be rolling over in her grave.
Therein lies the rub… The most fanatical denunciations of Wikileaks come not just from the usual suspects, i.e. right-wing politicians who depend on media indulgence of lying, but from the media itself, which in recent years has been caught more times with its pants down than Bill Clinton could ever hope to. They are, clearly, more invested in the lies they’ve been telling that the politicians (and donors) who benefitted from them, and they’d sooner piss on an electric (border?) fence than admit how they’ve actively helped to fuck up the country by relentlessly doing the exact opposite of what the First Amendment presumes is their job.
The story is depressingly familiar; the truth wafts into the room like a bad smell, and the media rushes in to open the windows, and breathlessly spray lies around as though they were a can of air freshener, and the “story” becomes a parable about how everyone should just shut up and, say, give up their Social Security, cut taxes on the heiresses, and support a new war, while ostentatiously plugging their noses to the palpable stench. Heck, it’s worked before, and it pays the hairdresser bills.
Sadly, after all these years a lot of people, numbed as they inescapably are by the steady drip of this brain-destroying anesthesia pumped into their eyes and ears, are just as reluctant to accept the truth as the pancaked boobs who have avoided it like the plague for all this time, and by the time you read this, Wikileaks may already have been extinguished, to cheers from all around.
Nice work if you can get it.
Let us all decamp to Madrid with our umbrellas and picnic baskets and watch the court proceedings there.
Perfect. I’ll bring the booze.
And brie, for me, thee, and our retinue.
The bull fights, not to mention the bullshit, should be mahhhvelous.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836
Seems like every government has its torture apologists burrowed in… Not a word in the MSM about the content so far; everyone’s too busy thinking of ways to eliminate Assange. Pretty fucking lame.
The press is not free – it has been captured by the Kleptocracy and chirps and mewls whatever tune it is told to purvey. Rachel was right – Bubba was our best Republican prez ( NAFTA, GATT, WTO, China most favored nation, Media deregulation/concentration, Wall Street gettin’ Rubinized, end of “welfare as we know it” and a plethora of other triangulation gems that refined Reaganomics to fatal precision and effectiveness ), but damn if Barry O isn’t giving him a run for his money !!!
I don’t think the Plutocracy will ever again accept anything close to an actual Democrat, who does Democratic things.
Funny, though, what craziness they accept from the right.
This is a perfect illustration of the point you’re making:
http://www.alternet.org/media/149039/wikileaks_exposes_america%27s_dirty_laundry%2C_while_media_clowns_like_glenn_beck_are_off_in_fantasy_land_/?page=entire
Great article, except for being so depressing. Personally, I see the Beck model winning hands down, if only because that’s what the big money wants.
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I so recommend Wayne Madsen Report .com by ex-NSA guy. But it’s a 30-bucks-a-year subscription to read behind the paywall … where WMR encourages all to relay his material into circulation.
Since few here might go to it, do allow me to bring it on here. Viz:
And previously, last summer:
And before that (in WMR archives), referring back to a time when Nixon exasperated about “getting the Jews out of the Treasury Dept.” and counter-threatened the CIA — that ‘they’ dare not challenge his hold on power since he “knew all about the ‘Bay of Pigs’ thing” — there is this:
Even the ‘free’ public material, new items, Madsen selects for his home page daily, raises eyebrows and drops jaws worldwide.
meremark , re various usual suspects using Wikileaks to make dubious points in favor of their usual agenda ( Attacking Iran, for ex.) , Arthur Silber nails it . ( As usual)
Of course they will . That’s what they do with everything .
Here’s something weird: a guy named Steven Aftergood, as Glenn Greenwald put it
had this to say about Wikileaks:
So because Wikileaks hasn’t transformed the nation — or, rather, “government information policy” — overnight, it’s a less-than-zero operation.
Some reasoning there, innit?
Of course, Time, the NYTimes, the Washington Post, etc. etc., ad nauseum, don’t fall under the same rulebook that Wikileaks does.
“You haven’t transformed government? Get thee out!”
Oh, they’ve transformed government, for the worse. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I haven’t listened to the GG podcast, but now I might have to, just to maintain my bad mood.